Double Trouble - The Aftermath

As I'm sure you know by now, my five year run of Blog Wars events came to an end last November with Blog Wars X. I decided I wanted to do something different instead of rehashing the BW format with a new name. I'd toyed with the idea of a BW doubles before but never went through with it because I thought it would put people off who didn't have a partner. That's where the Double Trouble format comes in. Everyone shows up with a 750pt force and they're paired up with a random partner in each round to play against another random pairing. I'm sure the idea of this put quite a few people off but I had 31 people prepared to give it a go so, with me making it 32, I ran the event last Saturday at the NWGC.

You may have heard that the venue has now been taken over by Element Games and they've injected a decent chunk of time and cash into renovating the place. It looks infinitely better than it did before. Unfortunately for them they inherited the bookings of the previous owner including the double booking of Double Trouble (maybe that's the "double trouble"?!?) and a Privateer Press event. Since the PP event was a 110-man manufacturer hosted 24 hour a day special they could hardly turn them down I suppose. What that meant though was they wouldn't be allowed to have models from any other manufacturers in the main gaming space. Understandable from PP's perspective but it meant that the venue had to hire a room from the theatre group who used another part of the building. That meant a trek past the lovely new venue and down into a dark room with precious little natural light, no bar, no projector (I brought a TV from home), no PA system (I had to shout a lot) and only just enough tables. Massive thanks to Luke and the other Friday night early arrivals who helped get things set up. The distance from the main hall and miscommunication from Element's staff meant that we didn't get lunch when we should've either which didn't go down well with anyone, myself included. I'll discuss this in more detail in the feedback post so save your comments for that.

The Double Trouble Dungeon!

All of that aside though, I felt that the tournament went pretty well. For the first event of a new format the day ran smoothly with only a handful of things that I hadn't anticipated. Looking over the pairings for the event on Friday night, I'd noticed that some people would end up playing repeat games against some opponents. I'd already made sure that there were no duplicate pairs but hadn't thought about duplicate opponents. This led to what can only be described as the world's worst Sudoku puzzle. I set out the 32 players and all their 9 opponents/partners and made sure that no one had a game with or against someone they'd played before. Of course, this wasn't totally necessary and some repeats could've been interesting (e.g. playing with someone you'd just played against) but the point of the event was to mix with people who you wouldn't normally, so I'm glad I did it. Apart from me writing one of the table assignments incorrectly, it worked like a dream.

Results
As I always did with Blog Wars, I'll run through the painting competition in separate posts. The quality of the photos is limited thanks to the poor lighting mind you. For the tournament itself, since everyone was paired up randomly there were only prizes for individual players rather than teams. The missions involved two concurrent objectives: blood points for destroying your opponents' army and victory points for scoring tactical objectives (from a custom maelstrom deck). The top scorers in each category were titled Master Tactician and Genocidal Maniac respectively.

Whilst some debated whether Matthew Grimes had actually been a tactical genius with his summoning Daemons list he managed to scoop 50 VPs over three games and took the Master Tactician award. He actually tied for first place with Rob Hill from 30Kplus40K but I used blood points as a tie breaker. I played Matthew in my second game so you can decide for yourself whether he was a "master tactician" or not based on my battle report.

The top prize for Blood Points went to Dan Wellington. Dan was running Cult Mechanicus. Seems he didn't pay much attention to the other half of the mission though as he only scored 30 VPs from tactical objectives.

Propping up the table with the lowest combined score, Rob Nathan takes home the Nobody Loves Me Award. It's tough getting the last place in an event like this because it may have had nothing to do with what he brought or how well he played. I've not looked into it in detail but there were certainly weaker lists that placed higher thanks to getting paired with very strong lists. I appreciate that sounds wrong but hopefully everyone felt that the competition was secondary to enjoying their games and meeting new people.

As you can see, my day was less than stellar. I'd have never expected my best game to be when I was paired with another Dark Eldar player (Nathaniel Gibbs) against a horrible Eldar list with Hornets and a Warp Hunter! I fully expected the result in the final game against the Optimised Stealth Cadre though! My good friend Matt effectively finished second were this a normal tournament. He'd probably have been pushing for the Genocidal Maniac prize but his lord of change got stuck in combat with some cataphractii terminators for longer than he'd have liked (7 rounds of combat I think) as he kept fluffing the To Hit rolls. You can't focus on the what ifs though and he still enjoyed the day.

You may see on some of the other blogs (like Rob Hill's) that there were trophies for all of the event prizes. These were kindly designed and 3D printed by Matt Calow. I wish I'd taken some pictures of them all together but sadly I never got around to even getting them out of their box until I was handing them out in the award ceremony. Hopefully I'll be able to get Matt to print some more for the next Double Trouble.

Stolen from Rob Hill (spoiler for the painting competition!)

Of course there was also the obligatory excessively generous raffle! You might argue that I could make it less generous and charge less for tickets but where's the fun in that? Up for grabs this time were 5, yes 5, different Start Collecting sets. I forget who took them home but what I do remember is a sheepish Dave Weston coming up to collect the top prize of Deathwatch: Overkill

Right, I think that's more than enough text for one night! Next up I'll continue the tradition from Blog Wars of running through all of the painting competition before moving onto my battle reports and finally a feedback discussion on how we can make the next DT better. I'm really pleased that people were so positive about the event and glad that I feel like it's worth running again.

EDIT: By request, I've created a Facebook group for the event. It's been years since I've created one (or even used Facebook much) so if you can't join it let me know. The idea is to keep in touch with people who you played with/against and to share photos/stories with them.