Saturday Smackdown

An irregular series, showcasing photos I took at February's St Albans Smackdown tournament.

EIC Tournament Report Day 1

At the end of February, my wife and I flew out to Mallorca for a long weekend at a spa hotel . . . with a two day Infinity tournament included. the European Infinity Challenge was running its third event, with a five round, 300 point tournament over two days, with people who dropped out after day 1 having an option for a 200 point one day tournament on day 2.

I went last year and really enjoyed it, but didn't keep up with my event write ups as well as I should. We had a little wander along the beach on the way to the hotel and saw a little evidence of some Weather having happened recently. There are some lovely cafes in that part of the island and we definitely want to go again when we have a bit more time.

Enough of the holiday snaps, though - on to the event!

On Day 1 we got to our tables to find a named event pack left for us. The organisation was broadly pretty good, with the table assignments coming to you via the Corvus Belli tournament management software, allowing you to look up on your phone where you were going rather than waiting for it to be shouted out, or having to queue up and be told where to go.

There was one oops where an admin error meant this wasn't the case for one round, but it got sorted pretty well.

There was plenty of cool event loot - an exclusive miniature, an event patch, plus some stickers, bases and so on.

The first game was Power Pack, and I was facing Baez, running Vanilla Combined Army.

He deployed an Impersonation Marker up next to my core link and doctor, so I decided to have McMurrough watch the stairs in the hope of deterring him. Sadly, he was able to go prone and sneak around causing carnage - killing my doctor, Warcor, two members of the link and McMurrough. But fortunately for me, at least, this could have been even worse and turned into a massive order sink.

My Kum biker got the lucky job of taking out the total reaction remote covering a large part of the board. He got into chain rifle range and wrecked it, getting hurt in response and going Dogged. He then became my man of the match by zooming around and taking out another couple of people, getting a classified for passing a Willpower roll on a downed trooper.

I received an absolute pasting overall, though, with Ko Dali dropping in to cause carnage as well. In the end, we'd both flipped a console and got our classified, and Ko Dali was holding my home objective. I started my third turn in retreat and was able to use Command Tokens to have my Zencha cancel its retreat stake and run back and kill Ko Dali, leaving us tied 5-5 with my last order.

Next up was Transmission Matrix. Dahshat are traditionally very weak to hacking and the commonly taken Dahshat list with a Zuyong link with a Rui Shi will not fair well against even moderate hacking. The table was a little weird, but not terrible. It might have been more of a problem with different lists, though.

I was playing against Whoop Whoop, running a Yu Jing list his local community made for him that was a little . . . off the wall. He'd travelled from Germany, and I definitely want to get out there for a tournament at some point in the future.

The plan with this list was to send an Odalisque Haris up to hold the centre while a defensive Brawler link held the home objectives. As insurance, I had Saito Togan hiding out right next to the central objective.

Yu Jing started off by dropping a Liu Xing into my defensive link. Fortunately, the defensive mine and other covering fire dealt with him....

Only to discover that the list actually had four combat jump troops in total as yet more dropped down to cause me problems. Fortunately, they weren't able to do as much damage as they might have otherwise, as the number of them meant that the Yu Jing order pool was pretty limited.

McMurrough got caught by an adhesive ARO, but managed to still score the central zone while immobilised. It was a brutal game where almost everyone died, but I managed to edge a lead in the early rounds and hold the lead. It ended with a 6-4 win, meaning I was in the top half of the field going into the third round.

The final game was a custom mission where you had to try and control a civilian in the centre of the field at the end of each round.  I was facing nombrechungo, who was running the Japanese Successionist Army.

The centre was pretty open, and I had the first round. I tried to get some smoke down to cheekily leg it with the civilian, but multiple AROs overcame McMurrough, and a cunning attempt to try a different angle with a Kum biker also got shot down.

I sent the link around another way to try and take out the overwatching ARO pieces, but was already starting to falter as I lost orders and was in a self inflicted bad position.

A turn in Loss of Lieutenant as an Oniwaban and a Ninja turned up and minced my back line contributed to the utter collapse.

