Some photos from last night’s gaming:
"Hi how are ya?!" Steve's Demon Prince.
"No, dude, that one's totally dead." Jon and Dan.
The Eldar teach the Mon-Keigh a few lessons!
Not what you want to meet in a dark alley. One of Steve's Oblits.
Lovell, Buford, Justin, and Lorenzo O get their melee on.
Traffic jam!
Papa Nurgle sends his love to the Kingbreakers! Steve's incredible Greater Demon.
More photos in the Flickr gallery.
Results from the 40k ‘Ard Boyz preliminary round at Redcap’s Corner:
| Rank | Player | Battle Points | Victory Points | Faction |
| 1st | Colin | 54 | 3129 | Chaos Marines (all foot Nurgle & Iron Warriors) |
| 2nd | Anthony | 42 | 3013 | Tyranid (heavy on big monsters) |
| 3rd | Joe K | 32 | 2330 | Kingbreakers Space Marines (balanced) |
| 4th | Sam | 32 | 2002 | Orks (balanced slightly mech focused) |
| 5th | Andrew | 23 | 3616 | Tau (heavy on Crisis Suits) |
| 6th | Rob | 23 | 1390 | Tau (very mixed) |
Turnout was a little disappointing but workable. Most people from PAGE were unavailable this weekend. In general I think although moving the schedule up a couple months may improve attendance at the later rounds, it crippled attendance at the preliminary. In mid-May there’s just too much going on with schools, sports, etc., I think June and July are much more open for this sort of all day gaming affair.
However, we had a great time. The group was pretty well balanced. Despite the decent spread of points above, it was actually a fairly close bunch in terms of ability. For example, Colin and I both played Andrew and both thought him a super tough opponent despite winding up on the bottom of the stack. The sheer firepower his Tau were putting out was almost unbelievable, as attested by the number of Victory Points he racked up.
Quickly, I think the missions were mostly reasonable and probably more mainstream than last year. The third scenario and its heavy penalties on fast units and vehicles was a little weird, but not crippling. I don’t think anyone except Colin optimized against it in our group, but even for him there’s a good chance he would have brought the same no-vehicles list anyway and has done so in the past.
I had mixed feelings about the lack of Dawn of War setups. That’s a hard start for non-mechanized forces, so it makes some sense in terms of the apparent general agenda to boost foot armies. But it is an interesting tactical problem so I sort of missed it.
What I really did miss though were more missions based around objectives. The second and third scenarios were effectively both variants on Annihilation. That’s fine, but I think objective based missions are in many ways more interesting, and more of what people are playing at this point.
The emphasis on Victory Points for both mission (e.g., second scenario goals) and tournament parameters (e.g., the bonus point in the 3rd scenario for killing 3000 points throughout the tournament) was also interesting. I do think they’re more balanced than standard Kill Points—there’s just no way a Rhino should yield up anything near the same value as wiping out a group of Plague Marines… But, they are definitely just enough of a hassle to calculate that they’re problematic. Among friends it’s no big deal, but in a schedule crunched tournament every couple minutes is crucial. More importantly, I think they lead to creating more mistakes in accounting when people slip up in their math and so on. Really it would be best to have some sort of modified Kill Points scheme that had the quickness of standard Kill Points but the balance of Victory Points. I’ll have to think about what that might be, it’s not totally obvious. For example, you can’t really just give rules like “Dedicated Transports are 1 Kill Point” since several armies have Landraiders in that slot, which should again clearly give up more value than Rhinos and Chimeras.
In any event, my battle report(s) are to come, but below are some photos. More are available in my flickr gallery.
One of Colin's Plague Marines. Killing even a single model of these guys should basically yield up a Kill Point, given how much firepower it takes...
One of Rob's Devilfish bites the dust, wounded Fire Warriors flying everywhere...
Andrew's fleet of Crisis Suits begins the long march across the table.
Paint scheme on one of Andrew's Devilfish.
Anthony apparently constructed his solid army by leafing through the Tyranid codex and bringing at least one of everything that said "Monstrous Creature."
Andrew and Colin wage war on the frozen tundra.
Anthony and Sam discuss the finer points of how many Boyz a Tyrannofex can blast to oblivion at once...
Rob is slightly stunned at actually coming across a Tau opponent.
Kingbreakers get the drop on those damn Plague Marines, caught worshipping one of their dark idols...
Tyranid vs Tau---a study in completely different game plans.
I thought I actually had a shot to win the third round against Colin; then I realized he had as many Termies in reserve as I did, but his are actually badass...
