NMTBW Painting Competition - Single Miniature Categories (pic heavy)

Following on from Monday's post which featured the Best Army and Best Conversions awards, today we'll take a look at the entries in the single miniatures categories namely Best Character and Best Vehicle or Monster.

Best Character Runners Up
First up Ian Plumpton's Cadre Fireblade. It's a shame Ian didn't have his Stormsurge ready for the monster category since he won it at one of my previous events but nonetheless there's clearly a lot of time put into a comparatively small model:

In second place with a single vote more than Ian was Cal Goodger's Iron Warriors Daemon Prince. I had the pleasure of playing Cal in my final game of the day so come back and check out the battle report for more pictures of his force:

Best Character - Winner
Liam could've ligitimately entered his Mortarion into the best Monster Category or even Best Conversions but it's models like this that make me glad I limit players to a single category. He'd certainly have swept the board otherwise and, whilst well deserved, I think it's better to encourage more people to enter. Anyway, I'm sure you'll agree that Liam has created something stunning with his Morty. At some point I'll have to get on and paint my Grotesques that I commissioned Liam to build. Anyway, here's the big guy:

Best Vehicle or Monster Runners Up
First up, Tom Capper's Blood Angels Cerberus. Note that as this is a Forge World model it wasn't legal at the event but I saw no reason not to allow him to enter into the painting competition:

My personal favourite was Jonathan Lyness' Traitor Knight which closer followed the artwork from the Renegade boxed set from GW:

Particularly interesting for me was Keith Duncan's Ryza Onager Dunecrawler as if I ever create an Ad Mech force it'd also be in the Ryza scheme to match my Knights:

Finally, Jeremy Morris' Daemon Prince:

Best Vehicle or Monster Winner
In what was almost a three way tie with Jonathan Lyness and Keith Duncan, Ben Houghton managed to win the category by a single vote when I figured out that someone had written the number down wrong and voted for Matt Calow who hadn't even entered! Anyway, Ben's Vanquisher was a worthy winner although again my photos don't do it justice:

Right, that's it for the painting competition. Inspiring as ever and it makes me determined to finally paint a force that I'd feel proud to display. Obviously I'll have to find another event to do so though....

NMTBW Painting Competition - Best Army & Best Conversions (pic heavy)

I decided to keep the Double Trouble format for the painting competition. This means four categories, each with a separate prize. These are Best Painted Army, Best Conversions, Best Painted Character and Best Painted Vehicle or Monster. Players can only enter into a single category to prevent one player from sweeping the board and to allow people to focus on a particular miniature if that's their preference.

Anyway, there were some great entries as always. Today I'll focus on the Best Army and Best Conversions awards and then later in the week I'll post with the entries from the single miniature awards. First up, the Best Painted Army offerings.

Best Painted Army - Runners Up

Nick Thrower's Dusk Knights space marines were looking great on their hazard striped display board. Anyone who reads Nick's blog will be familiar with this army but it's the first time they've been treated to a formal display board. Apologies for the blurry pictures but head over to his blog for better ones:

Next up Ryan Kemp's stunning Alpha Legion force:

In a close second place, just a single vote away from victory was the perennial painting competition superpower Dave Weston and his awesome Dark Angels force with his huge display board:

Best Painted Army - Winner
Finally, the worthy winner and a newcomer at my events, Toby Liddiard with his Custodes force featuring a ludicrous amount of NMM:

Apologies to Toby because I don't think my pictures really do that army justice. I'm sure there'll be better pictures around but I always end up rushing mine as I'm trying to get the round one results entered and find time to eat my lunch!

Best Conversions
Not a huge amount of interest in this category with just two entries. There was a runaway winner here with Graham Sander's Tyranids taking all but two of the votes which went to Greg Barber's Taurox:

Come back on Wednesday for the single miniature entries.

NMTBW - The Aftermath

Yesterday I hosted my 13th 40K event, Nevermind the Blog Wars (NMTBW) at the Element Games North West Gaming Centre (EGNWGC for the acronym fans). Veterans of my events will remember that I killed off Blog Wars with Blog Wars X (BWX) in November 2015 so it's been two years since I've organised a singles 40K event. This was partly down to the complicated mess that 7th edition was and also to try to find more hobby time. Well, my armies haven't exactly transformed into beautifully painted masterworks so I figured, sod it, I may as well stick to what I'm good at and go back to event organisation!

