Snippets from the Interweb

Not having the luxury of much spare time recently I've been filling in the odd moments where I get to hobby to catch up on the goings on in the NZ wargaming community. Whether it be recent tournaments, upcoming Masters tournaments, planned events and wildly semi-humorous going ons, here's my take on the current affairs of recent times.

Tournaments:

NZ Masters is being held 2nd weekend of December in Wellington and will be hosted by it's progenitor Pete Dunn. Even though I snuck into the invite list for WHFB this year I can't free up the time to attend. It looks to be a super competitive bunch of fine Warhammer players gathered for the event. You can find a list of the people attending here. There's no talk of baby seals as all the lists look pretty solid and it'll be a hard prediction to pick the podiums and the also rans. You can also find the WHFB lists here.

With the past weekend it saw a good new initiative in wargaming tournaments. The rise of the One-dayer in Warhammer. We already saw something similar with WHFB500, WH40K Combat Patrol and Vermintide the 1200pt event with 5 rounds in one day in Wellington could open another chapter of wargaming for the hobbyist finding it hard to free up both days of the weekend. With 5 rounds and a good bite of 1200pts, it qualifies for Ranking points and also means that it will feel like a full tournament. Keep an eye on this space as I've already heard good chatter to get a few of these off the ground here in Auckland. Expect them to begin mid next year and I'll have all the details as soon as they are confirmed. Vermintide results can also be found here.

Chatter:

There's always some talk about the relevance of sports/comp in tournaments. I know that most experienced wargamers are adverse talking about sports and comp as it's an old tired horse and my efforts to get a conversation going recently only managed to attract the new comers to the hobby as they hadn't been aware that there already exists a vast collection of converstation on the subject interweb wide. I picked up a classic example of the old crop beating the old horse and also a seasoned rider horse whispering.

Young buccaneer whips his tired horse:-

"I am curious to see how the sportmanship was done. It seems a bit silly to me that people pretty much always get max sports points. It kind of defeats the purpose apart from acting as a deterrent for people who might otherwise have been dick like in their game play.

I would like to sportmanship somehow done in a way so that there is a clear winner."

Old sage horse whispers:-

"The objectives of the tournament are for players to have a good time playing Warhammer against like minded people, and to encourage new players into the hobby and into tournament play. In order to meet these objectives it is important that the boundaries and expectations of behaviour / sporstmanship are set.

The scoring system, the briefing prep talk, and the player pack are designed to establish the expectations.
To me this is a Warhammer tournament and not a competition in sportsmanship. The sporstmanship criteria is a mechanism by which the worst elements of competitive play can be held in check. Everybody receiving maximum sports score, far from being silly, is a win for the tournament and for the players attending and met my hopes and expectations."

It's always been a red tie vs blue tie conversation, so which point of view do you believe in.

Computer Games:

Grew up playing UFO and have never got tired of the turn based old skool game. It no longer loads on my computer  as it's a bit ancient so I haven't played it in yonks. All classic pc game goodies are getting a revamp and bringing back the vintage game is Firaxis and it's looking pretty sweet. Here is X-Com: Enemy Unknown.

Web Series:

Stumbled onto the new Battlestar Galactica Ten ep series. About time they did more BSG and this is pretty high quality production from syfy channel. Well worth a check if you got a few spare moments and time to youtube it on the bus.