Objective Secured

Western Australia Warhammer 40,000 Masters 2018

The fourth annual Western Australian Warhammer 40,000 Masters was held 17-18 November 2018. Once again Objective Secured took over the South Perth Community Centre and 58 tabletop war-gamers came out to play.

This is going to be a long post, I’m writing it during the event so that it goes out before we go on leave and there is just so much to cover. Grab yourself a drink, sit back and settle in for all the details.

The format for the WA 40k Masters was 8^th Edition 40k, matched play event with 6 games (all two hours and forty five minutes) held over the two days. Three games per day. The first round was random match ups using Down Under Pairings but how would we match games two to six?

The match up process

We had quite a bit of conversation around how the match up process would work. We were recently introduced to the match ups that Warhammer Underworlds Grandclash use.

For ease of explanation I’ll talk about round two. All players with a win are groups together, draws are grouped together and losses are grouped together. The person with the highest points with a win plays the person with the lowest points with a win, the person with the second highest points win plays second lowest points win etc.  This process happens for each round except the last round and in the last round we ensure that the top two players are playing each other.

The alternate option (for round two) is to have the highest scoring player play the second highest scoring player, three and four play each other all the way down to 55 and 56 playing each other.  The only exception is that you can never play the same opponent twice. Should this happen a referee will step in and sort things out so that the players face fresh opponents of a suitable standing.

This was the option that we went with and the reasoning is that by matching the players in this manner, we can be sure that the winner of the tournament will have faced the toughest opposition along the way. It was an interesting discussion. In the end we made the decision because we wanted to ensure that the winner had faced the fiercest of competition on the road to winning the 2018 Western Australian 40k Masters.

What went wrong

So how did the day go? The day before the event I got a phone call to let me know that one of the fridges blew up. Brilliant. Not to worry there is still one large fridge, the freezer and the cool room. We can work with that! We arrived at about 6.20am and Mark and Marcus from Albany were already here and ready to help. Normally we can’t get in until 6.30 but the cleaners were here so we could get in early. This seemed like a good omen for the day. It wasn’t. In the politest possible way it felt like anything that could go wrong did go wrong!

The first thing I did when I got here was turn on the cool room so that we could get the drinks cold ASAP given we were a fridge down. The cool room door is broken and we can’t get it to close. That’s ok, we can still work with this, I’ll just wedge it closed as best I can.

Missing boards

As we were setting up we put out the boards. We were organised and ensured that we had three extra boards. We are in an awkward position at the moment that although we have boards for 40 tables if we bring all of our terrain we do not have space in our car and trailer to get them all here. We had borrowed boards from Outpost for Southern Hemisphere Open so we knew there were 22 boards here and we brought 10 of our boards so we would need to borrow 19 boards from Outpost meaning there were three spare Outpost boards as ‘just in case’. We put out all the boards and we were one short! We must have counted tables and boards 10 times between the six of us that were here setting up.

No, 10 ObSec boards and 18 Outpost boards. We are one short for the day and Outpost are 4 short! Steve very kindly offered to loan us one of his boards but his gorgeous new 2 seater car would not accommodate the board. Brad to the rescue and he drove Steve to his house and they collected the board. Crisis averted!

Scoring software failure

Right about this time while I was setting up all the tables, mats and terrain (and realised that there was an issue with terrain – don’t worry, I fixed it!) Mike was getting the software ready for the event. We normally bring a TO box, it has all the old scoring paperwork, and a heap of random things that we don’t use anymore because we are now on a paperless tournament thanks to Down Under Pairings however the car and trailer were full and we never use it so we decided to leave it at home.

As Mike was trying to log into Down Under Pairings the website was down. Panic set in as we realised that we are so used to this software working that we had not actually brought anything to use for back up. Mike was on the phone to the software developer who let us know that luckily for us another major event for Victoria was also happening today and so he had been trying to get the problem sorted for two hours by the time we found out there was an issue. God bless the time difference and thank you so much to the Vic players who notified him hours before us so that the problem was being looked out before we even knew it was an issue.

Mike and I had a quick panicked discussion and we decided that he would set up the event in the old scoring system that we used to use on the laptop and if worst came to worst we would have players come to the TO desk and record their scores that way. We could then manually enter this into DUP as soon as it came back online. We had a plan. Luckily 10 minutes before registration was due to start DUP came back online and we were set.

More problems

The room was set up and I was in the process of setting up the table numbers and realised Mike had picked up the wrong box, he grabbed the box that looks like it will house 30+ of table numbers but it actually holds two sets of 1-15. Since I still tease him about not having table numbers for our first ever Masters this felt like a bigger deal than it needed to. It was further compounded because we didn’t have the TO box so no paper, pens or tape to create any table numbers. Fingers crossed my Dad gets here soon and we can steal some paper from him to make up a make shift table number for tables 16-29. He did and we made it work.

Just after lunch time on Saturday we realised that the air conditioner at the TO table end of the room wasn’t working. Luckily with only 60-70 people in the room (players and spectators) and a pretty cool day for November the temperature wasn’t too bad. Then Mike discovered that the rest of the air conditioners were dripping. We had to decide do we leave the tables where they are and risk them getting damaged by the dripping water or move the tables and have the water drip onto the floor and risk people falling. General consensus was players would much rather risk themselves than their models and to move the tables. Luckily we realised that if we didn’t restart the air conditioners when they finished their on-cycle then the dripping would stop and the risk was reduced. Everyone would need to be alert until we could ensure the floor was dry and safe.

