Hallo all our pink 3++’s this is Goatboy and I am hear to chat about my feelings on playing a tournament that wasn’t dominated by battle points. I was lucky enough to throw down in the windy city of Chicago for Adepticon and found myself smack dab in another “competitive” tournament experiment. I personally think any tournament is competitive in some nature – whether it is paint competitive, handicapped army competitive, or just plan kick you in the nutz competitive.
Now I normally like Battle Points for my events. I think you can get some broad game ranges in scoring as well as some definite wins. It does usually lead to playing for the board wipe so that isn’t always the best. The best games I remember are the nail biters down to the end and when you are playing to get as many points as you can – a lot of the time it is just easier to play for the throat instead of playing for the missions.
Adepticon was my first chance to play in a non Battle Point fashion and I have to say I really enjoyed it. All my games were close and I thought I really had to out play my opponent in order to win. This is the best thing as beating the crap out of an army is just not fun for me. I feel so bad when the game just turns and it moves away from a good game of chess/checkers and instead devolves into a 5 move kill. It just isn’t fun. So Adepticon got it right for sure with the overall fun factor from the games I played.
The biggest complaint I could have with the event is that I felt some of the missions were either over used (Annihilation) or somewhat counter productive to creating a fair environment (HQ based missions). Certain armies were at a distinct advantage and I felt a few more missions that tried to push both sides of the army builds (MSU to Denial) would be the best per mission. I know we are looking at building a pool of mission objectives for Wargames Con that we can rotate through and create an easy to play and competitive environment.
While I like the Win/Lose factor of the event I thought the Draws were out of place. If we want to go to a straight to the top tournament we need to just have Win/Lose as the final factor. I do agree that day one needs to not just end with winners as I feel that sometimes the dice can just lose it for you (Look at my game 3 report) I do think some other factor could come in to help mitigate the bad dice that can hamper an otherwise decent player.
I’ve chatted with Mike Brandt about the upcoming Nova Open and hope to make it this coming year. I do like some of the factors that are going into changing their format and think that a mixture of all the ideas we are coming up with will end up creating the “best” format. I didn’t like the pick 5 kill points as I thought it gave too much to MSU builds but didn’t like how a kill point denial army could hurt other wise larger and more common army builds. The change to that with a win by 3 is easy and simple and something I always strive for in any kind of mission. How many times have you played some mission and when you are scoring it at the end have to ask the judge a ton of questions to get to the winner. It is frustrating to me and I think simplifying the games at least in the win conditions will end up being for the best.
The best thing is I really think there is a system that can be built out of all these thoughts and I am excited to see what we come up with in the next year or so. All these new events are popping up and there are a lot of strong TO’s that can help push our game to a new level and create the events we want to play in. I don’t know about you but all I want to do is play fun and challenging games.
Really at the end of the day I had a blast and found the event to kick ass on all levels. If you are an avid war gamer you should come to this event. The swag bag was good (got a starter set of Cryx), the terrain and tables were great, the event was fun, and all the people I got to meet kicked ass too.
Check out my blog at Goatboy40k.blogspot.com if you want to see some off the cuff thoughts as well as my miniature painting site at Full of Monkey Painting. I also write some things for Bell of Lost Souls from time to time. We know you big Goat!
