Charing Cross Crushed!

I am still mentally exhausted from last night's tourney. As much fun as it was, it was slightly painful. I thought that this was a slickly run tourney, with a friendly atmosphere. I think that the other nine players had a good time also. There is talk of having another small tourney like this one quite soon, but I won't be able to make it due to another hobby.

So, down to the action! Each player had three games. I was quite pleased, as I played opponents who were more experienced and were willing to give a few friendly pointers (while being competitive at the same time). I wasn't expecting much from the night as I had only been playing Warmachine for a few weeks. I took the following as my Protectorate list:

High Exemplar Kreoss

Guardian

Repenter

Revenger

Reclaimer

Choir (full strength)

I chose this as I still have not had time to build up my army. There were no scenarios so we just went for caster kills.

Please forgive me if I don't remember exactly models I came up against, as I am late in publishing this post ( I should have finished last week, but something came up).

First up was Marcus and his Khador force. Both of us charged forward in order to get into the action. I think I may have drew first blood, but I took more damage from his warjacks. I managed to bottleneck my 'jacks through the terrain as usual. This resulted in my Repenter being turned into scrap metal and my Revenger being immobilised. My Guardian couldn't do much as he was impeded as messy battlezone, and had been previously slammed into my own Choir despatching half of them. I seem to remember casing some damage to Marcus' Warcaster, nowhere near enough. Marcus then managed to place his 'caster in view of my 'caster (Kreoss) and deal out 17 points of damage! A few people were watching this happen and thought that Marcus had won, but Kreoss survived becausse he has 18 damage boxes. There wasn't much time for me to complete my turn where a gratefully tough Kreoss was going to (hopefully) Immolate the enemy 'caster. So the game ended with a draw, but Marcus scored a few victory points while I scored none.

Next was Conrad (the winner of the most sporting player) with his Circle army. This was a quiet game for both players as neither side took much damage. The game ended in a draw and no VP's were scored at all.

Last up was Nick and his Circle force, albeit with a completly different list. This was a marginally more brutal game than the first. I ended up being teased by Nick's warlock as he kept teleporting in, casting a few spells and then teleporting out to safety. I couldn't get near him. My Guardian was the subject of a pretty impressive slam attack that knocked me into Nick's solo who tried to sneak up behind me. As a result I managed to take him out. I lost my Repenter, Choir and Reclaimer because of a well placed spell. the rest of my force couldn't do much to protect Kreoss who didn't prove to be as tough this time round. So the result was a loss for me.

Overal, two draws and a loss. That isn't such a bad record for a relative noob to the game, especially someone playing in his first tabletop tourney ever (not even a 40k tourney). I ended up finishing 9th out of 10. I had read Marcus' comments after the event, and it turned out he didn't win any of his games and finished 6th. So the bottom five didn't record a win. But the difference between me and Marcus was that he actually scored more VPs than I did. Something that I could have easliy have done if I gave myself that chance.

On the train home, I tried to analyse what had happened. The answer was simple. I still had a 40k mind-set. Where 40k has different phases for you to do things (move all models, Shoot with all models, fight with all models, etc), in Warmachine/Hordes you have to do everything by model (model 1: moves, cast a spell, fight;model 2: move, fight; model: etc). You cannot really take back moves in a competitive game, but thats all I kept hoping for. You also have to try and figure out in which order you want your models to activate, as some actions affect other models. I kept getting both of these wrong. I was just moving all models, therefore givng up performing other actions. When I remembered to perform these actions, I had done it all in the wrong order. I don't want to use the five minute turns as an excuse, but I will admit that I panicked a bit (lot) despite numerous practice games in the previous weeks.

Despite a lowly finish, I had a great time. I will be hopefully be better prepared for the next tourney.