Games Workshop Championship at Simcon

[MajorSoB]

Like Kevin said in the previous post Simcon was a good time. A few reflections:

-The venue sucked balls. That had to be the absolute worst set up I have ever played in for a major tournament. U of R should be ashamed.

-The games and players were overall very fun and I can say it was a great time.

-The best painted army there never played. There was an Ork player with a beautifully painted and converted army that showed up not knowing you had to bring a partner. I hope to see this player again.

-Ben Kantor suffered a casualty yesterday. A moment of silence for his blender would be fitting...

-Lastly, the best news from the event was that both Kevin and Tommy received job offers. Good news happening to good people.

Congrats to all the winners and everyone who played. If someone sees Steve Horowitz maybe you could show him where the event was. I think Terry left though...

[evil_red_orks]

As far as i'm concerned its not steve's fault. A bunch of us didnt know about the location, because it wasnt posted on this website.

I happen to show up at the old location same time as rob and ben, we then drove around the campus for half an hour looking for the event in a convoy of three cars.

We then watched ben struggle(LOL) to walk up a hill to ask a security officer where the event was. I can imagine the conversation that took place as Ben asked where is the spot that grown men play with little plastic soldiers.

Yes I know there was a simcon location website with the location, but if u gonna sponser a tourney from this website then at least post the location.

I was a little miffed because i took friday night off from work, didnt go out for a beer with my wife, to be ready for this tourney.

[grubnards]

Doug, thanks for the kind words...

As for the blender, i was wondering where/how a blender showed up in the trash bin this mornng... Too funny!

As some of you know, today was the square base event for warhammer at Simcon and as Gabe and myself were the only two to show up for day two so it was going to be a rematch for best overall of the two days. Last year I narrowly beat out gabe but this year it was not to be. We faced off in the final match, with me maintaining a slight lead after game 2, but Gabe came through and gave my orcs a severe thrashing so he took best overall. Looks like a best of three is in order for next year.

As doug said, the venue was not the best room/hall as it was constricted and did not leave much wiggle room for fat asses like me. At least the fantasy event only had 3 people show up so we had the whole room to ourselves. I'll post all images and recap the weekend tomorrow.

Kevin

[Ranger Dude]

Don't let Kevin fool you. His "Slight edge" was 13 points. The only way I could catch him was to massacre him. I was happy to oblige, but it was no cake walk.

The Goblins kicked butt in the final game. Only fair after getting their butts handed to them in the previous two.

[grubnards]

As promised, pics of the event and a recap of our matches.

Here is what we ran....

Me: Eldrad, 6 fire dragons in serpent, 10 Dire Avengers in Serpent, Pathfinders, 6 Warp Spiders, 3 War Walkers, 5 Reapers

Rob ran: Farseer, 5 dragons in a falcon, Scorpions, 2 x 10 Dire avengers in serpents, 4 Guardian jet bikes, 5 Reapers


Game 1 vs. Dean and Duncan (Necrons/Orks)\
Mission: Spearhead but modified so only 1 team member deploys and the other comes on in turn one. (I mentioned to Rob that of all the people I knew that were coming to the event, I did not want to face dean and his cron's as I have not yet won a game against him)

Dean's list (roughly). Overlord in command barge, deathmarks, 2 immortal squads, 2 annihilation barges.
Duncan's list (roughly) Gazhkull, Sniktot and commandos, Mega Nobz, mob of shoots, lootas, and three big trucks. I'm sure I mis-named some as I am not familiar with Orks.

I deploy first and Duncan deploys his Orks

My deployment


Duncan's Deployment


Rob's vehicles came on near the middle and we tried to take out the big shooty guys in the middle and only accounted for 1-2 kills. Our shooting was bad.


Dean comes on from the back corner and would slowly spread out over the game to cover the table quarters.


Rob brings in his scorpions and reapers in the back corner to help my reapers. In two turns of movement his reapers never moved more than 3-4 inches. His terrain rolls were bad.


We can't stop the rolla's and Duncan has made headway into the center. Up in the corner, Dean's command barge kills my serpent and the deathmarks mark my dragons. (You can see the Exarch fleeing from them)


Snikrot and Ghaz outflank into our reapers/scorpions, making short work of them quickly. Rob's scorpions help whittle them down but leave Ghaz. The Mega Armored boyz come in from the middle to help wreck our serpents. We pour a load of Dire Avenger shots into them but they make amazing saves.