This was also my first event in 8th edition so there were a lot of things to think about. I tried to avoid over-complicating the day with custom objective cards like I've had in the past and kept the same combined mission in all three rounds. With the benefit of hindsight I probably went overboard with the restrictions but when I came up with them GW hadn't addressed things like flyer and conscript spam. Maybe this time next year 40K will be a balanced system with a robust ruleset and.... nope couldn't keep a straight face. We'll just have to wait and see how the codexes pan out.

Anyway, I kept a similar scoring system to that used at BWX with victory points converted into a tournament score which took into account the margin of victory.

• 30 TP for a win, with a VP difference of 31 or more
• 25 TP for a win, with a VP difference of 15-30
• 20 TP for a win, with a VP difference of 1-15
• 15 TP for a draw
• 10 TP for a loss, with a VP difference of 1-15
• 5 TP for a loss, with a VP difference of 15-30
• 0 TP for a loss, with a VP difference of 31 or more

Click to enlarge to a legible size

Congratulations to Greg Barber for winning in his first appearance at one of my events. Equal congratulations to Matt Calow on scooping the Wooden Spoon. I think he was probably happier than he really should've been!

Well it doesn't take a genius to work out that Astra Militarum are pretty strong at the moment with 5 of the top 6 players using them! It probably also doesn't help that they've got so many cheap units that they can circumvent most comp. I'd love to hear from people who played with or against them, do you think they were too much? Is there anything I can do to counter this?

What's interesting is that if you compare the first round of NMTBW to BWX there were roughly the same percentage of tablings. It's usually more of a problem in round one as the random pairings make for some horrible mismatches at times. Swiss pairings only really started to improve things in the final round with just 3 tablings in the 15 matchups. Also, the victory margins were generally smaller too. It's something I've tried to figure out a solution to in the past but I think it's just something we have to accept as a problem with one-day events.

I know the scoring system is a little different to most events as it rewards margin of victory over pure VPs scored. If you re-sort the list on total points scored (Maelstrom and blood points combined), Chris Nettleship would win (4th) and there'd be big jumps for Mark Crombleholme (16th to 5th) and Nick Thrower (17th to 9th). Reassuringly the bottom three would remain the same though! Perhaps the system should be changed so it rewards "strength of schedule". That would probably mitigate the randomness of a one-day event but crushing your opponent would be pointless as you'd actually get less points!

As ever, I'd love to know what you guys think about every aspect of the event. Did you like the scoring system? Did you feel penalised by it? How was the venue? Was there enough scenery? What about lunch? I'm particularly keen to hear about what you thought about round times and points level. I don't think people were getting many turns in in a lot of cases. I wish I'd put a box for it on the scorecards actually. Anyway, please let me know in the comments here, on the NMTBW/DT facebook page or by email.

I'd like to continue running singles events as that's where I started and they're still the core of the competitive 40K scene. The next NMTBW probably won't be called that. I think I need to come up with a new name entirely. I still have people asking if you had to blog to buy a ticket and the name doesn't exactly scream awesome 40K event. Still, I had fun ripping off the Never Mind the Buzzcocks logo. I'm open to suggestions for what my next event should be called. In fact I might even run a competition for it, well on the condition that no-one suggests Tournamenty McTournamentface (or something similar)!

Don't worry though, I'll continue to run Double Trouble in June with DT3 (acronym overload) taking place on June 9th 2018 (save the date - tickets on sale in the new year). I'll have to have a think about how to handle 8th edition but stay tuned.

Also stay tuned for the painting competition and a report of my battles. All that's left for me to say is once again a big thank you to the guys who came along and particularly the folks who show up time and time again. I appreciate the support as always.

The NMTBW Pie Charts Post!!

