So I found my self attending my first gaming convention this weekend. After playing Jawaballs at gamesday I felt the urge to wade into the pool of 40K competitive play and see how it felt. I have to say when all was said and done I had a lot of fun. The twenty guys who showed up at the WarStore Weekend 40k Tournament were all good players and great opponents. While my tournament score left me at the bottom of the pack I can honestly say that I put forth my best effort. The best plans can fall apart when the dice just are not with you. Even my opponents were amazed at my dice rolls, they were that bad. All dice moaning aside, I still feel I put up a good fight and had most of the games ended a turn earlier this would be a post about how I rocked my first tournament!Not wanting to take a super list of doom I settled for something like I usually field in the basement with the guys. Seeing the difference in army composition between our group and the people of the tournament was rather interesting. The Tyranid and IG players had armies that I was used to and could play accordingly. The Logan wing, and Black Templars forced me to take the initiative and come up with some tactical tricks. Lastly the Dark Eldar took me completely by surprise. Seeing the sheer amount of firepower across the table and knowing they would be up in my kitchen fast I opted to reserve much of my armor and attempt to bring a wall of vindicators in on his flank once his vehicles spread across the table. When spotty reserves finally got most of my army into play my scatter dice went bonkers and I actually hurt more of my army than his on some turns.
I found my self wishing I hadn't left my TH/SS terminators and their ride at home as the tournament progressed but made good use of my drop pods and vehicles to restrict enemy movement and secure objectives. The overall strategy worked well. Marines and dreadnoughts can be a real hassle to get off objectives quickly without committing a substantial amount of your force to their destruction.
Anyway enough of the tournament, and more about the rest of the weekend. When we arrived on Friday not many people were in attendance which was understandable with people still being at work. After registering we got our massive loot bags and set off to check things out.
Now when I say massive loot bags I mean massive. There was enough weight in the plastic bag that it wanted to cut into your hand if you held it for to long. My brothers bag actually ripped form the weight. We both had the roughly same things in our loot bags as can be seen below.Dan on the other hand got a ton of metal minis and bases, but no rulebooks. Seriously he must have gotten about twenty metal minis and a good dozen bases or more.Besides the tournament room, there was also a painting room where they did classes, a room for various clubs to run games besides 40k and WARMACHINE, and a vendor room that was loaded to the brim with everything you could want, except for one thing. I walked in and asked for a WARMACHINE rulebook. Over the last few months whenever I have been to a store it would be out of stock. Once the guy running the shop section realized there were no rulebooks he apologized and gave me his card, telling me to contact him afterward for a discount since they let me down. While in the end I still got a book this was an excellent gesture on the part of the Warstore and really cemented them as one of my top online shops. GF9 was present and their rep was very personable. We talked for a while and he let us know that he would be giving bulk discounts if we wanted to buy a lot. (Which we did.) Armorcast was also there with their awesome doodads and a big box of miscasts that they were selling for $10 a pound. I was tempted to go crazy but remembered that the wife would be watching via online banking!
After perusing the different sections we got a WARMACHINE demo from the guys running the tournament that weekend. You could really tell these guys had an infectious love of the game as they showed us how to play with their personal collections. I kept heading over to check out things throughout the weekend and making small talk about the game. Knowing about my inability to find a rulebook at the end of the day on Sunday, one of the guys came up to me, gave me his rulebook, and said, " I want you to have this because I want you to play!" This floored me. I never would have expected someone who was a complete stranger two days before would actually give me their rule book because they wanted me to play. If more of us did things like this I feel that the hobby would expand in leaps and bounds! Most of us have extra copies of books laying around and such a simple act could be what pushes someone into an enjoyable lifelong hobby!In all the WarStore Weekend was a great gaming convention to call my first! If you can make it next year I would strongly advise it. The only disappointing thing I could think of all weekend was that there was plenty of room and not enough playing!
