31st January - 28th + 29th Clash of Kings Australia 2017

So Jen and I have made our way down and back home from Canberra for CanCon since my last post. It was a great weekend away and we both had a lot of fun. For me it was my first time entering a tournament and I had a great time. It was pretty much my first chance playing against someone outside my usual group of family and friends, and I learnt a lot throughout two days.


Game 1 - Loss 0VP to 20VP

My first game was against another Abyssal Dwarf player with a small allied contingent of Forces of the Abyss. My opponent also came dressed as a Abyssal Dwarf general, and considering the nearing 40 degree temperature that was no mean feat. The polite term for what happened next is absolute slaughter I believe :). I'm fairly certain I was completely routed by the end of his fifth turn while barely managing to pull down a few hundred points of his army, but I quickly learnt the importance of keeping a close eye on unit positioning and the sheer demolishing impact of multi unit charging. I really appreciated his pointers both during and after the game which gave me some useful ideas going into the following games.

Game 2 - Draw 10VP to 10VP

I came up against an Orc force with allied Goblins in the next round. I was feeling much better moving into this game and managed to avoid any of the serious blunders from the first round. I slightly confused the objective on this one but thankfully had some larger units in the scoring area which allowed me to get a draw, I did have my fingers crossed for a seventh turn which depending on my combat rolls might have got me there, but it wasn't too be. Still I was quite happy to go from a complete annihilation to an even draw.

Game 3 - Win 15VP to 5VP

This was against a Kingdoms of Men force and gave me my first win for the tournament. Once again my opponent was great to play against and we had quite a bit of a laugh though out the game with some amazingly bad nerve rolls on both our parts allowed some incredibly tattered units to fight on for another turn, but I finally managed to break apart the centre of his force and take a hard fought win.

Game 4 - Draw 9VP to 11VP

My final game for day one was against a fellow Queenslander and his Forces of the Abyss. It was quite a different army to play against compared to my previous matches with quite a few fast troops and two hordes of nimble flyers. The objective was to punch through into the opponents half of the table and we both pushed an equal number of troops through he managed to maul me slightly more. It was still a draw but the attrition score gave him an extra tournament point and took one from me. But yet again another great game.

That bought the first day of competition to a close which left me sitting in the high 30s on the ladder. I was shocked at just how drained I was at the end of the day, I was expecting it to be a long day but just didn't think it would take quite so much out of you :).



Game 5 - Win 15VP to 5VP

This game was fantastic, my opponent was an absolute blast to play with. He had brought a Force of Basilea army and although he insisted they weren't finished I thought they looked fantastic. The basing was amazing and watching how they played I'm thinking I might put a force together myself at some stage. Again there was some amazing nerve rolls with three separate double one rolls at annoying instances for both of us but it made for some epic moments and big laughs for both of us. It was such a close game as well. My opponent let out a victory bellow upon the end of the game but after a closer inspection it turned out that my Lesser Golems had made it over the central line which gave me the win by one point. This took me to 30th on the ladder and I mentioned to Jen that I might have climbed a little to close to the sun here which we had a bit of a laugh about especially after my next two games.

Game 6 - Loss 2VP to 18VP

Another match up against the Forces of Abyss, though this one contained two rather powerful spellcasters which proved to be my downfall with turn after turn of two 20 dice fireballs combined with piercing wearing my Lesser Golems down leading them to be the first casualties of the game. My opponent had already begun to apologise about the pair of them before the game began so I was expecting them to be handing out quite a bit of punishment. I might have pulled a slightly smaller margin of loss if a few of my nerve rolls had of gone my way, but sometimes that's the way it goes. It was another fantastic game and another opponent I really enjoyed playing against.


Game 7 - Loss 3VP to 17VP

My final game was against a Dwarf player and again another great game and opponent. He had only recently relocated to Australia from England and had also been working for Mantic so we had quite a good chat after the game both about the mistakes I made (and yes there were several) and Kings of War and gaming in general. The scenario was Kill and Pillage! and I focused too heavily on the pillage aspect during deployment, the good thing was I realised this about 5 seconds into my turn. My other major mistake was trying to shoehorn the Supreme Ironcaster on Greater Abyssal into a role that would have been better served with a stock standard Ironcaster, something which I had started to realise but my opponent confirmed for me.

My final ranking was 48th out of 62 which I was quite happy with for my first showing. One thing that caught me by surprise was winning the Sportsmanship award, so thank you to my opponents for that as this was decided by a submitted three, two, one point vote so I owe it all to them :). Arwen, my youngest is particularly happy with this as part of my prize was three troops of Japanese themed skeletons [1,2,3] from Slave2Gaming Miniatures so a big thank you to them not only for the Sportsman prize but also the Undead captain in my player pack.

Also thanks to Angri Artists for the acrylic tokens included in the player pack. I also picked up a spot prize for my first round annihilation so another big thank you to Scibor Monstrous Miniatures for my Strielecs blister.