Well, that has to have been the worst list checking session I've ever done. Well, I say session, I've actually been at it for three nights since the deadline (I had Monday off!). I'd estimate I've spent about 8 hours on it. We've got 32 players in attendance this time so that's 15 minutes per list which isn't bad. Obviously some of the lists were significantly quicker to check than others (I'm looking at you, Guard players!). Anyway, thank you to everyone for submitting on time. Whilst it may have been the worst session yet it was definitely one of the easiest in terms of chasing people up for lists. There also haven't been many drop outs this time compared to previous events (still time yet I suppose!).

For those new to my events, a few years ago I started a tradition of meaningless statistical analysis of the submitted lists and I draw spurious conclusions from them in an attempt to convince myself that this was worth the effort!

Before I get into the usual pie charts I wanted to comment on the number of list errors I've encountered this time round. I think it's probably been the highest proportion ever. Something I think warrants a pie chart of its own:

I was pretty worried after Saturday night when I checked 8 lists and found 4 of them to be incorrect in some way. I think it's important to point out that I'm not trying to have a dig at people but I'm more trying to highlight how difficult it is to get things right with the way GW have written out the points in the books. Of the 8 returned lists, only one of them was for restriction breach and it was an easy one to miss. There doesn't seem to be a particular trend to a bad faction or anything like that. I thought about doing a specific pie chart to show the incorrect factions but as you'll see later some of them only appear once so it'll be pretty obvious who they were and I don't think that's fair. Instead I've broken it down into Imperium, Chaos and Xenos:

I don't really think there's a particular problem with any faction. The Astra Militarum lists were difficult but I suspect that's because Battlescribe isn't great for them and they naturally have a ton of units with low cost upgrades. Right, with that out of the way let's get onto the proper pies.

The Pie Charts
As is the tradition, let's start with the faction breakdown pie (click to enlarge if the text isn't clear):

Well, unsurprisingly there's a sizeable chunk of Astra Militarum (IG) lists. Not all of these were pure Guard though with a smattering of Inquisition, Assassins, GK, etc. mixed into them. Still, the popular opinion that Guard are powerful at the moment seems to bear out in the popularity at NMTBW. It'll be interesting to see how they fare though. Of the other newer books, CSM have made a bit of a resurgence from being quite a niche army at previous events. Space Marines are still there in numbers but nothing like as much as before. In fact, power armour isn't as popular and only one of the lists (I think) had Primaris marines involved. 

As ever, I'm thrilled that there's such a good spread of factions involved. In fact, with the exception of Death Guard and Genestealer Cults, every faction is represented in one way or another. I don't know about you but I think that's awesome. I'm pleased to see Harlequins making what I think is their first appearance at NMTBW.

There are no pure Daemons lists and only a couple of T'au lists. That's probably not surprising given the consensus of opinion about these two factions at the moment. Here's hoping their codexes address the issues. It'll be interesting to see how this changes with another year and hopefully a full complement of codexes.

Let's look now at the number of Imperium, Chaos and Xenos lists combined:

Firstly, ooooooo I discovered how to make these pie charts look flashier as I was making this one. No, I can't be arsed to go back and redo the others. Tough titties. Anyway, the flexibility of the Imperium over the other factions makes them a popular choice. It's difficult for non-Imperium players to feel cheated. Non-Aeldari xenos players could quite reasonably feel even more hard done to with just a single book to choose from. I'm semi-tempted to merge the results of the Imperium vs. "Everyone Else" since there's a 50:50 split but we'll see if I can be bothered on the day.

Lords of War
Next up, let's look at the number of Lords of War involved. With Forge World excluded and the 25 wound restriction there were only a limited number of options available. I hadn't realised that the Baneblade and its variants are 26 wounds until quite close to the deadline when someone pointed it out. I didn't intentionally exclude them whilst allowing other factions there's but still, I don't think Guard players need much help in the tank front.

I'd already done these pies before I discovered the snazzify option so they look a bit crap now but they do the job. As you can see there's a quarter of the lists featuring a LoW but let's break it down:

Unsurprisingly, both of the DG lists feature Mortarion and the Thousand Sons have brought Magnus along. I'm surprised there weren't more Imperial Knight as they're under the 25 wound cap and also (unless I've missed something) you could've brought 4 of them and stayed in the restrictions. I'm glad no-one has obviously but I thought someone would at least try it on! Have to say I considered it for my list to make my games quick but figured it'd be pretty miserable to play with and against. It's surprising that there's no Wraithknights but with only two Aeldari players it probably doesn't mean much. I do think they're overcosted though.

