So this last weekend I made the drive down to Omaha , Nebraska
Venue: Good. This is only noted as good because of the premise of the event. Since this was a fundraiser for a school activity I’m giving it a good since it allowed Tim to raise more money for the debate team. It was in a school gym but it was plenty spacious and had plenty of chairs. It’s just tough to stand on a gym floor for 8ish hours in a day and I know that wrecked a few dudes, two of them that came with me. There were concessions on hand to purchase which was cool with all of the additional going to the debate team. They also catered lunch if you chose to pay for it with pizza on Saturday and a taco bar on Sunday which was pretty sweet. They definitely went out of their way to make it work as well as they could given the facilities they held it in.
Terrain: Good. The only thing honestly keeping this from being pretty good/excellent is the fact that several tables had enormous LoS blocking terrain in the middle but they weren’t playable pieces of terrain. Meaning that about 1’x2’ area of the table wasn’t usable. A quick addition to the packet that there is no impassable terrain would have fixed this but I don’t think a lot of people playing on those tables made that distinction. I played on them twice and on one mission we had to play it as non-impassable since an objective had to be placed directly on in the middle of the terrain. There were also a few tabes that could have used a little more area terrain instead of all BloS terrain or felt bottoms to determine where terrain started/ended as one table had a bunch of trees but no base so it made cover/difficult kinda wonky.
Prize Support: Excellent. The total amount for the individual winners of both tracks was pretty standard at an even split of the GW support given to an event. They also included passes or invites to two different events (Nova & Adepticon) which was pretty nice too. The real nice part was the sheer amount of stuff they raffled off. Tim managed to nab a ton of signed novels from Black Library and quite a few of the Role-Playing books from Fantasy Flight Games that they just sent down. He also got some solid support from Chaosmailorder (I think) and a ton of support from one of the local stores, the Game Shoppe. Overall I was pretty impressed with the support since this was a first year event that it was a fundraiser for the debate team.
Turnout: Pretty Good. Tim managed to pull in around 44ish 40k players for his first year and it looked like a slightly lower number of fantasy players. It looked like a full event and there were a lot of impressive armies. Overall it was one of the larger dual events that I’ve seen in its first year. I think a lot of this is Tim started advertising early and even though he let up a little at the end it really helped his turnout.
Format/Scheduling: Excellent/Good. But then again it’s the Nova format with a minor tweak and I love that. Only thing they might want to work on next year is proper bracketing amongst the winners as there were a few issues with the highest seeds playing each other instead of the lower seeded undefeated players. Also I’d advise shifting it to a 4-game Saturday 2-game Sunday if you keep the 64 person threshold for next year as that allows people catch flights which would mean that you could pull in more people. Also try to avoid holding the event while the College World Series is going this really increases the cost of the event. And lastly, I swear, allow for the raffle time in your schedule next year as I think that’s what caused a lot of the back up on day one.
Scenarios: Average. This is only Average for a few reasons and I think that with a couple of minor tweaks it would jump to pretty good/excellent. One being a non-even spread of the deployment types. There were 3 games with pitch battle, 2 DoW’s, and 1 Spearhead. It should have been evened out. I know it was an advantage to my army as I played Deathwing that I only had one Spearhead game. Also there were 3 rotating objectives but they didn’t rotate evenly either. There were 3 Objectives as the primary, 2 KP as the primary, and 1 Table Quarters. Again a smoothing out to 2/2/2 as well as splitting the KP missions so they aren’t both on day 2 would be advisable.
Overall I had a great time. This was an excellent first year event and I had a blast. I’ve got a fair number of photos to upload but they’ll mostly be included in my battle reports. Tim and his crew ran a pretty good event. The judge for 40k was constantly running around and available. I had 5 good games and got blown out on one but I had a great time. Hope to see more new faces next year and more than a few repeats since everyone I talked to seemed to have had a really good time. I’m looking forward to next year when I hopefully don’t have to drive back through a T-Storm w/60mph wind bursts……and where a 6 hour drive doesn’t turn into a 9 hour one J
