Objective Secured

WATC, the Western Australian Team Challenge, is over for another year. What a fantastic showing from the WA gaming community.

The WATC was the biggest single day, single game system that Objective Secured has ever run and it is the biggest team event that Australia has ever played host to. 20 teams of 6 players, 120 players in total (including 3 female players, one female team captain and a female TO) the event was pretty exciting. It was also scary as hell as TOs.

History of WATC

The event has steadily grown over the last 2 years. In 2016 we had teams of 4 and 64 players, 2017 we went to teams of 6 and managed 72 players which we were very excited about. Mike was aiming for 16 teams of 6 this year, 96 players. After we sold 14 tickets he wanted to turn off sales and sell the ticket only in groups of 2 so we wouldn’t have uneven numbers. This was in February! I threatened to break his fingers if he turned off ticketing!

All of those 16 teams sold out literally months in advance. If you know anything about gamers you know that procrastination is their middle name. For us to sell out an event months in advance is almost unheard of, we have hit capacity for a couple of events but never this early and usually a week before the event we are looking at numbers thinking ‘is this going to float?’ WATC has quite a few restrictions meaning that getting a team together is not as simple as just getting a group of 6 players together, all the armies need to be different, factions/codexes can only be used once in any team so finding 5 friends who play different armies can be a challenge. With this in mind we weren’t expecting the event to sell out quickly!

Getting ready for WATC

Not only did we sell out for allocated tickets for WATC but we had 6 other WA teams on a waiting list and interest expressed from interstate teams. We had to see if we could fit more players in the room! To give you an idea around some of the things that went into the planning of WATC here are a few of the issues that went off in the background, I had measured out the room, drawn a scale model of the room, created scale model of the tables so I could create an accurate representation of the room so we could see how many tables we could fit. We worked out that with room to get to the bar and safety room around the emergency exits we could comfortably (ha! There is a ‘relative’ word if ever I typed one!) fit 60 tables and 120 players in the room. Here were the hurdles we faced to make that actually happen:

• there were only 40 trestle tables in the hall we hire, we need to hire 20 more tables. No problem, I received a quote for $350 for the table hire and $100 for delivery. Problem one sorted!
• this one was an easy one, we had 25 boards, the awesome group at Outpost 6030 had 20 boards we are 15 boards short. No problem, Bunnings (a massive hardware chain) here we come, we can buy 15 more boards and I can sticker them with our vinyl battlescapes. Sounds easy enough.
• we only had 25 tables worth of terrain and we could borrow 20 from Outpost, we are 15 tables worth of terrain short. Slightly bigger problem, terrain is not cheap, nor is it quick or easy and Mike HATES building and painting terrain so it is like pushing mud up hill trying to get new terrain sorted. We were exceptionally lucky that Matt and Jake from Beyond Games and Hobby offered to bring 6 tables of terrain with them up from Bunbury! We were now 9 short, Toy Soldier Cartel offered to loan us 4 boxes and our very own Danger Rod loaned us a further 2 boxes. Technically we were now only 3 boxes short. We then had a lovely gamer who is moving house and didn’t have much space offer us 3 tables of beautiful terrain and a long time gaming family Bob and Jordan Grey (Bob and Mike opened Outpost 6030 South together many years ago now) offer us 2 more tables of terrain that hadn’t seen the light of day in about a decade. Yay we now had an extra 2 boxes of terrain which would mean we could use just 18 boxes from Outpost which would perhaps make pack up easier??? Now all I had to do was get Mike to get the terrain out of the dungeon so we (I) could make repairs, block up any ground floor windows I had missed for the last event and make some up dates to the donated terrain that had been in storage for a decade.

Ok, sorted, we could now put the extra tickets on sale. They sold in about 15 seconds and we had 120 players locked in.

A problem shared is a problem halved multiplied

Now our second lot of problems started.

• I called to confirm my order for the trestle tables and she delightfully informed me that although I had told her we needed the tables for the 22^nd she hadn’t realised I meant we needed them delivering and picking up on the 22^nd so to do that we were looking at $470 delivery AND $470 pick up and she wasn’t sure she could even guarantee any of her workers would take the job because getting to a venue at 6am on a Sunday morning is pretty horrific (tell me about it love!) Awesome. We now have 120 players and enough tables for 80! Luckily we did have 10 trestles already but we would need to buy 10 more (and in an ideal world 14 more to give a little more space) and work out how on earth to get them there.
• Buying the boards, this was supposed to be the easy one but, for reasons we will never know, we stupidly left this until the Thursday before the event to go and get them. The first Bunnings we went to were out of stock, the second Bunnings didn’t have any either and there wasn’t even a space where they normally are. I now started to have a minor panic that perhaps they had discontinued the boards this size and we wouldn’t be able to get them and far out what were we going to do!?! (instert hyperventilation here!). Mike was at the trade desk asking whether they had been discontinued and if not when the next delivery would be and I was on the phone to any and all Bunnings trying to find one that had the boards we needed in stock. It was a panicked half an hour but we did manage to find them. Phew, one problem solved.
• 30 boxes of terrain and 35 boards takes up a significant amount of room. We have had the trailer modified to add a little extra room but it was just not going to be big enough! How on earth do we get all of this stuff from our house to the venue?

Ok, now a problem shared was a problem quartered!

This is where I feel exceptionally grateful to this amazing gaming community. While I was on the phone to rental truck companies trying to see what we could hire for the day (which turned out to be a 3 day hire requirement), Mike put a call out on Facebook asking for help. Within minutes we had offers of help. Brad, who is always there for set up and pack up at every event we run, took some terrain a couple of days before the event, Bodie who wasn’t even playing in the event drove from The Vines area to Mount Nasura to pick up the alcohol and drinks for the event! Not only that but he also stayed the whole day and volunteered in the bar and went on a mercy dash to the chemist for me when I stupidly burned both my hands (ObSec range of oven mitts will be out in time for Mother’s Day!), I could not have done it without you Bodie! Courtney from Toy Solider Cartel extended the offer of us borrowing their terrain to offer to come to our house on Saturday and he collected the remaining terrain and Jason from Tabletop Mafia borrowed a massive ute from work and was at our house at 5am on Sunday morning to load the trestle tables. I feel like I need to make some sort of joke about the Cartel and the Mafia coming together to support the WA 40k Community here but instead I will just say how very humbled both Mike and I were to have such amazing support to make the event a success.

Not only did we have those guys go out of their way to help us get everything to WATC, when we arrived there was an army of helpers there ready to help unload and get the venue set up. 6am, on a Sunday, in the rain and the middle of a massive thunderstorm and these guys were there to help. My heart really does swell thinking about it and I can’t thank you enough. As though that wasn’t enough one of the guys who was there to help, Kyle, also bought Mike and I a gift to thank US! I literally have no words!!!

We knew it was going to be a big job to set up 60 tables, boards and terrain so we had hired the hall from as early as we could get it and Mike was worried that we would struggle to get it set up on time but with everyone there helping the room was finished before 7.30. A full hour before round 1 match ups would start! I wish that I had set up a camera to show everyone working together and the room being transformed. I’m sure my colour coded floor plan made all the difference in making sure that the set up went as smoothly as it did 😊, the colour coded floor plan and the army of helpers that did the heavy lifting. I really do need to hit the weights!

This is just a snap shot of behind the scenes of event organisation. I haven’t even gone into the issues that the FAQ delayed release caused for WATC (and I’m not going to, I’m still traumatised!), or many other small issues that arise in the course of organising events. I just thought I would give you a small peak behind the veil of what goes on in the background. There is SO much more to running events than what you see on the day!