Sporecon Warmahordes Wrap Up

As you can see, I had my hands full with running the Steamroller Tournament during the Sporecon weekend. It started early, at around 10 plus, and lasted all the way till about 6 or 7. 4 rounds of steamroller is tough going! It’s a good thing Chiang Kee was there to help me on the first day and Wil on the second because if not, I think I’d have gone insane between running the tournament as well as demoes (and it seemed like we might have hooked a few new people with the demoes, which is good… 😉 )

But I feel like the turnout was good! We were at 16 people (with quite a few from overseas), and if it weren’t for the date change and other issues, I think we could’ve gotten anywhere from 20-24 people. Which is pretty darn good, for a Tournament in Singapore. I can only hope that the international participants (you know who you are 😉 ) persuade more people to turn up for next year’s game.

And it seems like the people themselves were top notch! The armies were just beautiful….

Sporecon has a fully painted army requirement, because as a convention that is open to the public it’s all about the pretty minis to get more people interested in the game. It behooves us to have more than just bare metal or primed minis when we’re showing off to the public after all, but even then, these guys brought their A GAME this year. The amount of awesome armies was just mindblowing.

I don’t think we ever had this much problems deciding on the top three best painted armies in Sporecon before.

That’s not to say that we’re just painters and not gamers, too! There was a lot of throwing down going on, and I feel that the Steamroller alternate rules really pushed the envelope for all the players, old and new. Surprisingly, I don’t think it was timed games that people have a problem with. There was the odd time-out here and there, but most players seemed to be comfortable enough with their armies (or running a small enough list, or a bit of both) to only need the extra time during their feat/game breaking turn.

Scenarios were definitely a bit of a game changer, as I think most people usually play normal caster kills during friendlies. We totally need to play more scenarios during our normal play session. Most people weren’t used to playing 2 different lists, especially with character restrictions, but I feel that it was a good thing, to prevent Molik Karn and Deathjack abuse and other shenanigans.

Amazingly enough, we didn’t see that much Molik Karn OR Deathjacks. What we did see though was a lot of Thrones. We had like 4 everblight (last year saw 1, iirc), 4 Khador, 2 Retribution, 2 Skorne and Menoth, Cryx and Circle… I’m missing a player somewhere (probably one of the faction miscounts), but I’m pretty sure we didn’t see any trolls, cygnar or merc and minions this year. Looks like the boys in blue will need some catching up to do (although if some of the new players join the Sporecon bandwagon, I’m sure we’ll see cygnar being represented soon).

Even though they were the only ones in their faction though, Shannon (Menoth) and Peter (Cryx) did their respective god proud, coming in 1st and 2nd in the tournament, respectively. Steven from Indonesia did really with too, with the Skorne grabbing both 3rd place in the tournament as well as best Hordes, and iirc best painted army too! Signed books and posters courtesy of Privateer Press, who I thought was really awesome with prize support this year!

That’s not to say the others walked home empty handed either. I’m a big believer in spreading the love, and so we had prizes for top 3 in Warmachine, hordes and best painted. And I also gave away some lucky draw prizes to make sure that people didn’t walk away empty handed (there were some really great prizes there, like Tshirts that you can only get in Gencon, and the like). And to REALLY make sure people didn’t walk away empty handed, we had door gifts in the form of Privateer Press dice and Sporecon flags, objectives and wrecks.

It’s only too bad the sporecon stuff came in a few days too late, but it’s beautiful, don’t you think? I’ll be sending these out to the international guys as soon as possible. Also, I wasn’t really able to catch any memorable battles or actions (I think there was a really close failed charge but I might be misremembering), but I remember Elliot seemed to be rolling really hot dice, and if you guys have any other awesome moments, please do comment and tell us about it!!

But most importantly, come back down for Sporecon 2013! We’ll make it even bigger and better!