This is a re-post of a long note on a DakkaDakka thread about gaming stores that spawned some discussion about gaming clubs. It talks about some things I’ve been meaning to write about regarding PAGE:
Chiming in on the clubs sub-thread: I help run a club (PAGE CC) in Philadelphia (east coast US). For those sort of clued in about the area but not quite, it’s about 40 minutes from Mikhaila’s store. Just close enough that a couple guys go there from time to time, but probably just far enough to be slightly different “markets,” particularly when you figure many in our club are true downtowners who rely on public transit, walking, etc.
The club meets once a week (Sunday evenings) in a building downtown owned by a long standing philosophy/activism organization (Philadelphia Ethical Society). The traditional club focus is on boardgaming, but miniatures and particularly 40k are a large and increasing aspect, and definitely currently the most energized.
Although small by many standards, I think the club’s actually fairly successful. The big thing is that almost everyone can find people to game with. On any given week, you will find a variety of boardgames to hop into. On the monthly 40k convergence, you’ll find a bunch of different armies and a good number of players (generally 12–17 players), and the club members work together to provide and transport terrain and so on, which many people don’t have or can’t get there.
In many ways it fills many of the roles of a good gaming store, which I see as including at least:
– Providing space to play. I think most people will happily play games with a larger set of people than those they would like to have traipsing all over their house. On top of that, public space can often run a lot more games. Especially in a dense urban area like ours, space at home to run more than a table or two is rare, let alone space to run the 12 or so we routinely run at the club (e.g., our recent pattern of 7–8 40k, 1 or 2 Warmachine, and 2–4 boardgames). Having that kind of space to all get together is great because it helps you meet new people, catch up with guys you may not be playing on a given night, suck in new players (“Wow, what are you guys playing?!?!”), and build an event atmosphere.
– Expose people to new games, systems, armies. Despite loving and following the fluff, I might never have gotten into actually playing 40k if I hadn’t kept seeing a couple guys playing it at the club. Having a large pool of people bringing in games, armies, etc., really increases your level of exposure to the hobby, letting you find that next great thing you really love.
– Teaching and recruiting new players. A lot of our guys are happy to lend out armies for people to try playing, and a lot are super supportive of new players. Part of the reason I started playing 40k a lot is basically a couple of the guys gave me a lot of their unused models once they saw the gleam in my eye… Having that large group also keeps new perspectives coming in, so people learn a lot more about rules and tactics then they would playing the same couple people all the time. Ditto on painting and modeling skills and ideas.
– Providing terrain and other support. Myself and a couple other guys love building terrain, have space to store it, and can transport it to the meetings. Other people don’t. Playing at the club provides a lot of our guys much better options in this regard then they would have on their own.
– Giving a community in which to geek out. Even though the club only meets once a week and 40k basically once a month plus the odd game here and there, there’s a lot of chatter about games and specifically 40k on our listserve. A lot of people get that from great forums like Dakka as well, but it’s cool to then actually see those people and get in a game with those people.
– Run special events. Especially for 40k, we have a pretty reasonable stream of stuff going on, whether it’s the club outing to ‘Ard Boyz or other external tournaments, our own relaxed tournaments, themed narrative nights, Apocalypse games, or whatever, people really get into that and having the club provides a larger pool of players and, critically, potential organizers.
In any event, such clubs definitely exist in America and I think have an important position in the gaming community.
Another point is that people are totally willing to pay for all of those features I list above (we basically charge $4/night to cover rent), so it makes no sense for anyone to argue that people playing at a store shouldn’t be supporting that store in some way. Whether it’s memberships to use store features or buying merchandise, I think that’s a completely reasonable expectation. Even within our club, which runs a pretty decent periodic bulk discount purchase, all of the core 40k guys definitely put out and evangelize the perspective that if you’re playing in a store, you should buy something. I admit that I hesitate to buy big stuff at full price, but myself and a bunch of the guys are all too happy to buy codexes, small boxes like Command Squads, etc., at local stores.
On that note, I think clubs and stores can definitely exist together. We’ve been unfortunate that there haven’t been gaming stores right in downtown Philly in a while, but recently we’ve been slowly building up a relationship with a new store on the western edge of Center City (Redcap’s). For an example of how they complement each other, one thing I think we’re finding is that it’s obviously easier for them to host small groups at weird times. They’re a store, they’re open basically all the time, and they have pretty good gaming space. You can reliably count on popping in with a friend to play a match and finding a table. Our kind of gaming would have to get a whole lot more popular for the club to justify paying that kind of rent (it’s worth noting though that Philadelphia and most cities have many bridge, poker, and other full time gaming clubs). On the other hand, in some ways it’s easier for the club to host less regular big events. We don’t have to worry about things like crowding out all the cash-money Magic players with a large crowd of comparatively space-required-per-$$$ inefficient 40k players. So, I’m hoping we can work together with symbiotic events and efforts to continue growing 40k in Center City.