My first game was against an Imperial Guard ‘parking lot’ style army.

Notable events:

• I blew up a Chimera with a Ravager on my first turn in Dawn of War. Didn’t kill any dudes, but it was cool.
• My personal objective I selected was Assassination. His most expensive unit was a Leman Russ Plasma deal. I spent the whole game shooting at it with Dark Lances and only destroyed it on my last turn.

I did, in fact, lose. The score was 6-1.

Second game was against Tyranids. It had a Hive Tyrant, several units of Genestealers, a Tervigon, some Gaunts and a few Mycetic Spores. Fully painted, too, and it looked great!

Notable events:

• Genestealers outflank into my Warriors and destroy them. Of course, they were camping on the objective I selected for my Personal Objective.
• I tried taking back the objective with Wyches, but they eventually fell, too.
• Assaulting a Hive Tyrant with Incubi, an Archon and a Haemonculous is not that great an idea.

Lose! I think the score was 7-0 this time.

Final game was against Necrons. Two units of Warriors, Nightbringer, a Necron Lord, a Tomb Spider, small unit of Paraiahs, a Monolith and a unit of Destoryers. He had a setup where he could light up his Monolith and the Tomb Spider (which was a FW Tomb Stalker). Very cool.

Notable events:

• Assaulting Nightbringer is nigh impossible with Dark Eldar. Assaulting anything close by the Nightbringer is also impossible.
• I should have paid attention to the Phase-Out rule. I went after all the wrong things.
• My blob of Warriors ended up holding my Personal Objective in the end, preventing me from getting another total loss.

Yep…lost again. 6-1, I believe.

After all that, you’d think I’d give up on the Dark Eldar. Nope. Here are some Wyches I finished this week:

I’m working on some Incubi now. They should be finished really soon!

• Played Ogres a few times in WHFB. Got beaten enough that I figured it must not be the army for me, so I sold/traded them for High Elves.
• Played a game or three of WHFB with the High Elves at one of the Circle City Circuit tournaments and felt pretty good about how they play, though I did get trounced most of the time.
• Won a painting contest at Circle City Circuit #2 with a Ultraforge Treewoman. There were only two other entries, though.
• Painted a High Elf Battle Standard Bearer to very high standard for the Scibor Painting Contest. I also entered Pandora, Candy and my Lord of the Feast. Pandora was chosen for the final voting.
• Assembled and painted more than 50 points of Hordes Circle Orboros for my eKaya army.
• Played in a Warmachine invitational tournament where I won game 1 and lost the other two rounds.  No worries, though. I got to hang out with some good friends and talk about painting with some folks.
• Started playing Warhammer 40,000 again since Games To Die For is running a 40K league starting at 600 points. I bought into Dark Eldar. Played my first three games and ended up winning just one against Imperial Guard.
• Bought a Wacom Intuos4 Medium tablet and Painter 11 with which I’ve done some practice drawings. They didn’t turn out as well as I hoped.
• I’m currently taking a Life Drawing class at Ivy Tech to try and improve my drawing skills.
• Sold/traded a lot of the smaller miniatures games and CCGs in lieu of those I can find opponents (and models) for. I’m still working on dropping Infinity and Malifaux. I also unloaded a bunch of roleplaying books to clean up stuff I know I’ll likely never use. I’m keeping Pulp City and MERCS for now.

I guess that’s not all that much for almost 8 months.

In the near future I hope to post some pictures of the models I’ve painted and maybe some digital/traditional art I have done.

Two days prior to the tournament, I kinda had a thought that my only real option for coming out of the tournament with any real kind of recognition was to have a fully-painted army (since I play Ogres and would be playing against some tournament-level players), so I began painting my Butcher. I finished painting him the morning of the tournament. I think he came out pretty well.

In either case, the tournament was set to start at 11:30am, but we started at about 12 or 12:30pm since some people were supposed to be showing up.

Here is the army list I ran:

• Bruiser (Sword Gnoblar, Luck Gnoblar, Gnoblar Thiefstones x2, Great Weapon, Heavy Armor)
• Butcher (Bangstick, Dispel Scroll, Tooth Gnoblar x2)
• Bulls x3 (Additional Hand Weapon, Bellower)
• Bulls x3 (Additional Hand Weapon, Bellower)
• Ironguts x3 (Bellower)
• Ironguts x3 (Bellower)
• Gnoblar Trappers x8

997 points

The first round, I was paired versus Bill Favorite and his Orcs & Goblins. First turn saw my Bruiser + Ironguts unit shot at by bolt throwers, causing a Panic check, which they failed on an 11. One of his spell casters had a miscast and died as a result. My first turn, the Ironguts + Bruiser unit failed to rally and ran off the table. The game was not starting off well for me and I do admit to being a pretty bad sport about it. The rest of the game was my Ogres trying to make it across the table to engage his units. My second Ironguts unit was charged by Night Goblins three times and in most combats, my Ogres killed one or two in each round. Finally, the Ironguts + Butcher failed a Break test, ran, and were caught by the Goblins. In the end, he killed every model I had on the table while I managed to remove a bolt thrower or two and a Snotling Pump Wagon. Normally, I don’t like to blame losses on terrible die rolling, but in this case, it seemed the dice wanted to “put me in my place”.

