On Nov 24th Ordo Ineptus hosted a 40k doubles tournament! While we can normally get up to 6 tables going at an event, due to the expected 'Black Friday' weekend crowd and due the horrible pinball machine the store owner has placed in our room, I was only able to get 4 tables set up for this. We probably could have done 5, but the game room would have been VERY packed (and VERY smelly!).
Still, with 4 tables meant 16 participants, one of the bigger events we've had. I played with my son Bobby...his first 40k tournament! He was SO nervous, he had an asthma attack during the first game, leaving me to do all the work myself! He got his puffer and pulled himself together, and actually had a really good attention span for an 8-year old, staying mostly engaged for all three games!
I took no pictures, sadly, but wanted to share the short version of how things went.
I tried to make the format easy and accessible to all players (one of the advantages of the doubles format is that newer players can get involved with less money and kind of share the load of gameplay decisions, helping to get past the intimidation factor), so made each team 2k, each player 1k, with their own full FOC, and treating their teammates forces as Battle Brothers.
This made things easy for the newer players, but also opened up things a bit for the non-new players. One of the meanest things I saw was a Necron Warrior blob with a Tyranid Prime, giving them Fearless and some significant melee punch. If I do this again, it will be AoC, not BB!!
I went with Daemons...yeah, I'm a Douche. At 1k points I had Blue Scribes, 2 units of 6 Plague Bearers, 2 units of 5 Flamers, 2 units of 5 Screamers, and a Soul Grinder. Amazing how much Mean you can fit in 1k!
Bobby took his Space Wolves; Bear Lord on Thunderwolf with TH/SS; Rune Priest; 2 Grey Hunter units in Rhinos; Terminator Lone Wolf with Chain Fist and Storm Shield; and 3 Thunderwolves.
Together we had pretty much no long range shooting, but we figured with as much melee and close-range bad-assness as we had, we'd do ok.
Our first match was against Myko and John, using Necrons and Black Templars respectively. Myko had a couple units of warriors on foot with Imotek and a couple of Lords scattered in, some Heavy Destroyers, and a Doomsday Ark. I don't know much about the Templars...to my novice eye John had a couple units of marines on foot with a few characters...sorry, but I just don't know what that stuff was!
They won the roll and chose to go first, but Bobby (who had deployed VERY well, avoiding LOS from the Ark to all his models) seized the initiative. I wanted Flamers and Soul grinder first, but got in the Screamers and the Scribes. The Scribes took a long-range pot-shot at the Ark with a Bolt, and Hit, Pen, failed Cover Save, and exploded! As Sean would say, "FIRST BLOOD!" This took a lot of the load off as Bobby's forces could move with impunity now and not worry about that mean large blast!
Things went from bad to worse for our opponents, as they failed a charge with the Black Templars against Bobby's Wolves (not that I'm sure they'd want to be there anyway), and did minimal damage with shooting.
Next turn we got the Soul Grinder and some Flamers in. Flamers roasted away some Necrons; Soul Grinder shot up some Marines; Bear Lord and his minions beat up some more Marines. At this point it was all over except the singing. They shot up a few things, killed the Soul Grinder in Melee with a Melta Bomb, but when the Flamers and Screamers went to work we ended up tabling them in four turns. Bobby only had to get one squad of Grey Hunters out...Daemons are really mean against infantry on foot! Good game to Myko and John...it was a bad matchup for them, and they took it well!
Second game we went against Brian and his dad Colin, playing Nids and Necron respectively. Brian brought the pain with Swarm Lord, two Tervigons, a Prime, and the required minimum gaunts. Colin had a Warlord with MSS, Tessaract, Warscythe in a giant blob of 20 warriors along with a Lightning Field Storm Tek and I think a Solar Pulse too, along with two min Scarabs and 3 Spyders and a small unit of Wraiths. Second Troop choice was min Warriors in a Night Scythe. Very hard, very mean.
And of course my luck held, as I got the wrong first wave, things scattered badly, and we struggled to kill ANYTHING. In fact, I think the only unit we killed that game was some spawned gaunts and the Wraiths. But, we did manage to hold two objectives, tieing things up at mid-table long enough that they couldn't push in to our objectives in time, and some Flamers (that had scattered back to reserve twice, so showed up at bottom of turn 4) were able to free up their third objective at the end of the game to give us a draw! We each had two objectives, they had warlord, we had first blood, and we both had linebreaker! The actual final turn of the game came down to 6 plaguebearers assaulting 5 Necron Warriors that needed to live to contest an objective...and the Bearers did their job well, wiping out the unit! So, a draw is better than a loss, but really we were getting our tails kicked badly...had it gone another turn (I think we got thru 4?) we would have lost badly. Fun game!
And of course, what's a tournament without me having to fight Sean?! Sean's partner was Grady, playing Eldar, while Sean had Dark Eldar. Sean had a big unit of Reavers, 2 big units of Wracks, some Harlequin, a Beast unit with 8 Razorwings and 5 doggies, and the Baron. Grady brought Eldrad, some Dire Avengers, some Wave Serpents, some Spiders. The mission was Capture and Control. I of course got the trifecta and got the wrong drop in again. We kind of lost our initiative and they pushed in to our side quickly, and we used all our resources to drive them away from our objective. Bobby did good work with his Grey Hunters, attritioning down the Beasts and a unit of Grey Hunters along with the Rune Priest's Force Weapon, beat the Beasts and actually killed them with Sweeping Advance! The game came down to both of us having our own objectives, Linebreaker...and they had First Blood. We needed to get Warlord to not lose, and they did all they could to prevent it from happening. Bobby's Wolves went in to the Harlies with Eldrad and killed every model except Eldrad on the charge, taking no wounds back! Little Kid Luck! Unfortunately Eldrad got away, and as this was a multi-combat, the wolves were stuck fighting other things. Sean threw Wracks in to that fight to keep them tied up and prevent them from getting to Eldrad on the last turn, but my Flamers were up to the task, as though they were too far to flame them, their torrent of BS4 S4 shots was enough to finish him off! It was a fun exciting game for both me and Bobby, as he got to do lots of fun things with his Grey Hunters and Thunderwolves, and I got to do the final barrage of dice needed to pull out the draw!
At the end of the day, Bobby and I went 1-0-2...not bad for an 8-year old's first tournament! Sean and Grady took first place in the event; Bobby and I took second; and Brian and Colin took third (they lost their final game, I believe, as the Swarmlord and both Tervigons were blown off the table by a combined IG/Eldar force that packed a LOT of S8 AP3!
Thanks to my Ordo friends for a great time, and thanks to my Bobby for being a great team-mate! Congratulations to Sean, Grady, Brian, Colin and Bobby! :)
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