On with the show...
Round Four - Brian Leigh - Vampire Counts (oh joy)
Ok... this again.
I'll go over Brian's list a bit later in a series of separate posts but suffice to say a L4 with Helm, Barrows Grave Guard with Great Weapons, Black Knight bus with Dreadknight Vampire, 2 big Skellie units, Black Coach (groan), Varghulf. A tidy litte package and I knew exactly what I was in for.
Brian was canny enough to run the Lord with Helm solo so I couldn't tie his unit doen with Bats in order to demolish what I wanted so I went for Plan B when it comes to facing the Helm - hit so much stuff that he can't help them all. I hit the Grave Guard first with the Skellie train and General and the Varghulf. As the GG were under influence of the Helm and would have it for at least one round before I could tie down everything else this was the best choice - the Varghulf's Hatred and Thunderstomp and the Lord's Hatred and Red Fury was still going to buy me some casualties. The plan kind of worked except in Brian's turn the Varghulf was flanked and killed by pathetic Skeletons. Sad face! However with both units of Bats stopping the Black Knights from achieving anything useful (incredibly Brian DIDN'T roll up Van Hel's!) I was able to chop through the GG while the Skellies, Wraiths, Zombies, Coach and BSB set to work on the two Skeleton units. My Grave Guard had the unenviable job of dying slowly to hold up his Coach and Varghulf. I managed to collect the Varghulf by the end of the game but the Coach finished chewing through the GG.
At the end of the game Brian had his Coach and General and I'd managed a decent win.
14-6 win.
Round Five - Daryl Painter - Dwarfs
Argh, stunties. Daryl had a nails list with magical artillery, Anvil, double miners, Longbeards and Warriors (Great Weapons naturally) and a potentially hideously annoying Daemonslayer. This scenario was Watchtower and though I won the roll to occupy it I chose not to, instead bunkering the boss and Wight Kings in the Grave Guard and running them into it first (thanks to typical Stunty slowness). That at least guaranteed me the bonus 400VPs and kept the Lord, characters and Grave Guard alive and well.
This left the rest of my unfortate host to suck down rear-charges from the Miners. Daryl had some bad luck with a couple of misfires that saved my bacon early on and by the end of the battle I'd collected an Organ Gun and Grudgethrower, both units of Miners and a stray Engineer for the loss of the little Skellie unit, Zombies, Varghulf and Bats.
12-8 win.
Round Six - Thomas Van Roekel - Lizardmen
"Ah, the much feared Lizardmen with Lore of Life Slann and bag of dirty tricks", I thought. "Surely they aren't as bad as all that?"
Top of turn two, Dwellers Below, Vampire Lord rolls a 6. Dead. Game.
Huh.
Gee, it's not until you've suffered this kind of thing yourself that you realise what it does to the game. To put it lightly it's a touch damaging to Vampires to lose their General in that way :)
With 5 turns to crumble and having a pretty good idea about how that would go I called the game. I'm not much into calling games and handing my opponent an auto 20-0 but this was going to be clear but and dammit I wanted to play some Warhammer! So we pretended he hadn't died and played on so we could have a game but Thomas kept the 20 points for the sake of the tournament.
And I smashed him. Gutted.
Actually I didn't smash him because he called the game in turn 5 with just a Saurus block and two Salamanders left having lost his other Saurus block with Scar-Vet, 2 units of Skinks, baby Steg, Ancient Steg... and Slann.
Gosh Warhammer is a funny old thing... :(
In the washup I cam in 11th. As always it's interesting to see the final spread of points. Looking back and seeing where you could have made up the points etc and trying to remember to carry those lessons through into future game and events is a big part of tournament gaming as far as I'm concerned. In this case:
- I was 18 points or so off first place (that pseudo 17-3-ish win over Thomas when we played through would have placed me second)
- I placed 11th despite losing two games 20-0
- If I'd looked at Jack's army in Round Two and considered the likelihood of Killing Blow going off on my boss (ok, I realised he was likely to die but was interested to see what could be accompnlished) I could have hidden at the back of the board and lost 8-12 or something
- If my Lord hadn't died to Dwellers in the last round :)
Those things considered I'm pretty happy and confident things could have gone a lot better. In fact I could have made the podium even if I'd still lost to Jack 20-0. That's pretty neat.
Experiencing the Dwellers catastrophe I think is important for where I go to from here with Warhammer and what I want to be involved in tournament-wise in the future. As a TO I'm not interested in altering the actual mechanics of the game, but I think this can't help but shape my views on Warhammer as a tournament.
And with FluffyCon coming up next February and with me at the helm it's deinitely an awful lot of food for thought!
No comments:
Post a Comment