Day 1 of the tournament we arrived nice and early and I setup my two tables of terrain. I'm glad I brought them as the amount of terrain on the tables was lower than last year, and they gave at least a few people some good games. Some of the Mackay players said that I must like terrain heavy tables, until I pointed out that they were only 25%, the recommended amount.
Damon put up the first round of matchings and I found myself against Tim, a local who I had played last year. He'd brought his Space Marines again with a few changes. You can see my deployment below. I made one big mistake and bunched my Repentia up slightly to hide them better from his tactical squads behind my rhinos. I realised my error just as I finished my turn, before he dropped in an Ironclad dreadnought in a drop pod and flamered the entire unit. Only the priest survived who then ran and hid in a building for the rest of the game so as not to give up a further 125 VP's. We battered away at each other and ended up in a draw in my favour.
My next game was against Adam Buckley and his Imperial Guard. Damon had decided to try and steal my Milk the Cows mission but unfortunately in making his changes, also made it unbalanced. Dawn of War deployment and Adam winning the roll to choose sides meant that he held two of the three objectives for two turns before I could even attempt to contest. Coincidentally just under the amount of points that he won the game by. It was still a close game and a lot of fun, especially my Canoness knocking a Valkyrie out of the sky on her first turn after it moved flat out.
Next up I played Stewart from Gladstone. I deployed second and got lucky by seizing the initiative. I rolled forward and popped smoke and from there started to destroy his army. I screwed up again in this game, this time by deep striking my Seraphim near a fresh tactical squad and their rhino that was holding an objective. Naturally they scatted onto the Rhino and were destroyed, handing away my minor win and pulling me back to a draw.
So I finished my first day with two draws and a minor loss, not great but not all bad either, tomorrow I would play against some of the lower half, and would hopefully pick my game back up. That night Wusty, Dan and I went out for a feed, margaritas, more margaritas, various rum based concoctions and finally dancing. It wasn't until the early hours of te morning that we crawled into our beds.
I woke up the next day feeling hungry and thirsty, we hit up Subway for breakfast and the Nightowl for some powerade. I set my army up on the table and then started going around and taking photos of the other armies on display, it was at this point in time that my batteries ran out, so no more pictures of the actual games.
My next game was against another local who had a mostly foot slogging Eldar force with way too little anti tank to handle my wave of Rhinos. I rolled forward and destroyed his entire army except for a Farseer on one wound and the last of a guardian squad. Major win for me.
My last game was against Captain Steve from Townsville with his lovely Nurgle army. He was a great opponent and we ended up playing musical chairs around a central building as our armies struggled to get to grips with each other. I had some really bad dice rolls for acts of faith that caused me to give away some easy VP's early on and only managed to pull it back to a draw.
In the end I placed 7th overall out of 32 players which given that the games were mostly kill each other with some bonus points thrown in for objectives, I felt that I did fairly well. Lastly I picked up a Citadel Battlemat from The Games Room. I've been trying to hunt one down for ages as GW had stopped making them but it appears they're back on sale again.
Below are some more pictures of the event and armies.
Eltnot.