BlogWars T-minus-1

My weekend was a bit of a hobby pilgrimage, as I mentioned here, not only did I go to my first tournament and visit Maelstrom games for the first time, I also had my first visit to Warhammer World in Nottingham.

What can I say about the place, its amazing!  I really, really wish that I could live close to this place and it could be my regular gaming locale, but on the other hand, it'll remain somewhere to go for special gaming events and meet-ups.

For anyone who hasn't been there, it consists of the top level of a long warehouse unit behind the main GW offices (I'm pretty sure the ground level is used for mini-making based on the signs I could see around the place).  The majority of the space is taken up by the absolutely huge gaming hall.  There must be well over 100 regular 6'x4' tables all with varying types of surface and loads of terrain, as well as a whole load of very special boards (see the pics below).  There's a GW shop at one end in which you can buy everything, absolutely everything including ForgeWorld Titans etc. right off the shelves.  Above the shop is the Miniatures Hall where all the mini's you see in White Dwarf and on the website are setup for you to check out.  At the other end of the hall is Bugman's Bar, a fully themed bar made up to look like something you'd expect to find in the Fantasy world.  The food there isn't too bad either and a decent price.  You can even take your drinks into the hall, beer and gaming, what a combination.

     

Here you can see a beautiful Empire hamlet, quite possibly the most expesive piece of terrain I've ever seen and a brilliant Tau themed swamp board.

While I was there I managed to get a pick-up game with a kid I ended up talking to while finishing the last bits of painting for BlogWars, and who happens to be playing just one table over but Andy (Atreides) and Damian (Bully) from Sons of Sanguinius who happened to be wondering where I was.  We hadn't really figured out how we were going to recognise each other so it was quite a stroke of luck.

We ended up hanging out for the rest of the afternoon, and even managed to get in a game together, 1000pts of my Wolves, 1000pts of Damian's new Grey Knights versus 2000pts of Andy's IG.  We were playing on the absolutely terrain packed Ork Skrapyard board but decided that all our vehicles could have free Dozerblades otherwise it would have been a bit of a footslog.

We were playing Seize Ground (5 objectives, centre of the quarters and centre of the board) with Spearhead deployment.  The pic on the left is around about the end of turn 1 so not much has happened.

Now despite what Damian thinks, his Grey Knights did actually kill a few things with the Psycannons, and they were also good at drawing quite a bit of the Guard shooting which meant that my Grey Hunters didn't die too much.

This is the bottom of Turn 2, most of my Rhino's are now immobilised/destroyed so my Grey Hunters are all on foot now getting ready to bring the pain.  Although its not too clear, there is a squad of GH just under where the hand is about to be charged by a squad of guardsmen.

Things didn't exactly go too well in that charge though for Andy, my GH squad managed to kill of both charging units in the combat, then proceeded to work their way across the top of the hill and into the top corner killing off a good fraction of the guard army in the process.

This is about where it ended, you'll notice the top-right of the board is a bit sparse of guardsmen.

Now I'll say right here and now that I was pretty lucky in this game, a number of roles went very well in my favour which is why my GH squad made it across so much of the table - in reality they should have struggled to survive the first fight, let alone the 2 or 3 that came after that!

Anyway, it was a great game, Andy and Damian seemed to enjoy themselves and we were all having a good laugh.

So, sorry about the epic-length post, I promise tomorrow I'll be getting onto the BlogWars coverage with a weekend summary followed by some individual battle-reports for the 3 games.  

Cheers - Andy