Astronomi-con pics and thoughts

Well, after my first tournament I have lots of thoughts about things I'd do differently. First off, play more games. I kept running into trouble with not knowing rules off the top of my head, which was hard when I came across people who were unfamiliar themselves. Everybody interprets some rules differently, and you can forget that when you play against the same group of people who all play with the same understandings. Since my list was deff rolla dependant, and the rules for it are FAQ'd this was a bit of an issue. Mostly because the organizers of Astro don't recognize any FAQs except their own, including GW's. Only the errata is official in their minds, so this makes things a little difficult when you have things like the deff rolla that don't behave like everything else.

The other thing I didn't care for was that they include all imperial armour rules, including flyers. Luckly I didn't come against any, but I think that really throws the dynamic of 40k out when some players can compete against that and others can't.



Anyway, enough of that... My results were decent. I had a 50/50 win/loss ratio, and I'm sure if I were to play again I'd do better. They have different scenarios for each table, so its all about playing the mission, which I generally suck at. With a little more practice I'm sure I'll do better at those. My army score was decent and I mostly got dinged for not painting my 60 boyz up to the same standard as my elites and HQ's as well as not having a lot of conversions. My painting score was high though, so I was happy with that.

Overall it was great. The general timing of the events was ample for the points (2 hours for 1500 point games), and time for lunch. I would say that there was room for improvement at the end when we were waiting for the results (they didn't do the draw prizes or announce any painting winners until all the results were calculated). This meant that everybody had to hang around for an extra hour, which was less than ideal for those of us who had to drive home. The other thing that could be improved was the tables and terrain. They expanded the event to allow for more entrants, but this meant that a bunch of the tables were painted sheets with terrain on them. 1/3 of my games were on tables like this, so that took away from the value of the tournament, but hopefully that will be something that they change in the future knowing in advance how much interest there is for the tournament.

This guy got voted best single miniature:





Anyway, here are some pictures that I took at the event.