Summer events wrap-up

 Hey folks. I've been to a whole bunch of events since I last got round to blogging, so this month's blog is going to be a wrap-up of all of them. 

A Crown of Salt and Shadows - AoS28 narrative event

I did a full blog on this one already, which you can find here. It was a blast! I had a great time and would love to go to other similar events in future. As well as playing in the event I also had a lot of fun practicing my mini photography skills, I used my camera's macro lens and tried to get some atmospheric shots with very low depth of field, which was a good challenge.

War in the Mortal Realms AoS narrative event

This was a 2000 point AoS event run by Bad Moon Cafe back in June. I took my Living City army, which I painted back during lockdown but had never taken to an event before because it is terrible. But I figured a narrative event was a good opportunity to get it on the table.

I'm still not sure how I feel about this one, it was great to see Bad Moon try to do something different from their standard 2000 point highly competitive AoS events, and for the most part the players leant into that and took armies that weren't at the top of the competitive meta. But the event was still very focused on winning games, the scoring system included soft scores for painting/hobby and sportsmanship, but the prizes were all for combined score, so to win you pretty much needed to win all your games and on top of that get some points for the soft scores. I think it would have been a better event if there had been separate prizes for best army and best sports, as there was a lot of focus on the best army voting but it only really impacted the people at the top of the table.

In hindsight I wish I'd taken a different army that would have given me a better chance of winning games: I lost all my games pretty convincingly, and probably didn't give my opponents a great time as my army wasn't much of a challenge to beat. I did enjoy getting the chance to show off the army, and to see all the other great armies there, but if Bad Moon ever run something like this again I'll focus more on trying to win some games as I think that would make for a more fun time.

My Celestial Hurricanum getting chopped up by an angry orruk

Witney Warhammer III

This was a narrative AoS event in its third year, that I was attending for the first time. It was very heavily narrative, with a strong gangster themed event narrative, and fantastic scenery and table design that introduced lots of special rules and provided opportunities for players to develop their own army's narrative over the course of the weekend. 

I took the Blood Kraken Reavers, my Slaves to Darkness army, and had an amazing time. I wish I'd had time to do a full write-up of the event as it was a tonne of fun, the organisers had clearly put a huge amount of effort into it and all the players were really invested in the narrative elements. My army's story for the weekend ended up being all about competition between the different heroes as they moved along their path to glory, with my poor Lord on Karkadrak consistently murdering everything in sight but going unrewarded, while my Chaos Sorcerer Lord took all the credit for the victories and eventually became a Daemon Prince.

This was one of the best events I've ever been to, I'm hoping I can go back next year and I'd really recommend it to anyone with an interest in narrative AoS.

When you become a daemon prince and still can't kill ten shadow warriors

Warcry: Blood in the Dark

This was a narrative Warcry event at Bad Moon Cafe. I hadn't played Warcry for a few years, but I knew the event organiser and thought it sounded fun so I figured I'd give it a go. I had a great time, I remembered enough of the rules that after a round or so of the first game I felt pretty on top of things, and everyone was playing in the spirit of having fun rather than trying too hard to win. 

I don't enjoy Warcry as much as I enjoy AoS and Underworlds, but it's still a fun time. I lost all of my three games but all of them were close, and I never felt that I didn't have a chance. I also somehow managed to come away with a prize for most kills despite losing every game, which I think was probably because two of the warbands I played included goblins, who were pretty easy to kill!

I also played the Catacombs version of Warcry for the first time at the event and enjoyed that more than I'd expected to, we ended up with a lot of chokepoints over bridges which was interesting tactically, and people falling off bridges into lava will never not be fun.

I was a big fan of this lava themed Catacombs board

London Warhammer Guild Underworlds mini-tournament

I'd been meaning for ages to go along to one of the London Wargaming Guild Underworld nights, and I finally got round to this when they ran a mini-tournament in early August. It was a three round best-of-one Nemesis format event (for non-Underworlds players, Nemesis is a format where you build a deck from your warband's cards and any one Rivals deck, so it has a deckbuilding element but with quite limited scope).

I took Domitan's Stormcoven (a three man warband with a focus on spell casting) and used them with cards from the Seismic Shock deck, which is a natural fit for them as it is themed around wizards holding objectives, and all of the warband are wizards. I'd been playing a lot with the Stormcoven in Rivals format but it was the first time I'd run them in Nemesis, and they seem super strong with Seismic Shock. I basically just went through the warband deck and took out the cards I don't rate highly, and then picked the corresponding number of cards from Seismic Shock to replace them, and it was a huge power boost. In particular I was able to take out a lot of objectives that rely on them being in the opponent's territory, which meant I could play them much more defensively than in Rivals.

I managed to win all of my three games and win the event, which was great. It was also really nice to meet some people from the community, they're planning to run a league in the autumn so I'm planning to enter that and give them a chance to get revenge.

Blackout VII

This was a 2000 point AoS competitive matched play event run at Firestorm Games in Cardiff. I took Kharadron Overlords, and ended up going 2-3. For a detailed rendition of my games check out episode 14 of the Three & Two AoS pod once that comes out (see list. For now I'll say that at the time I was pretty disappointed to go 2-3 since at one point I was 2-0 up, but writing this a week after the event I feel much more reconciled to it now - it was probably a pretty fair result for the army and my skill level, and I had five fun games against great opponents. I'll be happy if teleporting vampire lords casting Merciless Blizzard get nerfed at some point, though!

I'm very glad I finally managed to get the Kharadron Overlords to an event, I've always been put off running them at tournaments because of how hard they are to transport, and getting them to Cardiff was not without its stresses, but they remain probably the army I most enjoy playing so it was nice to get them on the table, and I learned a lot from the event.

So far I'm enjoying the 23-24 GHB, while some elements of the magic rules might need a bit of tweaking at some point, it feels impactful while mostly not being horribly broken, and the scenarios feel more varied and interesting than the ones from the previous season did. In particular I like that there are a good number of scenarios with six objectives now, whereas the 22-23 seasons tended towards big battles in the middle of the board over a small number of objectives.

I was resoundingly beaten by this dragon heavy Stormcast army

What's next?

I have a few more events lined up this year: an Underworlds clash in early September, and another AoS narrative event in October. I'd like to get some more competitive AoS in too if I can, but nothing booked in as yet. I've just started on my next army project, a narrative focused Seraphon army, so I'll probably blog about them at some point.

How many do I have to paint before it counts as an army?