Hurrah, I'm finally home from running the tournament at Intrepidations in Perth. It was a fairly small point size but the turn-out was excellent - 14 players - especially considering how many people came in from outside Perth. It was an excellent chance to meet with the people from Dundee and we dragged several Glasgow players to the tournament (with a minimum of kicking and screaming). We're only really missing people from Aberdeen and Edinburgh to round out the Scottish ensemble.
Overall the entire event went smoothly, there were no drama issues to deal with and no excessively incomprehensible rules queries to answer. It actually ran very quickly, we finished about 30 minutes before I expected to. No one appeared to have any issues with the timed turns, which was slightly surprising given the number of very inexperienced players were attending. All the issues I were expecting just never came up.
Winner: Jim Lawrence
Second: Adam Davies
Third: Thomas Rolland
Random Painting Prize: Alan Kennedy (initially it was Ken Laidlaw, but getting store credit at the store he owns is a bit of a moot point)
Wooden Spoon: Alan Kennedy
Full rankings can be found on the Warmachine UK forums.
Watching the games, you could generally tell who the experienced players were at a glance: they were the ones running full tilt into the control zones. The newer players were cautiously advancing forward, perhaps hoping to minimise losses, only to discover they were losing control points at a very rapid pace. I hope this changes as people get more experienced, I'm sure most of the players learned something new and interesting about the game.
There were a few real highlights to see as I wandered around the tables though:
Tom Hanratty pulled off a very surprising win against John Sinclair in the Revelations scenario (round 1), I was quite impressed with it. Tom went second and elected to head to where the second flag would spawn and filled that area with the majority of his army. Once the flag spawned, he camped it for 2 control points and held out until dice down was called - though he'd humped John's heavies by that point I believe.
Murray lost a game to Mark (Fae Perth - it's what his handed in army list says!) as Mark had a unit of Swamp Gobbers touching the flag and Murray had no complete units (or solos) in the zone when dice down was called. Thus, Mark had a single point in the zone, Murray had none. Go gobbers!
I hope everyone enjoyed themselves and the newer players now crave more of the crunchy goodness that is Warmachine and Hordes. The next tournament will be at Highlander Games in Dundee on the 31st of October.
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