Detachments
One of the biggest changes in 8th was a standardised pool of detachments for all factions. Previous editions had this but in recent years we've had a lot of faction specific detachments and the Marmite of 40K, formations. The tournament restrictions allowed up to 3 unique detachments and people built their lists as follows:

As you can see, the majority of lists needed two detachments to fill 2,000pts. The most popular combinations of two detachments being Battalion-Spearhead and Battalion-Super Heavy Auxillary closely followed by Battalion-Vanguard. I suspect this was generally a bid to gain a couple of extra command points as most of the lists could've been contained into a single Battalion detachment. Around a quarter of the lists used a single detachment and unsurprisingly the most popular by far was the Battalion. I suspect that's down to how used to the old CAD we'd become.

Let's take a more detailed look at the detachments used:

Of the 61 total detachments at NMTBW a whopping 29 of them are Battalions. Again, that's not really surprising. It's interesting that the Outrider, Patrol and Air Wing are barely used. It would seem that Elite and Heavy Support choices are more popular than Fast Attack! I'm also impressed that two players not only managed to fill a Brigade but also that they included other detachments too!! Obviously it goes without saying that these are Guard players!! I'ts also interesting to note at this point that only one player out of the 32 has made use of tactical reserves and even then only 100pts worth. Granted there aren't many Daemon or Tyranid lists but it's still interesting (to me at least!).

Special Characters
Finally, in a nod to the origins of this event in my previous tournament series, Blog Wars let's look at how many people have included Special (or Named) Characters in their lists. The reason I'm tracking this is because I used to have a somewhat unique comp at BW that required all lists to include a special character and I themed the missions around this. Interestingly, looking down the list of factions I think all of them could've included a named character of some description. Obviously some factions are pretty limited in options e.g. just Cawl for Ad Mech. Anyway, here's the pie:

So more than half the lists included at least one SC without me making it compulsory. It'll be interesting to see how many SCs GW adds (or heaven forbid, removes) over the coming years but I remain a big fan of them. Looking down the list there's only two SCs who appear more than once, namely Pask and Mortarion. What surprises me more than anything is that Roboute Guilliman is a complete no-show leaving Chaos with 3 unopposed primarchs (albeit one of them twice). I really expected to see him at least once if not multiple times in the lists but he never appeared.

I keep intending to produce a list of all the Special Characters that have appeared over the years of my events and which have never been featured but I never quite get round to it.

Attendance
Finally, whilst not a pie chart I'd previously tracked attendance at my events so I took the opportunity to update the graph:

Well when you ignore the peak of Blog Wars in BW9 and BWX I've managed a pretty steady attendance of around 30 players. I'm pretty happy with that. I've always capped sales at 50 anyway as I think above this it gets unmanageable for a solo TO. I have to wonder if I'll ever get back to the peak of BW9 and BWX but perhaps the name is somewhat to blame. I really ought to come up with something that sounds a bit more like a 40K event and doesn't make people wonder if they need to blog to take part.

I have to say I'm feeling apathy towards the competitive 40K scene at the moment after the one experience I've had of it so far. Granted that's not a fair sample but the spam and filth still seems present and it doesn't seem like other TOs are doing too much to combat it. Mind you, GW is doing a much better job of "balancing" things at the moment.

Phew! That turned out to be a much more epic post than I intended. Fair play if you actually got to the end of it. Even more props if you actually read all my ramblings in between. I'm looking forward to the event and I'm intrigued to know if my somewhat excessive restrictions actually make for an enjoyable day of gaming. If nothing else about a third of the people there will win a prize so there'll be bribery at least!

Never Mind The Blog Wars Update - First Turn, Ob Sec, etc.

Apologies for not posting this sooner but I haven't posted much of anything for a while now. With NMTBW just over a month away I thought I ought to clarify how the Chapter Approved updates will work at the event. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about please take a look before reading on.

