Results from the 40k ‘Ard Boyz preliminary round at Redcap’s Corner:

Rank	Player	Battle Points	Victory Points	Faction
1st	Colin	54	3129	Chaos Marines (all foot Nurgle & Iron Warriors)
2nd	Anthony	42	3013	Tyranid (heavy on big monsters)
3rd	Joe K	32	2330	Kingbreakers Space Marines (balanced)
4th	Sam	32	2002	Orks (balanced slightly mech focused)
5th	Andrew	23	3616	Tau (heavy on Crisis Suits)
6th	Rob	23	1390	Tau (very mixed)

Turnout was a little disappointing but workable. Most people from PAGE were unavailable this weekend. In general I think although moving the schedule up a couple months may improve attendance at the later rounds, it crippled attendance at the preliminary. In mid-May there’s just too much going on with schools, sports, etc., I think June and July are much more open for this sort of all day gaming affair.

However, we had a great time. The group was pretty well balanced. Despite the decent spread of points above, it was actually a fairly close bunch in terms of ability. For example, Colin and I both played Andrew and both thought him a super tough opponent despite winding up on the bottom of the stack. The sheer firepower his Tau were putting out was almost unbelievable, as attested by the number of Victory Points he racked up.

Quickly, I think the missions were mostly reasonable and probably more mainstream than last year. The third scenario and its heavy penalties on fast units and vehicles was a little weird, but not crippling. I don’t think anyone except Colin optimized against it in our group, but even for him there’s a good chance he would have brought the same no-vehicles list anyway and has done so in the past.

I had mixed feelings about the lack of Dawn of War setups. That’s a hard start for non-mechanized forces, so it makes some sense in terms of the apparent general agenda to boost foot armies. But it is an interesting tactical problem so I sort of missed it.

What I really did miss though were more missions based around objectives. The second and third scenarios were effectively both variants on Annihilation. That’s fine, but I think objective based missions are in many ways more interesting, and more of what people are playing at this point.

The emphasis on Victory Points for both mission (e.g., second scenario goals) and tournament parameters (e.g., the bonus point in the 3rd scenario for killing 3000 points throughout the tournament) was also interesting. I do think they’re more balanced than standard Kill Points—there’s just no way a Rhino should yield up anything near the same value as wiping out a group of Plague Marines… But, they are definitely just enough of a hassle to calculate that they’re problematic. Among friends it’s no big deal, but in a schedule crunched tournament every couple minutes is crucial. More importantly, I think they lead to creating more mistakes in accounting when people slip up in their math and so on. Really it would be best to have some sort of modified Kill Points scheme that had the quickness of standard Kill Points but the balance of Victory Points. I’ll have to think about what that might be, it’s not totally obvious. For example, you can’t really just give rules like “Dedicated Transports are 1 Kill Point” since several armies have Landraiders in that slot, which should again clearly give up more value than Rhinos and Chimeras.

In any event, my battle report(s) are to come, but below are some photos. More are available in my flickr gallery.