Sunday, 26 August 2012

Burning Hammer Tournament Report

 from Darryn, our roving reporter



So this weekend I went over to a one horse town minus the horse called Orivesi (which means water horse haha) and took part in a tournament of about 16 people. The entrance fee was 10 euros (R110) which is about the price of a largish meal at a Turkish kebab place or MacDonalds, so very very reasonably considering the prize support, but more on that later. I was referred to by all as "The Englishman" which was rather funny, and although technically correct, I didn't want to correct them for fear of having to explain my white Africaness AGAIN. Anywhoo...

Game 1 versus Empire. 

I took my dwarfs out on thursday so see if I could get them going since I have the whole army here, and found far too many things in need of repair. I settled with a skaven list that limped along due to a lack of billions of models that are sitting in Musgrave right now. Must get them back in December! But basically my first game was against an army I will forever call, "The Mother-in-law". 2 steam tanks, and 17 knights in one unit, the front row made up of a captain, grandmaster, warrior priest and level 4 light wizard. About as subtle as Will Ferrell. HAD I brought the right amount of slaves, I could have parked any number of unfortunate ratmen in front of this ball breaker and let them kill chaff while I got his weak points, but my list was designed to fight straight up. It didn't go well. The combo resulted in troops only hitting them on a 6 (pha's protection -1, and white wolf banner or somemat -1, to hit) and then getting hit back at str 6. Yuck. Despite this, I managed to get my grey seer in a good position and use jaws of the world wolf...ooops....I mean cracks call on both steam tanks at the same time, destroying them with one spell. Huzzar! This brought it back from a massacre to a draw and there was much squeeking and gnawing of teeth. As I said before, the dwarf army I intended to bring would have minced this list in 2 turns =P 

Game 2 versus Chaos Dwarfs

Now in all my long years as a gamer, I have never fought against the Dawi Zharr, and although I have read older books and know how they work in theory, the new Forge World Tamurkhan Chaos Dwarf list is a beast. He brought two war machines, a wizard, some hobgoblin chaff and a unit of chaos dwarfs in shard armour (full plate, 5+ ward versus fire). The center piece was a k'Daai Destroyer, a demon possessed golem with flaming attacks, half immunity to non magical weapons, extra frenzy and movement 9. Holy Hashut that thing is mean! The scenario was dawn attack which is practically random deployment, and the horned rat smiled on me and put most of my stuff on the opposite flank to his, hehehe. Randomly deployed load flank for the win. it didn't help at all. it kept me safe from the horrible warmachines (the earthshaker is a horrible thing, daemon possessed guided shells in a fantasy game, for shame!) but luckily he kept missing or damaging clanrats which I didn't really care for. The big highlight of the game was turn 1 his sorceror tried to explode my grey seer with a big spell, got irresistable force and scattered away, and in the subsequent miscast, lost all his magic levels. tee hee hee lucky me again. I managed to out move his much smaller army, but when you have a K'daai on your ass, there is not much you can do except send in the mutant poisoned rat ogres and hope for the best. It worked, but just. Combat starts with the K'Daai getting a str 4 flaming hit on each model in base to base. Ouch. Then it has init 5, so goes first mostly. It has 5 attacks plus d3 frenzy at str 7. When you wound it (toughness 6) with mundane weapons, so have to reroll the wound. And finally it has a 4+ ward save. Its downside, each turn it takes a toughness save (so on a 6 it fails) or loses d3 wounds since it burns itself out. Yeah didn't happen once. Still managed to kill it with poison which was mightily fun, and got to face a new army. Result, minor loss to me. 

Game 3 versus Skaven. 

A 10 year old kid in a hoodie who looked unimpressed with getting to play The Englishman, and had less skaven models in his army than I due to him being new to the game. I wont go much into this game since it was kind of boring and over quickly. but I got a minor win against him. It ended up being a civil war between two rival grey seers and there much much magical dueling. 

End result of the tournament, 39 of 65 potential points and full for painting. I probably came second in the army painting competition, but there is no way a horde of brown rats will compete with a dark elf army with custom lava bases for each man =( 

I mentioned the prize support earlier. These guys dont mess around. Even though it was a really small event, there were trophies for 1st, 2nd, 3rd and best painted. 1st place got a 65 pound bull taurus model from Forge World, 2nd place got a whole unit of Forge World Fimir, 3rd got a blister of chaos dwarf heros, and best got a pro painting kit. Really impressive considering the low entry fee. 

Overall was fun and a poor mans substitute for my usual ICON adventure, but most welcome. 

Regards, The Englishman! =P

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