Boots On The Ground
First off, Boots On The Ground will definitely be in use. Granted with the limited duplicates we won't see many (if any) flyer heavy lists but it's worth bearing in mind.

Objective Secured
We'll also be using the Objective Secured rule as below:

However, this will be used with the caveat that every unit in the detachment has the same faction keyword from the following list: Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, Deathwatch, Astra Militarum, Adeptus Mechanicus, Adeptus Ministorum, Asuryani, Drukhari, Harlequins, Chaos Daemons, Renegades & Heretics, Thousand Sons, Death Guard, Necrons, T’au Empire, Orks, <Hive Fleet>, and Genestealer Cults.

Also note: Codex: Grey Knights, Codex: Chaos Space Marines and Codex: Space Marines are explicitly not covered by Objective Secured because their Codexes provide a similar rule (i.e. Defenders of Humanity).

I haven't seen the Death Guard or Astra Militarum books yet but I'd assume they would also be exempt. Please can someone clarify for me if they have anything similar in there.

First Turn
I think at this stage it's better to stick with the original rulebook version of things. I think this is the right call for several reasons:

1. First and foremost, NMTBW hopefully won't feature the standard tournament mentality of shooting people off the table as soon as possible. Partly because the core group of regulars are a decent group but also because of the way tabling works with the Maelstrom points.
2. The new +1 to first turn roll-off doesn't make much sense to me when your opponent can still Seize. You've already deployed at this point so Seizing afterwards makes the roll off seem a bit daft. You've deployed not really knowing who's going first after all.
3. It's pretty close to the event so people will have written their lists and (hopefully) already have a sizeable chunk of their force painted. Changing the mechanic now might require people to rethink and there isn't long left before the army submission deadline (28th Oct).

A Few Other Clarifications

Few quick questions from the Double Trouble/NMTBW Facebook page and emails:

• Warlord Traits and Psychic Powers can be picked or rolled for. It's up to each player to decide how they want to generate them. Players can change these before each game if they like.
• The Astra Militarum book will be legal at NMTBW but please try to keep filth to a minimum (same goes for all armies mind you!)
• You can enter a model into the painting competition that doesn't feature in your tournament army. However, the Best Army Award entries must all be armies that are competing at the event.

If there's anything else you want clarifying, comment, email or ask on the FB page but do so soon so I can inform everyone of anything significant.

Nevermind the Blog Wars - Tickets On Sale Now!

Title says it all really, tickets are now on sale for Nevermind the Blog Wars which will take place on November 11th at the NWGC in Stockport, UK. This is a return to singles events after running Double Trouble on its own for a couple of years. The release of 8th edition has piqued my interest in singles again so I thought it was time to resurrect Blog Wars (albeit in a different guise).

I recently previewed the event pack on the Double Trouble/NMTBW Facebook page and I think it would be fair to say there was a mixed response. I wanted to try and address some of the issues we've seen with 8th edition 40K in a semi-competitive environment. I'm not suggesting this is the format that all tournaments should employ but I've never been interested in going along with everyone else. What I want to continue to run are tournaments where the emphasis is on showing up and having three fun games against friendly opponents rather than three miserable games where you either annihilate your opponent comfortably (no fun) or watch as your opponent decimates your army in a couple of turns (no fun either).

I know some people feel the comp goes a little too far but remember two things: 1) this is a new edition so TOs need to try things to find a system that gives balance and 2) no-one is forcing you to attend. There are other events out there (granted none of them have generous raffles like mine). Also remember that I'm pretty experienced at running events now and the last couple of Blog Wars ran pretty smoothly. I've been to some events that are woeful in terms of organisation, are stingy with prizes (looking at you GW) or where the majority of people I play are WAAC types. Can I promise you that NMTBW will be the best event you'll attend in 8th edition? Of course not. Will I try harder than any solo TO out there to get it as close as I can? Definitely.

Anyway, if after all that rambling you're still interested in attending, tickets are on sale now for £17.50 from the usual PayPal address. Details or the scoring system, army selection, etc. are on the NMTBW page. Please read them carefully before you buy your ticket.

I hope to see plenty of you guys there and maybe even some new faces too. Whatever happens it'll be a good day of gaming and you never know, you could scoop the top prize in the raffle!