Age of Sigmar one-day event report: Barleylands Brawl

 Here’s a quick blog on how I got on at Barleylands Brawl, a one-day Age of Sigmar event I went to a couple of weeks ago. Normally I cover Age of Sigmar events on my podcast (Three and Two: A Matched Play Age of Sigmar podcast), but my fellow podcast hosts and I have been to more events in January than we’re going to be able to fit into a pod, so I’m going to cover this one here instead.

Barleylands Brawl is a recurring one-day event held at the Offworld Outpost store in Essex. It’s further away from me than I’d normally go for a one-dayer (I had to leave my house at about 6:15am to get there for a 9am start), but it’s run by some of my friends and I’ve never managed to make it to one before, so I wanted to make the effort.

After a trek across London I made it there in decent time. The event is held in a function room above the store. It had natural light and a reasonable amount of space, excellent toilets, and even a little kitchen space, so 10/10 for facilities.

I was running a Kharadron overlord list similar to what I’ve been taking to a lot of recent events:

Boats beards & balloons 1990/2000 pts

Kharadron Overlords

Endrineers Guild Expeditionary Force (20 Points)

General's Handbook 2025-26

Drops: 2

Battle Tactic Cards: Intercept and Recover, Master The Paths

General's Regiment

Endrinmaster with Endrinharness (150)

 • General

Arkanaut Ironclad (460)

Endrinriggers (220)

 • Reinforced

Skywardens (260)

 • Reinforced

Vongrim Salvagers (120)

Regiment 1

Null-Khemist (150)

 • Shrewd Opportunist - (10) Points 

 • Blazebeard and Sons Bamboozling Flakgun - (10) Points 

Arkanaut Company (180)

 • Reinforced

Arkanaut Frigate (300)

 • Zonbarcorp 'Dealbreaker' Battle Ram

Endrinriggers (110)

Faction Terrain

Zontari Endrin Dock (20 Points)

 

It’s a bit of an all-rounder list: the Ironclad is essentially a mobile shooting platform, while the skywardens and to a lesser extent the endrinriggers have some combat punch, and most of it is pretty fast and can get around the board ok. I can’t say I’ve had great success with it, but I’ve enjoyed playing it.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the event at the time of writing this, so I’m not going to give a blow by blow of every game as I’ll inevitably have forgotten details, but I’ll give a quick summary.

Game 1 vs Russ with Lumineth

Russ had a Lumineth list he was practicing for an upcoming team event, based around three blocks of twenty wardens. He also had a small unit of stoneguard, a small unit of dawnriders, the Light of Eltharion (Scourge of Ghyran version) and three small wizard heroes.

We were playing Noxious Nexus, a scenario where there are three objectives in the middle, you can’t score objectives round 1, and there’s a big points boost available at the end of the game for holding the left most objective.

I’ve found that my army struggles on this one: I don’t have the resilience to hold the objectives early game if my opponent has a melee army, so I tend to go behind on primary. It’s also possible to use places of power to make all the objectives obscuring, so that I can’t shoot whatever is on it. In this match-up, Russ had a very obvious battle plan of ‘put twenty wardens on each objective and keep them alive’, so I knew that if I was going to win I would have to fund  a way to chew through the wardens.

I had priority going into battleround 1 and gave Russ the turn, as expected he moved forwards and put a bunch of defensive buffs up on the wardens (I don’t remember all the details, but he could make them immune to rend and give them a 5+ ward). I felt like I needed to start trying to kill stuff early, so I shot the middle unit of wardens, and charged by frigate with the skywardens and smaller unit of riggers into the rightmost unit (which I couldn’t shoot because they were obscured). I didn’t kill either unit, but I did a bunch of damage.

Russ then brought the middle unit of wardens across to join that fight, and also teleported Eltharion behind my lines and made a big charge to kill the Vongrim Salvagers and threaten the Ironclad.

At this point the game felt pretty close, I had done a decent amount of damage but I’d lost some stuff too and Russ was ahead on points.

