Tablewar Headhunter Tournament at Battle Bunker Games in Antioch

The RL gods aligned and I had some free time on Sunday to play in a tournament at Battle Bunker Games in Antioch, California.  The tournament was also sponsored by Tablewar Games and the owners were there to show the flag as well as their products.  I'll write up my thoughts on seeing the products in person in another post.  There is already too much in this one...

I had planned all week to bring my Blood Angels (Blood Ravens, counts as).  I even had a play test game on Thursday night with a friend of mine to tweak my list and get his thoughts.  I ended up taking my IG as my predators still had broken lascannons and I decided sleeping in on Sunday was more important, so I just grabbed my IG.

The tournament was a FLGS style tourney, with thirteen players.  The crowd was a pretty competitive, but relaxed group.  This was a great opportunity for me to get some games against some good players and learn something.  I hate soft games, I am a firm believer in getting beaten by better players is the way you get better.

The tournament had a unique system of all three standard missions were in play each game.  There was a primary mission worth three points, a secondary mission worth two points and a tertiary mission worth one point.  These were both battle points and to decide the winner.  I don't want to bury the lead, I ended up with 3 points at the end of the day.  I had 3 points in my first game and none after that.  I won one, and lost two games.


On with some pictures!

It was a "fun" atmosphere to say the least....

 My first game was against one of the gentlemen from Tablewar.  He had an Ork Battlewagon list.  I would be disingenuous if I didn't say I was worried about how I would handle the battlewagons in a dawn of war game without getting first turn. 

His battlewagons charged in.

I deployed in a normal IG gun line and shot back.  I got very lucky and blew up one of his battlewagons (with Ghaz in it) first turn. 

 

I was then able to blow up a second wagon, spilling out the squad on an objective. 

 The below picture is a few turns later.  Even without their ride Ghaz's squad got into my lines and got a lot of Kill Points very quickly.

 The game ended with me winning, but just barely.  The objectives were a tie, but I won on Killpoints by one Killpoint.  A very fun game against a great opponent and it came down to the wire. It could have gone either way.

My next game was against demons.  I was happy to get this game in, the opponent is a friend of mine as well as I haven't gotten to play much against demons.

I forgot to get pictures of the start, but it is pretty much as you would think.  I turtled a bit and he deep struck on me.  I got really lucky and he had a very far scatter for putting a unit of crushers on me and it got destroyed. 

I

 I was able to take out Fateweaver with some shots and the psyker battle squad dropping his leadership.  Some flamers and copious amounts of las fire took out the seekers.  My multilasers finished off the second greater demon as well.

 There was another objective that was being contested, I couldn't get the plaguebearers off of it so this is the one where the game came down to it.

 Three meltaguns hit the plague bearers! Then I rolled to wound......

 The game ended up a loss. I killed almost everything he had, but I couldn't finish him off.  He ended the game with only two units of plague bearers but that was enough.  The resilience of this army is amazing.  Losing the unit of crushers really hamstrung him from the start, and losing fateweaver took some of the reliability away.  Even without those two he stomped me.  Fantastic game.

My last game was against Orks, and I was playing Tasty Taste (Nick) the show runner behind Blood of Kittens. 

He had a fantastic list, and so simple.  It was a ton of boyz (90+?) with stormboyz and Snickrot (with Mad Doc riding shotgun).  I made a few bonehead moves to start and it cost me.

 I always outflank the Valkyries but this game I decided I wanted the pie plates to start.  They worked great scouting up and putting fire into the stormboyz.  The problem was I forgot to move them on my actual turn so the stormboyz ate them both...

 A few Deffkoptas caused me some problems, zooming into one of my flanks.

 Snickrot is a nasty character.  He is brutal both from a CC and his unit point of view but his psychological impact cannot be overstated. I kept worrying about him coming at me and it affected what I was doing.  He is a fantastic character and I think I will add one to my Ork list.  I was really impressed with him. From the below picture you can see how he got in behind my vehicles and caused some major problems.  Ghaz also got to me and it was a classic pincer move and it hurt...

 At this point the Orks were just mopping up the IG and we called it after four full turns.  It was a really fun game and I learned a lot about how nasty boyz lists can be. 

Overall it was a really fun tournament.  The tournament organizer had a great mechanic where if a player wanted to challenge another one he could.  This was a great idea for an event like this where most of everyone knew each other at least casually and most have played many games with either other. 

I'm not sure if I like the three games in one mechanic, with the battle points as it stands.  I liked the concept, for the only reason of it was different without being too complicated. It does need some adjustment, though I'm not sure where.  I feel like the basic missions are too simple but tournament organizers tend to make really complicated missions that gum up the game too much.  This felt like a nice compromise, and with some tweaking I think the TO is really on to something.