Doubles Tournament Shennanigans! A.K.A. Dice>Tactics

Alrighty here we go!

The doubles tournament was at Misty Mountain down in Burnsville MN. It was a 3 round tournament that had an odd number of teams, so 1 team each round had a bye. I like the tables at Tower better but Misty Mountain was not nearly as claustrophobic. This will be a long post, so gird yourselves, maybe go get a snack, maybe I am just exaggerating and your attention span is much longer than mine and you will be fine, but I vote for a snack.



First, a thought on doubles tournaments. It was really hard to come up with 2 1000 point lists that share the same FOC as my Chaos partner. We ended up taking, what we both thought were pretty solid lists:
Tau:
My std HQ
1 x 6 FW (shared FOC so I only took the 1)
2 Fusion piranhas (seperate)
2 Hammerheads
3 deathrains
3 fireknives

Chaos:
Quicktime DP
Plaguemarines with 2 meltas
Berzerkers with a fist and a plasma pistol in a rhino
Chosen in a rhino with 5 meltaguns
3 Oblits

I thought we would have a good list especially against all the mech heaviness. You would think, so.............. Except for the fact the dice gods shunned my partner and I. With that, on to the first match.





Sorry kids, but you really have to learn how to play the game and learn the rules of your army. Am I bitter about losing to two people, one who didn't know how to measure and the other who didn't understand how his army's abilities worked? No, I am mad because my army managed to do almost nothing. The only thing I accomplished was wounding the Mawloc enough that the chaos oblits could finish it off. Otherwise my shooting was entriely ineffectual, and I lost all my guys. We lost regardless of what the opponents did, we would have lost to 1 IG squad and some gretchin because my army couldn't make any saves and couldn't hit anything. It was the backlash of all the good luck I have had in any game all concentrated into one spot, it was amazing.

That is also why I added the music to the video, hopefully it is as annoying as the dice were.

Another after effect of this game is that I realized I am too trusting and nice. I assume that everyone knows how their army works and that everyone has a decent level of understanding as to the function of a tape measure and how it is employed effectively. This is not the case.

During the game it became apparent that there were some rather wide defintions of what 6 inches was. We already lost at this point but genestealers moved halfway across the table then up and through difficult terrain in 1 turn, easily covering nearly 30 inches. I was dumbfounded but it didn't really matter because we had lost the game by this point and I was kind of in shock.

I am going to call this "reality shock" when someone else's version of "reality" clashes with what your perception of "reality" is. I couldn't really do anything because my brain was shutdown at what my eyes were telling me. I think that is my tournament naivete. In the other two games that the dynamic duo of nids and chaos played they got utterly tabled, and their opponents were not at all what I would originally term as nice, but now recognize as enabling. They did not enable any loose interpretation of the rules, and they really brought the hammer down.

Then my psychology degree kicked in. I am a preschool teacher, and in the classroom it is part of my responsibility that all of the kids understand what is expected of them. To do otherwise is to ill prepare them for future socialization and human interaction. I don't believe these two opponents were "cheating" I just think that they did not know the proper way to do things, and my partner and my self set a bad example by enabling that behavior due to not stopping them as readily and explaining why what they were doing was wrong.

Which brings me to another thing, unless I know them, I don't think I like playing warhammer against kids. Not to be mean, but I don't want to have to constantly be on alert that my opponent may or may not understand everything he can do with his army in each phase.

I have no problem helping a kid learn how to play, or in the future teaching my own kids, but if I am in a Tournament Setting I am not mentally prepared for the mindset of "teacher". Teacher is an on/off type of mindset, although with me it is naturally triggerd by anyone 6 or under. Anyone over that age I assume is probably fine, especially if they were able to assemble all the models themselves and paint them (tyranids have lots of parts!). Obviously this is not the case. I have a degree in Early Childhood Development, that means birth through age 6 I have a lot of understanding and tolerance, beyond that my understanding and patience can wear thin if we are of disagreeing temperments.

It was a hard loss, and the effect of this was that my Chaos buddy and myself had a bye, we drove an hour to play 2 games of warhammer over the course of 8 hours. The bye sucked. I did manage to check out all the other games and talked to a group of guys with a good game that was taking place at the table we played our first game at.

Finally after a bajillion hours of waiting (2.5) We had our next game, and it was against a different group of kids. I was bitter from the first match and had seen these two play during the second round and was thinking about the fact that it may be the 1st game all over again. However as we started to begin the game one of the kids got a phone call and said he could only stay for another hour. After just coming off the bye, i was not about to play a half a game, because then the day would have really been shot.

Told the kids sorry I don't want to play for just an hour so we went over and pulled the guys who had the bye in for our last game. They had Space wolves and Blood angels. It was a rough one, but it was a lot of fun.



I managed to seize the initiative so we went first, but that was pretty much the end of our "too good to be true" luck. The game was fun though and the people we played against were good opponents with some solid tactics. Our side still got blown away in the end, with a single firewarrior remaining, but that is just how it goes sometimes. I am glad we could save them from the doldrums of the bye.

In hindsight I think chaos and I should have just played a game against each other during the bye, but we did have fun seeing everyone's armies; A majority of which were SM, with 2 nids, 2 guard, and 1 other chaos player.

Now on to the next announcement: fueled by the frustration of recent tournaments and some games I have played against opponents who did not follow the rules I am going to make a series of videos that address the issues of how to recognize and address the issues of reality shock when you are confronted with it, as well as tournament etiquette. The series will just be labeled "tournament etiquette" and will be pretty funny because it is not meant to be pretentious, just to address some key issues of playing games with other people. Basically just stuff I do with the preschoolers, but translated for warhammer!

-Krox