I’m still exhausted! And dehydrated!

Rapid Fire

The Iron Fist League ran a variant of the Rapid Fire tournament I ran back in March (and plan to run again next year): 500 point games with some light composition restrictions, play as many games as you can as quickly as you can. We did both a 40K and a Fantasy version.

The Fantasy side of things looked like it went about as smoothly as they could have.

The 40K side (where I spent the bulk of my day) was wildly successful. We should have had more tables set up (and we could have, but we weren’t confident that we’d have the turnout to support them), as the line to play got long. One guy complained of waiting over an hour to play! Although that’s a good indicator that things were a lot of fun, that’s an unreasonable amount of time to expect someone to stand around.

At the end of the day, on the 40K side alone (I’ve yet to see the Fantasy score sheet), we had 99 players play 98 games. Most games played: 7. Longest Streak: 5. Highest Score: 10.

A large part of our success was the lack of the Open Gaming tables. I lost count of how many people came by asking for them. I think this was a huge mistake, and I hope they fix it for the next Games Day. I know that the beautiful tables that they’ve had in the past are too expensive and cumbersome to transport, but these people would have been delighted to just have a mat and terrain to play on.

There are some lessons to be learned from the event, I think, but that’s for the club forum, really, and not here.

Loot

I spent more than I should have at Games Day. Not more than I could afford, which is good, but certainly this month’s hobby budget.

The real treat of the day was in the madness that was their clearance section (which, while awesome, was kind of a problem: only six to eight people could belly up to the table and everyone else was SOL), I was able to get three Bloodthirsters for $10 pop. I hate the Bloodthirster model, and had been thinking about ways to convert up a better looking one but, for $10, I was sold. Even better was that I was able to flip one of them to someone who hadn’t been able to fight their way to the table for twice what I’d paid (it’s what they offered). So, in the end, I got two Bloodthirsters for $10 total.

I also ordered some of the new Khornate Forgeworld stuff: specifically the Daemon Prince & Herald and two Blood Slaughterers (which will be Soul Grinders). Also, on a strange whim, ordered a Manta. (That’s a little disingenuous: it was an Epic/Aeronautica Imperialis-scaled Manta, not the 30 lb, £875.95 40K scaled one.)

In part of my buildup to my Khornate Daemon army, I’d been hoping to pickup a second Be’lakor model… but he doesn’t seem to be available any more (certainly not in the store, and I can’t find him anywhere on the website). I saw someone who’d bought one, though, so I ran back into the store and grabbed two.

The total list of stuff:

• Khorne Daemon Prince & Herald (on order)
• Blood Slaughterer x2 (on order)
• AI Tau Manta (on order)
• Aeronautica Imperialis
• Tactica Aeronautica
• Bloodthirster x2
• Be’lakor, the Dark Master x2
• Herald of Khorne on Juggernaut

The only real problem I had with buying this stuff was actually buying it. The lines were terribly slow. I’m not sure why (the temporary credit card machines were suggested as a possible cause), but a line only twelve people deep should not take over thirty minutes to work through. It just shouldn’t.

Golden Daemon

I’ve never entered anything in the Golden Daemon before, so this year was a first.

I’d decided at the last minute not to enter my Haradrim Troll (because, although it’s a clever little conversion, it’s really not GD-level amazing), but I convinced myself that I should still enter my Deathwing Techmarine. It’s a neat conversion and I think it’s one of my better paint jobs. Also, I never get to use it in a game, so what else am I going to do with it?

At about 2:30, I went to collect my mini: I knew I wasn’t in any danger of winning anything. They wouldn’t let me have it back! “We’re not done with it; we’d like to takes some pictures of it,” I was told. I made the finals!

Ultimately, I didn’t win anything with it, but I never expected to and I can’t get over making it to the finals. It’s really exciting, and I probably won’t stop talking about it for the next few months (apologies in advance).

If I understand things right, they took pictures of it, so it should show up on the Games Workshop website and, possibly, White Dwarf. How cool is that!?