Rob's Avengers rush the wraiths and between shooting and combat whittle them down...


Only to have Duncan's orks come in to contest the quarter.


Eldrad comes in and Mind War's Ghaz, bringing him down...


Only to die to the Wraiths


My serpent was going to tank shock the overlord, who decided to Death and Glory... only to fail and die.

Results: They took the table quarters, 1 HQ kill (Eldrad) and they held the center of the board for 14 pts. We took 4 points for the 2 HQ kills.


Game 2 vs. Trevor and Ben (Space Wolves)
Mission: Pitched Battle with 6 objectives. Each worth a different amount of points depending on where they were located on the board.

Their list has a crap load of Rhinos, Razorbacks, a Redeemer, long fangs and all the other Space Wolves stuff.

Rob and I deploy pretty much in the left flank and center. There was a huge amount of large terrain, making it difficult to find fire lanes for our Reapers and Pathfinders.


Left corner deployment


Rob's deployment of the Falcon/Serpents to hold off the Rhinos who may try to come down the center.


Redeemer comes in fast and discharges the termies. They kill Rob's Reapers but between our Avengers, Pathfinders and Scorpions they die quickly.


On the left flank Ben tries to bring some rhinos down. He immobilizes my fire dragon's serpent and I destroy the one rhino and stun the other one for 2 turns. (The immobilized serpent and immobilized land speeder pictured went one to shoot at each other ineffectively for the rest of the game, neither killing the other)


Note the two objectives in the center. That is where the final push would come at the end.


Rob's bike's take care of the rhino near the one objective.


The Redeemer ended up buring my Pathfinders on the back objective and between repeated Bright Lance and Witchblade attacks from both Eldrad and the Farseer, we cannot bring down the Redeemer for the rest of the game.

In the end, Trevor was holding the middle two objectives and was surrounded by empty rhinos. There was now way for us to assault in on the last turn so I tried blade storming his squad. I end up killing 9, leaving 1 troop to hold onto an objective. Trevor also held onto an objective in our right flank as well.

In the end I think we got a 4 points to their 7, or something like that.

Game 3 vs. Collin and Wies (Eldar and Space Wolves)
Mission: Dawn of War but both players could only deploy 1 troop and 1 HQ. 1pt was given for each troop choice destroyed, 3 pts for each HQ destroyed and 2 pts for anything else including transports, regardless who they were bought with.


Our first turn after walkons. Note the reaper squads...




They decided to rush all of the Wave Serpents, Vipers and Rhinos up as fast as they could. Only leaving Collin's guardians and Pathfinders in the back.


Remember where the Reaper's were... They ended up getting pinned by Collin and then between the banshee's and Space Wolves they got torn apart. Rob's counter fire with the Avengers allowed us to clear them out.


My spiders and Walkers were able to take down the vyipers and a rhino along the right flank. The spiders would be hunted down in return and eventually the walkers fell as well.


In the end we were able to clear them out of our corner.


Rob went in and worked on Collin's remaining units.

Results: We killed 30 points worth of their stuff to like 15 of ours.

Overall a fun event but I wish we could have played against some of the other opponents that do not normally attend MG's events. Like Rob said, with the opponent's we played, we could have easily stayed back at his place and pooled the event fee towards pizza and beer.

Fantasy pics coming next!

[bromento]

Sweet lord, I thought this was a comp event. Dean/Duncan's list was ridiculous!

Looked like some fun games though. Thanks for posting Kevin!

[grubnards]

Onto the Fantasy event.

Only 3 people showed up, me (Orcs n Goblins), Gabe (Goblin Hoard), and Greg (Ogre Kingdoms) Boldo played dwarfs to give us all three games.

Seeing how the last time I played fantasy was at Simcon last year I knew I was not going to be winning many, if at all, any games.


Grubnards and his lads

Game 1 was pitched battle against Boldo. Boldo ran Dwarfs, killed all of my army. End of game. I did not take many pics of this game because I was too busy trying to remember all of the rules. I even forgot to roll for Animosity that entire game.

