Hello all

As you all know Chris and I competed in the veterans tournie over the weekend, it was awesome.

The tournament was based on some others from America and the UK. There were 5 games of 2500pts each and were of a rather advanced nature consisting of a primary, secondary, tertiary and bonus objectives worth 15, 10, 5, and 2 points respectively. One mission for example would be structured as follows; the primary objective would be to destroy and enemy’s unit (chosen by you), the secondary objective was to occupy as many terrain pieces with infantry units by the end of the game and only troops can contest, the tertiary objective might be something like  not firing a particular weapon in your army (chosen by your opponent), and bonus objectives would be little things like having 2 HQs alive at the end of the game. In addition to all this complexity there were also a number of situations in which you could use a command counter to do things like reroll 1 dice or allow a unit to be worth double kill points, each command counter you had at the end of the tournament was worth 5pts. You also got up to 40pts for the appearance of your army and also up to 20 sportsmanship points, the player with the most points at the end of the tournie was the winner.

Ok so with the technical stuff out of the way I shall explain how my tournament went.

Day 1:

1st game: v IG, this was great since I got to go against Chris and our two armies are pretty used to slogging out for a win. I did particularly well in mission and managed to score 26pts. I cant remember what Chris got. This mission showed just how interesting the tournament was because by the end I only had 2 plague marines and a land raider left or something like that but despite being hammered I managed to get a very nice result.

2nd game: v orks. This didnt go well, I got tabled in turn 4. 3 battlewagons with defrollas and gazgull really hurt. Despite getting thrashed I still managed to bag 15pts which wasnt great but could still help me out.

3rd game: v black Templars. This game could not have gone any better for me to make a long story short it was a massacre and I got 34 of the possible 36 points.

after day 1 I surprisingly enough was tied for 1st place with Brindley who  is one insanely good player, he won the last regionals earlier in the year. So I was feeling rather optimistic after the 1st day. I went home and did my homework for the next day, which as we quickly discovered is vital if you want to succeed in this type of tournament.

Day 2

4th game: v blood angels (Brindley). This mission was weird what we had to do was teleport our units out of the game (before the shoot), the person who got the most out got the primary objective. Brindley played an amazing game, I had no idea what I was doing and got thrashed. 7pts for me.

5th games: v chaos. This was very close with both of us really trying to outsmart the other on a board that was far from ideal. unfortunately I failed to grab the primary with a bad deep strike scatter, I was not amused. I did still manage to get the secondary and tertiary objectives so that was 15pts.

So with my varied results I placed 7th or 8th which was disappointing after the position I had after the first game, but still Im happy and the important thing is that the tournament was brilliant, I recommend that everyone should enter next year.

So the next tournament is another interclub at Warren’s new shop sometime in April I hope we will be able to attend and really bring the pain or atleast to better than the last interclub tournie.

– Josh Barlow