The game ended with nombrechungo getting a well deserved 8-0 win, and I had practically nothing left alive on the entire field. This put me firmly out of playing the second day of the main tournament, so I was off to play in the "Low" tournament on Day 2 . . .

A bit of introspection

I've been thinking a whole bunch recently. I'm still working on the conclusions, but I'm trying to lay out some of those thoughts to put them into a better order. The thinking hasn't been limited to my hobbies, but that's what I intend to focus on in this post.

One of the trends I've noticed is that I have a tendency to over-commit to things - LARP events and tournaments. This means I end up rushing to get other things done around those commitments, and its often unbalanced. I get fear of missing out and sign up to lots of things, but end up tired and not doing other things I want to do.

So that's something to bear in mind. I need to be careful about what I sign up for, and check when the events are. It's going to be better to pick a handful of good events than go flat out and go to every possible event I could.

I also need to be a bit more disciplined about what hobby I do. I'm getting models assembled and painted, but everything I've painted so far isn't for use in the near future, and that's a bit daft. While I'm going to make sure I finish the Wildfire Shasvastii, for example, I want to make sure that whatever projects I set up to paint next are usable, playable forces - like the Malifaux mercenary crew.

If there's a theme to this, it's bang for buck. I'm absolutely enjoying the tournaments I'm going to. I get joy out of getting my models painted. And that's a massive step up from where I was. But I'm pretty sure that by being smarter, I could have more fun for the same or even less effort.

And that's got to be worth a go, hasn't it?

Saturday Smackdown

An irregular series, showcasing photos I took at February's St Albans Smackdown tournament.

Malifaux Slow Grow League Game 3

For the last game of the Dark Sphere Malifaux Slow Grow League, I was up against the Swampfiends. It was up to a full sized game, returning to "Plant Explosives" as the Strategy, with a pick of "Harness the Leyline", "Search the Ruins", "Outflank", "Detonate Charges" and "Take Prisoner".

I knew Zoraida had way, way too much activation control to risk either Detonate Charges or Take Prisoner, and "Harness the Leyline" looked like a bit of a faff, so I picked Outflank and Search the Ruins. I'd later discover my opponent had gone for the exact same schemes.

Bishop got into an early punch up with the First Mate, and my opponent brought in Bad Juju to tie him up and then had the First Mate leap out of the way.

Big Jake had run up one side to drop his Explosives and score an Outflank, but the Grootslang jumped out of it's lair there and turned him to mush.

Going into the second turn, I drew the Red Joker and a face card Crow. Bishop has an ability to cause damage if he is attacked in melee and successfully defends using a card with the Crow suit. Bad Juju swings, I cheat in the high Crow, then draw well for damage . . . Bad Juju swings again, I cheat in the Red Joker, and Bad Juju dies. He has a once per turn resurrection that he uses . . .

. . . but that's the end of his turn and my surviving Victoria kills him and moves on to the First Mate, who desperately uses his defensive abilities to run away at speed rather than meet the same fate.

The Prospector and a Will o the Wisp have an ineffectual slap fight on my left flank . . .

Meanwhile, I have nothing left on defence and the Neverborn are happily scoring all their points for Detonate Charges and Plant Explosives.

Zoraida desperately tries to Obey Taelor into a bad position for scoring . . .

I get my move order ever so slightly wrong and fail to score Outflank in Turn 4 with my Prospector, trying to set up my Detonate Charges for the end of game. As you can't score both points for Outflank at the end of the game, but I could have done my Detonate Charges the following turn.

I also mis-positioned Big Jake's return, costing me another victory point in turn 5, leaving the final score as 8-6. I did practically no scoring defence, but in doing so was able to move around the Swampfiend crew and score most of my points.

That I was only two rookie mistakes off the spectacularly implausible 8-8 win made me both a little sad and very proud of how I'm picking up the game. I've signed up to a couple of Malifaux tournaments now (the London Grand Tournament and the UK Nationals) as I'm definitely enjoying myself and would like to get some more games in.