Second round I got the “bye” and played Sean with his Tomb Kings. My luck had totally turned around for me in this game. The benefit of having his shooting being mostly nullified by my high-enough toughness and the fact that I felt like I was playing more tactically saw me wipe his whole army in the end. He spent several turns trying to kill off my Gnoblar Trappers with a full unit of 10 archers, but only managed to kill one or two a turn. The Chariots tried charging a unit of Bulls a few times, where I remembered that I have the option to flee. A flank charge from the Ironguts + Bruiser wiped them out. I ended up getting a pretty decent victory out of that one.

Third round, I played against one of the other players’ sister, Sarah. She was also playing Tomb Kings. I got the feeling from having watched the end of one of her games that she was a pretty new player, so I tried to make sure to be as open as possible about how the Ogres worked before we started playing. The main highlights of this game was her chariots charging some Ironguts + Butcher and having Righteous Smiting do no damage whatsoever as well as having their impact hits do very little. In the end, the Ironguts + Bitcher managed to remove the chariot from beneath the Tomb Prince, but the chariots ended up winning combat later anyway. The Bruiser + Ironguts moved down the flank along with some Bulls to wipe the unit of archers, Carrion and eventually the Screaming Skull Catapult. Another unit of Bulls wiped the second unit of archers and tried to catch the other two characters, but only managed to kill one of them.

After that, results were announced and I came in 6th place. Pretty respectable for the ol’ Ogres. I did end up winning for best painted and had 15 “points” to spend.

A very well-run and enjoyable tournament. Most everyone I played against was very friendly and I had fun playing them. I big thanks goes out to Sean for running the tournament and Games To Die For for hosting it.

The awesome thing was that Jim had shown up that morning to play 40K, which is what usually happens on Saturdays at the store. He saw we were setting up for a Warhammer Fantasy tournament and he decided to throw his Daemons in the mix. I believe he came in 8th.

Here’s my Aurlok Nation list:

• Tamel’Seh Far Eye
• Auroch Totem Warrior
• Auroch Totem Warrior
• Wolf Thunder Warrior
• Crow Thunder Warrior
• Toad Medicine Shaman

Round 1 (Jin Posts) vs. Andy’s Kingdom of Avalon: With the exception of a second Crossbowan in place of a Templar Novice, Andy’s army ended up being nearly identical to Jim’s army, which I’d played before. The big fear for me in this game was getting my guys shot up on the approach to the Jin Posts. With as little scenery as we were using, this was a definite possibility. Also, having heard of, but not seen the effects of the Deacon’s “Corruptive Bonding” formula, there was fear of that as well. I deployed my forces mostly to my right side of the table in hopes of controlling one Jin Post definitely and contesting the center one. I don’t think in 200 points one has enough figures to cover all three. The first 3 rounds consisted of one or two activations and a pass on both our parts. Andy ran the Deacon around to collect as much components as possible. He was full up at 12. This game was very bloody. I ended up running one of my Aurochs into one of his Crossbowmen to try and minimize their effect and maybe cause some confusion. It didn’t really work all that well. The other guys hung around the Toad Medicine Shaman to build him up for his damage spell. In the end, we drew, but I’d lost all but a couple of figures.

Round 2 (Informants) vs. Doug’s Khaliman Republic: I’d never played this scenario before, but as it turns out, the army I built is perfect for this scenario. It’s all about speed and TamelSeh can hand it out while being pretty quick himself. I decided before the game began that my strategy would be to run full out and try to get the 5 VPs before Doug does. Doug used the Shiek’s first turn of activations to shoot at my army. The Wolf Thunder Warrior and TamelSeh ended up taking a couple of wounds each. This wouldn’t matter for the scenario and Doug would later say he regretted doing it. In the end, he tried to kill TamelSeh with the Shiek while TamelSeh was standing “on watch” next to the 3-point Informant. After two successful cover saves, it pretty much ended the game. We ended up spending the last 30 minutes chatting about all kinds of stuff. I ended up with a win and no minis lost or enemies killed.

Round 3 (The Chests) vs. Jim’s Kingdom of Avalon: I’ve played against Jim’s army before and so I had some idea what to expect. This scenario, however, I’d only played once. There wasn’t all that much eventful, unfortunately. Jim ended up successfully opening one chest and claiming a total of 7 VP in the end. I had 3. A good number of my figures were killed and several of his as well, due partly to the Deacon’s “Corruptive Bonding” spell. I ended up with a loss.

I came in 4th place and apparently was very close with 3rd, but my Goal Average broke the tie in Mark’s favor even including my bonus points for turning in my list on time and being the only one with a fully painted army.

The prize support was excellent and since only 6 people made it, I believe everyone walked away with something. Personally, I picked up the Khaliman starter.

While there were several well painted figures in the painting competition, I ended up winning with my Toad Medicine Shaman. This entitled me to my choice of LE figure when prize distribution came around (though, that painting DVD was sounding good, Doug! ) and I chose the Khaliman LE.

Sryth picked up the Khaliman Tuareg box and hooked me up with it with the promise I’d “hook him up” with something sometime.

All in all, the tournament was a blast and it was great getting to see the guys from St. Louis again. I look forward to the next time we can do something like this. And thanks, Doug, for bringing prize support!!!