Feast of Blades retrospective

Over the past weekend I had the pleasure of attending Feast of Blades 2014 in Denver, with the intention of participating in the Heresy tournament being put on. Got down there nice and early on Sunday (and totally not because I misunderstood the start time), and poked around a bit and chatted with some other earlybirds about how the weekend was going. Everyone really seemed to be having a good time!

Last year I went down to FoB to play in the huge apocalypse narrative event, and this year they really stepped up the game with a whole huge 'Floorhammer'-style cityscape for titans to really duke it out. Sadly the Heresy tournament very nearly didn't happen due to a couple of the players that were intending to participate ended up using their armies in the regular 40k tournament and did well enough to move on to the finals on Sunday. That being the case the guy that was running the tournament shared out his immense Iron Hands and World Eater armies to a couple people who were interested in learning more about 30k, which I thought was very cool of him. Since several of the players had never tried 30k before we all decided to just do a round-robin style series of games and just play for the fun of it (which was fine by me)!

 

My first game was against the Iron Hands and a fellow who was just making the switch from 40k to 30k so he was using a fair bit of unpainted and/or proxy models which was a bummer, nevertheless he was a very nice guy and we had a really fun time of it. Both me and my opponent were beset by truly abysmal dice rolling - I think we rolled a hundred ones between us! I didn't end up taking as many pictures as I should have, and I'd forgotten to turn off the macro settings on my camera so most were blurry messes. Doh! Final result, loss to the Thousand Sons by 3VP (pretty close for the fact that I was darn near tabled).

My second game was against a very cool Dusk Raiders army, was really jazzed to see someone go deep in the fluff and rock a full on pre-heresy army!

 

The mission and table setup meant that for the most part our armies were out of range of each other for 3/4th of the game. Both of our infantry more or less hunkered down (the VPs were based on killing infantry units), but the Dusk Raider contemptors and terminators sallied out and were met by the Thousand Sons predators and terminators, and engaged in an orgy of mutual destruction. When the dust cleared the Dusk Raiders pulled off a win by 3 VP (starting to become a trend). Another very fun game, we were laughing our butts off all through the game.

 

Finally another game against one of the Iron Hands armies that the organizer had shared out, and it was a hard core army, couple units of vets in Rhinos, a Sicaran with Castrmen Orth (one of the most lethal combos in the Heresy) and a Volkite squad in a bunker. This game was a major back-and-forth, with the predators annihilating the rhinos and vets, only to be hammered into scrap by the Sicaran. Another massive Terminator combat ensued in this game as well, which swung to the Iron Hands rather decisively, then an outflanking Javelin detonated the bunker in a single round of fire doing massive damage to the Volkite squad and Master of Signals. Once the game drew to a close we totted up the results and the Thousand Sons lost by... You guessed it, 3 VP. Another fun game though, this one was a real nail-biter.

Throughout the day, there was opportunity to earn Purity Seals (by accomplishing certain tertiary objectives), and I picked up a couple. Some of the organizers were wandering around handing out discretionary prize awards and drawings, and apparently the Thousand Sons were a big hit - I scored a fair bit of additional prizes throughout the day which was very surprising!

Speaking of loot, I'd snapped a quick pic while I was home for lunch today. Came away from the event with a staggering haul! I'd opted for the swag bag for the weekend, which had all sorts of stuff in it, including a Shaltari starter army for Dropzone Commander, a Malifaux box and all sorts of templates, dice, counters and some cool secret weapon testers. I scored some more Dropzone stuff (including a full rule box set and a set of both Scourge and UCM plastic starter armies) from wandering organizers, and on a lark I'd picked up a few raffle tickets as there was some really cool stuff up for giveaway at the end of the weekend. I ended up winning the raffle for a HUGE pile of Malifaux stuff, with the rulebook, cards and six boxes of gangs(? not sure of the terminology). No idea what I'm going to do with all of it though, wasn't really looking to get into a whole new game system (let alone two), but with most of it just dropping in my lap essentially free it's worth a try! I'll admit I've had my eye on Dropzone Commander since my early gaming history included a LOT of Epic way back in the day. The Malifaux models look to be pretty cool, though I've heard they're quite a bit bigger than warhammer stuff so their viability as conversion fodder are limited. Looks to be fun stuff to paint though! I know next nothing about the setting or the game system for either of these, going to read through the rulebooks and see how they grab me, I guess...

 

During the awards ceremony I was absolutely floored when they called me out for a best painted/best theme for the Heresy events - had no idea that they were doing such a thing. I was very honoured though - this marks my very first award for painting/modeling in my life! Overall the weekend was a complete blast!