Objective Secured

Another weekend, another tournament, ok, that may be a slight exaggeration, it was a month between events. On Sunday the 16th July we formally welcomed 8th Edition with a 42 person tournament run by Objective Secured (aka M and I). M had very diligently done his homework and played as many games against as many different armies as he possibly could between the time of 8th Ed release and the event. I lost count how many practise games he got in in the name of ‘research’. His first game took about 4 hours to play a 1500 point game, every time either of them went to roll, move or breathe they checked the rules, read them aloud, processed them, debated how they could be interpreted and eventually played the turn. Over the course of his practice games he got faster and faster and I will be honest we were crossing our fingers that 2 hours per round would be long enough to play out each game at the event and thankfully it generally was.

I will start the post from the beginning of the day and work through as methodically as I can. Firstly we need to say a huge thank you again to the people who came and helped set up. M and I started set up at 6.30am and it wasn’t long after that when Brad joined us and got to the heavy lifting. I hate to play the girl card when we set up events but I have to admit I am just not as strong as I would like to be and lifting the boards nearly kills me. I lifted some of the tables, or should that read attempted to lift some of the tables, it was more a drag and shove scenario so I was very grateful to have the help. Before 7 Russell (sorry Rusty) arrived as well as Steve with a friend and they all chipped in to help with the set up, then there were multiple people in the room setting up terrain and we were actually ready almost an hour ahead of schedule – a rarity for any tournament I am sure!

We attempted to use Best Coast Pairings for the first time at one of our tournaments, the hope was that with everyone being able to score from their phone it would make the process run a lot smoother. Sadly we really underestimated the amount of time taken to register everyone so despite having the room set up early we were actually a little late to start the event. I have to say, it was the funniest sight to see a gaggle of gamers (apparently the collective noun for gamers is ‘a multitude’ pfft! that’s boring, I think a gaggle is much more appropriate!) all standing around trying to learn how to register via the app. I have to say how refreshing it was to see how many of our community are technologically challenged. I lost count of the number of phones that were shoved in my direction with a ‘you do it, I can’t work it out’. This was fortunate all things considered so that when we hit Southern Hemisphere Open we have a much better understanding of BCP and are ready to go! Once everyone was registered it was onto the games.

The first game had me worried, it was so quiet. I’m not used to quiet at our events. I was worried because a lot of the players were first time ObSec attendees and this did not feel right. My worry was short lived. Within half an hour the volume had started to rise and by the end of the game we had reached pretty darn close to regular levels of volume and energy. We had a few problems with the app, android users couldn’t access players lists, then they couldn’t send their results through and then for some reason when M created round 2 it created 2 rounds so while we thought we were going to make up some time in the break and get us back on schedule I ended up having to go around to each table and make sure each table only had 2 players and they were the right players for that table. M had a heck of a learning curve working out how to remove a round on the fly but he worked it out and thankfully we didn’t have that problem again.

In between round two and three we had armies on parade, photos will be at the bottom of this post. We ran peer judged painting for this event and it was a tight competition, there was one vote between second and third and one vote between first and second. Very excitingly the top 3 (3rd to 1st) Matthew Crosbie, Oliver Paun and Owen Casey have never won an ObSec painting award. Rounds 3 and 4 ran pretty much without incident. Annoyingly I totally forgot to take photos of the winners so I don’t have photos to share of our winners but I want to offer congratulations to Matthew, Oliver and Owen for painting, 3rd to 1st for Sports was Russell Moore (Rusty Gates), Owen Casey and Tim Absolom, 3rd to 1st for Best General Mark Bruce, Brian Mitra and (our first ever female Best General woo hoo!) Bree Bowen, 3rd to 1st for Best Overall  Brian Mitra, Bree Bowen and Kyle McCaughey. Unfortunately in M’s haste to get the results quickly, combined with his limited knowledge of Best Coast Pairings we did make a mistake on Sunday with the announcements. We have to offer our apology to Mark Bruce and Oliver Paun who were acknowledge as 2nd and 3rd for Overall and offer an apology to Bree and Brian who were not acknowledged for their podium finish on the day. You can find all the results HERE.

Overall from a tournament organisers perspective the day ran really smoothly with the exception of a couple of small hiccups with the scoring system but we will iron them out and it will all run much smoother next time. The first event for 8th Ed was challenging for M as there were a lot of TO queries and he was often surrounded by a group of people vying for his attention to get rulings. I had a few queries that generally went along the lines of ‘but I could do x in 7th Ed, so I can do it now right?’ My answer was always ‘what happened in 7th is no longer current, what does the rule book say NOW?’ It was challenging for players who have been used to playing almost on autopilot because they are so familiar with the rules to now not feel comfortable with how their armies work or don’t work in the new edition.

Some of the comments that I heard a few times through the event included: 8th Ed has levelled the playing field, go first or go home (the advantage of going first) and it feels as though the first few turns it’s anyone’s game and then a few turns in it becomes apparent who is going to win and it’s inevitable. There has been much healthy discussion around the advantages of flyers, can an army beat flyers, should flyers be capped or limited, the list goes on. If you have any thoughts about 8th Ed so far please feel free to add them to the list we are compiling on Facebook as M and I will cover these topics in more detail.

My overall impression of the event was that it was a nice, relaxed day. The players brought a great positive energy to the event, there was friendly banter and a good atmosphere. As always it was lovely to see some familiar faces, it was great to meet some new people along as spectators, a very warm welcome to the new players who made their ObSec tournament debut and it was great to see some new models and armies. I was editing some of the photos I took at the event and said to M ‘I’ve never seen models that look like actual people before’ he laughed and said ‘do you mean Imperial guard…er…Astra Militarum? Well to be fair 7th Ed wasn’t kind to that army!’ so it was great to see previously rarely seen armies coming out to play.

On with the pictures!