So I’m completely biased here because I’m the TO (now part of a 4 man organisation team). Massive thanks to Dirk, Luca, and Janis for their support to run these events and I’m really proud to say that they’re just getting better and better! Special shout-out to Luca who really stepped up and by the time we all arrived the tables were already set up completely and he ran the day amazingly. On with the show…

The tournament in general

I’ll just try and go through the facts here because otherwise I’ll just be patting my own back. Ah no, I’ll point out some things we need to change here. We’ve been really open with our attendees about building up the tournaments and taking into account their feedback.

Venue: Kutami in Bremen which is a FLGS with 12 tables available. The tables are nice and high which is great for all us old fellas. There are some chairs but not enough for everyone, seemed like we’re getting there with having enough now. I’d love to have some bar stools but we don’t have anywhere to put them between tournaments. Big pro is that everyone can stock up on their war dollies whilst at the tournament and they even kept the cash register open until after the end of the tournament which was really nice of the dudes from there.

Food and drinks: Water, coke, sprite, and of course a couple of cheeky beers. The only thing missing was COFFEE. We now have a solution for the next time but recognise this was a bit of a pain for people. For food, we have lots of places within a short walk which is great for people to be able to get what they want for lunch… the downside to this means that everyone splits up over lunch and you get less time to chat together

Organisation: Only major criticism here is the lack of a clock, reminders were loud and clear though thanks to Luca.

Prizes: Wow! Our sponsors really came out for people this time… on top of Kutami themselves sponsoring, there were also PlayMats, Battle Systems, Gamer’s Grass and Micro Art Studios. I mention Micro Art Studios in particular because they’ve been awesome and have been supporting us since before we rebranded and they’re just so nice and happy to support us for so long. They do some great basing stuff which I use myself and they can really up your bases with some great details. In the end, we had prizes for 1^st-3^rd and also for Best Painted 1^st-3^rd plus a little prize for everyone and others raffled out to everyone who was there at the end of the day… which was everyone. Our community is so awesome!

My List

Same one as before… but now with my Cairn Wraith as my general instead of the Lord Ex

I got asked why it says Ah Fittsy at the start… well, it’s mostly just to have it at the top of the app 🙂

Onto the games

The Vice – Bjorn Fyreslayers

Bjorn again! He’s still an awesome dude and it meant we both had a pretty good idea of each other’s armies going into the game. We both made a couple of mistakes which could have made it closer or wider in the end. I knew in this one, I needed to do enough damage and/or keep him pinned further back on the battlefield to keep the potential to take the centre objective.

He pushed up the centre but committed less there and hung back as far as he could. It wasn’t enough though and I pushed up hard into the centre with most of my army whilst sending the Hexwraiths up on each board edge to threaten the flanks. In this case, for the first turn where I wasn’t tagging so much of his army, he took the 5+ ward which meant I’d have to play around the strike first one later. He’d learnt a lesson from the last time and used all out defense to keep Gotrek alive when I went in… and he survived on 1 health because of it! Also… because I forgot to burn my once per battle extra attack to clear out the centre and only realised halfway through the combat phase… This was the start of a recurring theme for the day. On the flipside I did remember that Reikenor gets to ping his 1 “allocate wound” against an opponent without letting them have a ward which was perfect to take Gotrek out.

2^nd turn I took the double to try and start controlling the board and take the chance to do more damage. This was the turn where I needed to deal with the strike first and I took a little damage going into that but importantly, I started to pin some more of the Fyreslayers.

From there on… it was a bit of a war of attrition and for me to start scoring big whilst Bjorn played solidly and kept the score close with some clever battle tactics. We did get interrupted quite a bit during this game and we ended up running out of time. This was for sure a bit disruptive, especially for Bjorn, and it’s something to think about for future tournaments.

28-22 to me at end of the 4^th turn

Shifting Objectives – Ole with his KO

I was quite happy to go into a KO list to see how I could play against them with my Nighthaunt. Wow… was it an intense game in the end. One of the most exciting and close matches I’ve ever played. If I’d done a couple of things differently, I think it would have been a win for me…

I gave Ole the first turn, looking for the double into 2^nd or 3^rd as my win condition for this matchup. In the first turn, Ole played it pretty safe and stayed well back but dropped Callis and Toll onto the centre objective for a seize the centre and to get up on points. I knew it was going to be tough to keep him off the points with 2 Frigates on the board and potential for a lot of damage from the Riggers and Brokk on one side. With this in mind, I wanted to take my chance to wipe Callis and Toll and take control of the centre. On the other hand, this meant that they already did their job holding me up for 2 turns of combat and scoring a tactic and points. When I went in, I forgot to burn my artefact again to wipe them out (not sure that would have been enough but it would have been closer). Perhaps more importantly is I pivoted 1 unit of Hexwraiths to move over to the Riggers side and aggressively pushed the others up to charge the Frigate after a redeploy. I then foolishly threw my attacks into the Frigate instead of starting to whittle down the Riggers. The Hexwraiths whiffed on their attacks after an all out defense and it didn’t matter that much in the end. Got the double into 2 and this should have really started to swing the game my way. I did use it to get rid of most of the riggers with my Hexwraiths and cleared the centre out whilst starting to position to push towards the Thunderers and their Frigate.

