Brawler Bash Game 1 and a Big Ol' Owl

I like the GT tournament style because nearly every army ends up being fully painted.  As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted my army to look nice, so I spent the last week finishing up a unit of white lions and getting two new units finished: an archer unit and a Giant Owl (made by Cool Minis or Not).  Here's a shot of how the two models turned out:

I really liked the way that the owl turned out.  The miniature itself comes with a sorceress, but I was able to use her legs as a base for a white lion conversion.  CMON advertises the owl as 32mm, but I think that it fits in really nicely with the rest of the army.  It was my first experience with a resin model, and I really liked working with it (even if it did seem a little fragile).  The model is a little pricey, but in my opinion, it makes a great centerpiece.  I used it as a great eagle rider, and it seemed to be well appreciated by my opponents.

I liked the Bash because they actually used the book scenarios instead of just going Battleline for every game. My first game of the tournament was against Wood Elves.  His list consisted of a level 4, a treeman, a scouting hero, a hero on an eagle, a variety of bow armed troops, and a unit of treekin.  My problem in this game was not understanding what I was up against, which I think is a common problem for people who encounter a finite number of armies.  I really didn't respect what mass strength 3 bow shots could do.  We were also playing the scenario Dawn Attack which creates a random deployment.  My army was built around having a bunker for my archmage and BSB behind the rest of the army and when the bunker got shifted off to the side, I put them in the unit of archers.  50 some shots later, I had neither a BSB, an archmage, or the unit of archers.  That was pretty much game over.  We scuffled around for the full six rounds, but I never really recovered from the loss of my BSB.

Incidentally, I think that one of the strengths of 8th edition is in its scenario design.  The various scenarios will punish different sorts of builds.  A lot of lists depend on certain units to be in certain places, and the scenarios definitely force some outside of the box thinking.  By the end of 7th edition, I had really grown tired of Pitched Battle over and over again, so much so that I had purchased the old General's Compendium to add some spice to the game (that's a great book for campaigns and custom scenarios by the way).  Having six very different scenarios certainly added some necessary spice to the game (even if Watchtower is broken -- as I'll talk about during my next post).