As I am typing this I am realising that there is a fair chance I was being melodramatic when I said that it felt like everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Everything that went wrong we worked around and had plans on how we could overcome the obstacles. Even with everything we were still ready bang on 8.30am for briefing and we were ready at 8.40am for an 8.45am start for round 1. All in all, the chaos behind the scenes didn’t impact the players. Just our stress levels.

Overall analysis Masters 2018

Overall the event seems to have gone pretty well. Normally I would have a hundred plus photos to edit but annoyingly I forgot my camera both days this weekend so I literally have a dozen phone photos.

Generally the room is buzzing. Everyone is chatting and getting along well, the soundtrack to the event is the shaking of handfuls of dice and the solid hum of chatter. Everyone seems to be having fun.

I’m a bit disappointed that this is the first Masters where 100% of the players are men, sadly no females here today playing. One of the positives of a male dominated event, normally when I go to a concert, movie, or any ‘mainstream’ event there is a massive queue for the women’s toilets and men never seem to have an issue. Today there are Leonie and I here and we have 7 toilets all to ourselves. We definitely wont have to queue for the loo! (It’s all about finding the silver lining).

Highlights of the WA 40k Masters

It was pretty cool to see the new Table Top Mafia rugby jumpers, the Toy Soldier Cartel were here in their team shirts, there were ObSec shirts, Outpost shirts and ETC shirts. I love it! It is great seeing those groups form and grow and it makes my heart sing to see players wearing our logo! The fact that you want to be associated with something that we created is just amazing. It’s super exciting for us both!

I am loving that a couple of the new players have come dressed to impress! Full suit and tie. Nice! I love the effort! (Especially since I chucked a hat and sunnies on this morning because I really didn’t have the time/energy to think about doing anything with my hair more than running a brush through it and make up was so not happening :p)

The display boards are something else! Honestly, the time, energy and effort that has gone into these display boards is amazing. I’m blown away with the talent in this room.

Prizes

There are plenty of prizes here today, we have encouragement awards, Best Overall, Best General, The Artist (painting), The Diplomat (Sports) then we have spot prizes for Best Dressed etc.

At the time I’m writing most of this the event is still in full swing so I’ll have to pop back straight after the event to update the winners.

Painting

We have played around with painting for the last 3 years. We have ended up going back to a system very similar to what we used way back out our first Masters.

At the first Masters Mike scored the painting and then the top armies were invited to display for Armies on Parade. There were some issues with this as it was seen as too subjective and players were concerned that their army hadn’t been assessed and that’s why they weren’t included in the Armies on Parade.

Over the years we have put more systems in place and we have a score sheet for painting (which is exactly the same scoring as Mike used back at the first Masters, it is just formalised and put it down on paper to allow for transparency). What we have been doing in more recent events is Mike and I are scoring painting, it is this score that goes into the overall score for each player. Then painting is peer judged and ‘favourite army’ is the one that wins ‘The Artist’ award for the event.

For this event we are modifying the two. Armies were assessed against the painting score sheet as per the players pack by Mike (all armies were scored by Mike this event) and then the top 10 armies were invited to display for Armies on Parade. All Masters attendees were then invited to vote for their favourite army out of the 10 on display and The Artist was chosen that way.

Armies on Parade

The top 10 painting scores (in alphabetical order) and players invited to display for Armies on Parade went to:

Travis elected to withdraw from the peer judged painting competition as his army was not painted to a finished standard.

Stats

We had a fair spread of factions:

The two hours and forty five minutes was too long for some rounds and just right for others. Mike thinks we have ‘hit the sweet spot’. I don’t disagree, it’s just that for the players that finished before the first hour was up it made for some pretty long breaks. There were still a couple of games that didn’t finish naturally but the vast majority did. At the time of writing this part the games were averaging two hours and twenty minutes. I’ll paste the stats below once game 6 is finished.

Thank you

Right now though, a great big thank you to Mark, Marcus, Steve and Brad for being here so early to help set up and to everyone else who pitched in with set up and of course everyone who helped with pack up. Thanks to Outpost for the loan of the boards, thanks to OTP terrain who were the main sponsor of Masters with prizes for the main prize winners and runners up and a discount voucher for everyone who attended, thanks to Sardowyn’s Foundry and A-Case for sponsorship of the event as well. Thanks to everyone who came along to the event, either as a player or a spectator and thanks to the family members who gave up a full weekend with their loved one so that you could come out and play!

I also again have to say a huge thank you to my parents. Dad gave up his weekend to work in the kitchen here and mum had our 3 kids all weekend so we could both be at the event. This isn’t anything new, they do it for us for every event we run. What makes it even more special this year is that on Sunday the 18th of November my parents celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary and they celebrated it apart so that they could support us and support ObSec so thanks very much mum and dad! Mike and I couldn’t do this without you.

Objective Secured aims to build community and it feels like we are living that community right now. It is great to see players who don’t see each other often greet each other like old friends. Seeing players laughing, joking, buying each other a beer (or a soft drink) are all things that show me that Western Australia has a happy, healthy and growing Warhammer 40,000 community. Thanks for everything you bring to it!

Happy gaming

E

PS Winners!