Brawler Bash (4/8-4/9)

Brawler Bash is the largest tournament I will play in this year, and it will undoubtedly be the most competitive.  I went into the tournament with a few goals this year:

1)  Don't get too serious or too concerned about winning.  There are a lot of good players using well-honed lists.  The tourney did an interesting thing to set its composition scores.  Instead of having some sort of checklist, they just used a panel of private judges.  I thought this was a good idea, although I didn't necessarily agree with all of the decisions.  Based on this, there were 19 hard lists, 17 medium lists, and 4 soft lists. I made my own list based primarily on maximizing my painting score, so I wasn't using a well tuned list.  Still, I can be competitive, so I wanted to be sure that I took a thrashing without getting too down (and the first game put that to the test).  In the end, I accomplished this mission; something that was made easier by having 5 awesome opponents.  In the end, I went 2-3, which is about the same as the last time I went (when I went 2-2-1). 

2)  Finish in the top 25% of painting scores.  I'm not a great painter, but I worked really hard on my list and my board.  Here's what I ended up with as an army:

I built the board by taking a picture frame down from the attic and popping the glass and picture out of it.  Then, I stapled a piece of plywood to the back of it.  Using patching plaster, I created a surface over the board.  I painted part of it blue and then covered the rest with flock and sand.  The final step was to use Woodland Scenic's Realistic Water to create the water effect.  This was my first time using Realistic Water, and it was very easy.  Just pour and wait. I had a hard time deciding how much I needed. I ended up getting two coats out of my 16oz bottle, and I still have a little left.  For reference, the board is a little bigger than 2 x 2.

As you can see I added a ship model to (hopefully) make it stand out a little.  I still have a few things I want to do with the ship, namely add some painted shields up the side and put some giant banner on top.  For reference, the ship is made by a Russian company named Zvezda (I got the idea from Ender on Warseer:  http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=263869).  It's a seriously nice model.

In the end, I finished 4th in painting, which was a lot better than I expected to.  There's some work that I am going to do to try to improve my score next year.  First, I want to improve the board.  The grassy side looks lame.  I'm thinking I may try to make that look more like paved stone -- as if they are marching towards the dock of a city.  I'm also going to get some Woodland Scenic Water Effects to create some waves in my water.  Second, I will improve my boat as I discussed above.  Finally, I want to try to convert some of the new Phoenix Guard into Spearmen.  My spears are the first models I painted, and they look it.  They are pretty rough looking.

Hopefully, I can post some of my progress on this blog.

3)  My final goal was to meet some new players and play some armies that I never get to play.  I was only partially successful here.  I did meet some new players, including some that live close to one of our gaming spots (if either of you check the blog, I tried to get into your yahoo group but didn't have any luck).  However, I didn't get to play many new armies.  Our group consists of my High Elves and Tomb Kings, and my friends' Warriors of Chaos, Orcs and Goblins, Bretonnians, and Vampire Counts.  In this tournament, I played High Elves twice, Bretonnians (an army I've played against 1,000 times), Orcs and Goblins, and Wood Elves.  Wood Elves are the only army that I rarely see.  Still, the games were really good, so I can live without seeing some new stuff.

I'll close this post by saying that it is a great tournament.  I thought the staff did a great job of organizing things and making themselves available for questions.  All of the players that I came into contact with were very courteous, and every army look fantastic.  I'm hoping next year that I can get a few more of my group (and who knows, maybe my old Tennessee group) to come down.  It's definitely a fun weekend.

That's enough of this for now.  I'll post some pictures of my opponents' armies and some mini-reports from the games next time.