A whole bunch of aelves

Russ gave me a double into turn 3 because a lot of my stuff was caught up ion combat, but I think this was probably a mistake. I was able to do some mortals with boat bombs in the movement phase which freed up some of my units, and over the course of the double turn I finished off the first two units of wardens and was able to take out his terrain piece and all his wizards. The Null Khemist was super useful here, he does double damage into wizards so was very efficient at mopping up.

That left Russ with a unit of twenty wardens holding the leftmost objective (which is the one worth ten points at the end of the game), Eltharion, and a unit of stoneguard. I had more stuff left, but Russ was where he needed to be for board control, while I had two turns left to race the length of the board and shift him off the objective. In the end I was able to do that, Russ moved the wardens into the middle as a speed bump but I was able to chew through them pretty quickly, and Eltharion by himself couldn’t stop me taking the remaining objective, so I scraped a narrow win.

It was a very fun game and Russ was a great opponent, there were a few swingy moments with some hot dice. I think in hindsight Russ shouldn’t have given me the double into turn 3, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Game 2 vs Luke with Stormcast

Luke was running two reinforced blocks of shield Annihilators, a reinforced unit of reclusians, a reinforced unit of stormstrike palladors, a unit of Questor Soulsworn, a Lord Imperatant, a priest foot hero, a small unit of liberators, and Callis and Toll.

The annihilators in particular are a problem for me, because they have 2+ saves and I don’t have a lot of rend, so I knew they would be tough to get through. The scenario was Passing Seasons, which has one objective in each board quarter, but only two are scoreable every turn. It’s usually not a terrible scenario for me, but it’s a good scenario for Stormcast as they have a lot of mobility through teleports to be wherever they need to be for objective scoring.

I had choice of turn at the start and went first so that I could push out of my territory before Luke deepstriked a lot of annihilators and pinned me in. I did a decent job of screening and he had to drop between us, but he made some big charges and got a lot of stuff into combat. I didn’t lose all that much, but the palladors killed the Salvagers on my bottom left objective which left me without a lot of ways to threaten the left side of the board.

I forgot to take any photos of this game, but if I had done it...probably wouldn't have looked like this, because Luke's Reclusians got right in my face straight away

We then traded off over the next few turns: my arkanauts were absolute heroes and held up some annihilators for ages, and I was able to eventually kill the reclusians with skywardens and some other shooting. He dropped Callis and Toll on the top right objective but I took their ward away and was able to wipe them in a turn. However, the palladors swept across from the bottom left, wiped what was left of the arkanauts, and took my home objective.

I did a decent enough job of killing things, but Luke ended up with board control and I couldn’t score enough on primary. I was also struggling to score tactics, as Luke was (sensibly) very cagey with the units he had made my Intercept and Recover targets, and kept them obscured and out the way. So it ended up with a 30-50 loss for me. It was a good game though, Luke was a very clean player and it felt like a very tactical game as there were lots of different fronts across the board.

Game 3 vs Kevin with Slaves to Darkness

This game had a very different vibe to the other two. Kevin had had what sounded like a rough loss in game 2, and was keen to play quite a relaxed game. He was also a bit less up on the rules than most tournament players, so we ended up playing a fairly casual game. I’ll admit I would have preferred a more full on competitive match: I come to tournaments because I want to play competitive games of AoS and try to get the most out of my army. But it felt like there wasn’t really a way that we were both going to get to play the type of game we wanted, and having already lost a game I wasn’t in contention for a podium spot or anything.

Kevin’s list was Abraxia, three units of three Varanguard, three units of ten chaos warriors, and some foot heroes. It was basically a case of could I kill enough with shooting before it got into me, and fortunately for me it turned out that I could. He scored more on primary than me early on, but I killed a bunch of stuff and was able to catch up late in the game and pull ahead on turn 5.

My Ironclad did a lot of work in this game

I finished 2-1 but didn’t trouble the prizes. It was a fun and well run event, I hope I’ll be able to go again at some point. I'm continuing to find KO a lot of fun to play.