Sunday, May 9, 2010

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

12 comments:

  1. Also Woot! I finally figured out how to do that stupid Jump Break thingy!

    -Krox

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  2. oh yeah i forgot, they also had Hive guard and noise marines in one rhino?!?!?!?!?!?!?

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  3. Thanks for the great game in round three. You two were a lot of fun to play against so I'm glad you guys had fun as well. Man, I swear I rolled five 1's with lascannons against that fire warrior. He deserves a metal and a promotion. Thanks for the battle report. Which model Flip do you use?

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  4. @Chad: I have the Flip Ultra. It was pretty affordable and like I have said in other entries, pretty much idiot proof. Thanks for the game, maybe sometime we can fight again.

    -Krox

    P.S. Firewarrior was promoted, now he has a cushy desk job back at the capital.

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  5. Hi everyone! Jimmy here, Kroxitau’s friend who helped him get bashed at the doubles tournament. I thought I’d share my thoughts on the tourney at Krox’s request. I’ll try to keep it brief since this isn’t my blog and no one’s paying to hear the crazy chaos guy blabber on :)

    The first battle was the definition of frustration. Two kids that have serious problems playing the game according to the rules were rewarded for forgetting their tactics at home with unbelievable dice rolling. I won’t go into too many details, but in our first round of shooting at a squad of warriors, they had a 1.6% chance to save everything and succeeded (I think it was 6 shots). Things didn’t get any better from there, even though we set our units up in such a way that we were fighting only half their army for the first few rounds. I understand poor luck happens sometimes, but one of the kids’ rude behavior about the game afterwards forced me to exercise more self-control than I typically like to use in a day. Moving on…

    We got the bye second round because of the poor result of the first game, which was more infuriating than anything. I’m beginning to understand how Berserkers of Khorne feel. However, it did give us a chance to chat with some other players, and we met some really fun, intelligent, and respectful people (one recognized the Final Fantasy character on my shirt, hehe).

    Krox covered how we got into the second battle with some cool people playing Space Wolves and Blood Angels. These guys knew what they were doing. We had decent ideas in the battle, but some of the key things we needed to have happen fell apart, and the domino effect began again. Looking back at this fight, I think I should have had the Berserkers hang out close to the Chosen, with the Plague Marines forming a bubble around the front to draw any assault. This may have allowed for more than one round of shooting with the meltas. Anyway, this battle made the tournament a good experience for me.

    Misty Mountain Games was a pretty cool place. They gave us lunch and entertainment all day for only 10 bucks, can’t go wrong with that. I’m eager to go back there in June for the 2000 point singles tournament. Get your bowls out everyone, the blood god is thirsty!

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  6. I'm really sorry to hear that your first game was a total dud. Its never fun when your opponents don't know how to play. I am glad however that we (Chad and myself) were able to play you guys in the third game, though I wish it would have been a closer game. If you guys would have played us in one of the first two games when our dice crapped on us the result would have been totally the other way around.

    ~shameless plug time~
    You should also check out my blog http://peaksofasaheim.blogspot.com/ ;)

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  7. @JTaylor: Man, you're going to make me create a blog to start posting my crazy magnetizing tutorials, aren't you? LOL.
    @Krox: One of the kids you were to play in the third round didn't seem to have a good grasp of his army either. He asked me a lot of questions before the tourney and didn't have everything quite right. Though man, I'd loved to have seen a 'nid in a rhino.
    Also, my game time is pretty limited with a newborn, but if you have a standard game day/location, I'll message you if I can make it. :) I'd play you guys again!

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  8. @Chad: blogging is fun!
    Also I would love to see some magnetizing tutorials, I magnetized 2 crisis suits last night, while the end result is awesome, the process was frustrating, mostly due to a glue explosion and the tiny size of the magnets along with the astounding strength of the magnets.

    Generally we eithee play at my house or Tower, but I don't go every Friday. I understand the time constraints of a newborn, so if you ever randomly get some time let me know. If you send me an email I can give you better contact info.

    kroxigor AT gmail dot com

    -krox

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  9. I'll second that blogging is a lot of fun. It's nice to get reactions and comments from the community and hear their take on the hobby as a whole. There are alot of great blogs out there for every aspect of the game.

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  10. Rock on. I'll send you an email.

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  11. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  12. Ok guys, you talked me into starting my own blog.
    http://techbayfour.blogspot.com/

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