Highlights of the game...

My spider riders enter the woods. We roll to see what kind of woods and they are the type that hit you. I suffered some casualties, causing the spider riders to flee... directly into my Doom Diver Catapult... causing them to flee. All of this before I even got to the 2nd phase of the first turn.

The giant, not surprisingly, took a cannonball to the chest and died. At least he didn't fall on any of my units.

Regardless, it was fun and Boldo pointed out some tips and strategies for the army.

Game 2 was Dawn Attack vs Greg and his Ogres. This my first match ever against Ogres so I was worried about how badly they were going to beat me.

For those not familiar with Fantasy, In Dawn Attack you roll for each unit during deployment and based upon the roll you deploy in either the left flank, right flank or center. Most of my rolls ended up in the center, which is what I wanted, except for my Orc Warboss/Battle Standard unit who ended up in the left flank. The reason this mattered is that now, my low initiative army, was out of range of my warboss and the banner, both which allow you to use the Boss's leadership and the banner allows re-roll to failed tests.


My deployment


Greg was a little more spread out, which gave me some breathing room.

Turns 1 & 2 go well initially as I suffer no animosity, my war machines do damage as well as my spells. Even the Fanatics got into things.


Lines pretty much maintained for now...


Picture just before Greg slams into my lines. Without the Boss's Leadership or Banner, my goblins and orc unit in the center caved pretty quickly. The Giant held his own and actually drove off a unit.


At this point things went south for me. See the red die, My shaman cast a spell with Irresistible Force, meaning that the spell automatically goes off but also causes a mishap. The spell going off should have been a good thing except I rolled too little for distance thus my target was not affected. A roll on the miscast table then tells me that each of my shamans must now take an automatic wound.

Needless to say, Greg got a major victory. Good game overall and I realized that Ogres are not that quite scary as I thought.

Game 3 vs Gabe. (Rematch from last year's event)


Our Deployments


Side shot

We were both evenly matched. While has does not have any Orcs he does have a large unit of Trolls and fast flankers. We both had a good amount of magic and war machines so this was building up to be a good rematch.

The first two turns not much happened except for shuffling of units and getting things lined up for charges. In the next pic you will see where I made a huge mistake.


Gabe saw my spider riders sitting next to the building with two war machines behind them. He charged into the riders and I opted to flee, hoping to regroup in the next turn. I rolled too little for my flee distance and he over takes me and then hits into my spear chukka. The next turn he wipes out the spear chukka and moves into the doom diver catapult. This now means that I have a fast unit sitting behind my lines, forcing me to reform one of my units, thus leaving them exposed to everything else coming towards me.

The wolves and giant then smash into my main unit and we fight it out over a couple of turns. I eventually kill the giant but at that point the damage was done and Gabe was handed a solid win.

It was one of those games where a stupid movement opened the door for him to exploit. In hind sight we realized that when he caught my spiders that should have triggered the Fanatics that were in the large goblin hoard but that was my fault for not remembering that. Overall a fun game and it paves way for another match up next year.

[Ranger Dude]

You did forget to mention the stupidity of my archer wolf riders. Fully planning to flank Kevin's archers, pulling out the fanatics with minimal casualties, they instead succumb to animosity, and charge the archers, fully into the face of the fanatics. 1 rider made it into combat, passing it's leadership check for casualties, only to fall to the stand and shoot response. At least they drew out the fanatics as planned. Mind you, this was on turn 1.

[rwag]

I was running my tyranids not daemons. The games were good but the event itself was pretty lousy. Simcon was being run by all newbies this year so they lost their good room and organized poorly. Most other years it's in a nice big single room with lots of space to play.

[grubnards]

Rwag,

Thanks for the correction. I was going by what I saw a few tables down during the first game and I saw what I thought was a big bug but wasn't sure if it was tyranid or not. How did your team do overall.

[rwag]

Meh we got stomped by Wolves/Eldar game 1 (that d**n lone wolf would NOT die), played the other RWAG team game 2 (necrons/blood angels) and lost due to only getting 3 turns in and some assault marines deep striking onto 2 mid ground objectives that turn, won game 3 against wovles/IG thanks to my zoans dropping both his land raiders by turn 3.