From then on… it became a game of cat and mouse with Ole using his Frigates to get onto objectives and the Codewright buffing control scores. Along the way, I did get into combat with the Thunderers, Codewright and the 2^nd Frigate. What I did wrong there is that I should have taken the chance to kill the Codewright just for the effective change to control scores but I was focussed on taking my chance to kill Thunderers. It all came down to the last turn where Ole had to win the prio to take the double and score 6 points on the objectives… Then I had the chance to tie and I forgot to use discorporate to protect my Hexwraiths, proceeded to lose 1 and couldn’t take control of the last secondary objective.

Giving away the double into 2^nd was a huge help but really hurt watching the primary objective constantly go over to his stronger side and making it easier for him to score. In the end, my overall gameplan was good but a few choices along the way made it a tougher game for myself and Ole was just playing some fucking top grade AoS. He was also a nice fella and I look forward to more battles together in the future!

41-42 for Ole for a well earned win!

Feral Fourway – Janis bringing DoK this time

Ah, the curse of our team, I paired into Janis my teammate and one of my most common opponents. For context, in the German League, the teams are only 3 players… so zeah, a bit of bum luck there. He is a great player who loves to switch armies and play with interesting lists… like this one he’s taken with Daughter’s. For context… there was a bit on the line here as with Nighthaunt I’m still undefeated against him despite him being arguably the better player of the two of us. This was somehow my first time ever playing into DoK even going back to 3^rd, 2^nd, and even 1^st ed. I didn’t really know how the army worked so I figured I’d just go into it and have fun. I wanted to bait Morathi up to the middle and then keep her busy… which I did but at the cost of a lot of my army. I swung around Morathi and sent my Reapers up to start clearing out the center while my Hexwraiths tried to clear the side.

An interesting point here is that Janis loves to include fast units and even better teleporting units so I knew that cleaning them off would help me to control the scoring better.

A couple of times here he threw in buffed up Witch Aelves who then did a little damage with their 1^st attack but ethereal helping keep enough of mine alive to then smack them back off the table.

Back to Morathi… I wanted to whittle her down and even set up my Lord Ex and Cairn Wraith to block her from getting to Reikenor, but I left too big a gap, she jumped into the middle and wiped all 3 in a turn *sadface*. But at that point, there were only a few wounds left on her and I’d been clearing enough of the rest of the army with my Hexwraiths hardly injured running around scoring and causing mayhem. A bit of a turning point was when he picked Slay the Entourage on my single remaining Reaper who then rolled all of their ethereal saves even with Morathi going into it and survived.

In the last couple of turns, it was getting awkward for both of us which led to some inventive Hexwraith congalines to take objectives and score tactics at the same time like in this photo 😊. They really can stretch a long way across the board when they need to!

50-36 for me, Don’t worry Janis, you’ll get me one day.

Lessons learned

I tried out a new trick where I would put a bottlecap in my hand or on the table to remind me of battle tactics or using an ability… Unfortunately this didn’t help for the Lightshard as I did not use it once in 3 games… unfortunately Nighthaunt doesn’t really have a better artefact so I’m probably stuck with it.

There should probably be some sort of reflection on the mistakes I’m making or how I should change how I play. I’m happy I’m recognising them and if I get back to playing more regularly, I think I’ll nip them in the bud over time. Oh, I didn’t mention it in this article but I did game 2 and 3 on the clock… I wasn’t slow but it did distract me and I need to get back to practising with the clock again. Sounds like I need to get in more games!

Rounding this one up…

All in all it was a great day, I was a bit tired heading into it but I was lucky to have 3 really great people as opponents. The day in general and the tournament ran pretty well too thanks to Luca looking after everyone and doing a great job with the orga side of things. I’m pretty happy with this list, I’d like to start playing around with using Awlrach for that deepstriking goodness but not against Janis in case he beats me while I’m practising :P. This event took me just under 70% winrate with my Nighthaunt so that’s going better than with my KO and I’m having a lot more fun with them. Still in that weird spot waiting for the new book but I’ll take them to at least one more tournament until then.

I’ll be back next week with a new article and I’ll probably focus on how running these tournaments has been going. Who knows… I still have a huge backlog of article ideas so I may just pick something that I’m feeling like writing about. In the meantime, I hope you all get in some good games and have fun out there!