Besties, I have had a rough one. Since I last left off, I’ve been absolutely through it on the health front (physical and mental), my partner’s had health stuff too, and I’ve barely played a game of Kings of War between my last writeup and now.
So, of course, naturally it came time to play in the most competitive tournament of the year. Usually that would be cause for a blizzard of prep, considering every possible matchup and terrain configuration, and playing a bunch of practice games. Instead, I did not do that. Indeed, I switched away from the configuration I’d been playing beforehand, with the Horde of Human Tribesmen, into a build with Fallen, simply because they were painted. I did not have the energy to put a basecoat of green on ten models. That’s the level of tired we’re talking about here, folks. We seriously considered pulling out of the event entirely, but it got too close to the due weekend, and also if I go seven weeks without writing up a game my brain shrivels up like a dried out sponge.
Here’s what I was running.
Army list - click to expand
As a reminder, I had qualified for the Masters using the Varangur faction. So, I was obliged to take them. My partner had qualified via top 16, and so could play whatever they wanted, choosing to ditch the Salamanders they’d been practicing and speed-build a Forces of the Abyss army. Helping with this consumed the last dregs of hobby energy I had, but resulted in some absolutely lovely models. Here, you can look at those instead of mine.
We arrived at Mantic HQ with a decent amount of time to spare, and the benefits of advance knowledge of our matchups and map. Unfortunately, any benefits conveyed by such knowledge were robbed from us by the sheer WTF factor of Nottingham’s bizarre approach to traffic calming. After a pleasant journey down the M1, we were confronted with these hideous things. Such sights steal reason from one’s heart and chill the blood.
On the plus side, I was really looking forward to this round. The TOs had made a genuinely interesting map – it might be the first Kings of War table I’ve really loved – and I had a blast from the past to reacquaint myself with.
Round 1 – Ian Sturgess, Trident Realm of Neritica, Hold the Line
Ian is an old friend from way back, when I still played the game that shall not be named. He moved over to Kings of War long before I did, though, and has established himself really well, consistently placing highly for as long as I’ve been following the rankings. I’d barely had the chance to say a proper hello before this event, though, so it was going to be great to get time to do so.
Army list - click to expand
Ian, in his normal manner, was running a list very much departing from the norm. No doubt expecting a meta full of hard hitters, he’d went with a whole bunch of low-De stuff with Ensnare, meaning every point spent on big hitting power would be close to useless. Good thing I didn’t do that, right? The good news was that the terrain would serve to really hinder both sides (no pun intended), and if there’s one thing I’m used to doing with my cavalry, it’s sitting there staring at someone and waiting for them to charge me instead of me charging them. Not really what cavalry are supposed to do, I know, but it keeps working so I keep doing it!
We basically picked our flanks to win, then decided how much to commit to the centre ground. I was happy enough to win the side choice, and gave Ian some truly awful terrain challenges to work through (this will be the last time I say that terrain properly matters in this tournament, for those keeping track). He was forced onto the left side, which I reckon I could defend with quite a small investment, while I got to make a relatively small push on the right to hold that area. This meant I could weight heavily central and really pile the pressure on.
The early game was some of the cagiest Kings of War I’ve ever played, and was great fun. In my head, I thought the Kraken was Sp6 like a Terror, but it was actually Sp7 – so, with all the Wild Charge kicking around, it could actually get the first charge off on me. Great stuff. I thus gave it the respect it was due, keeping it consistently marked, as though I’d likely not crack it in one go I could certainly hold it up for a while. Everything else, though? Free fire zone for Night Raider. They absolutely shone for the first few turns, comfortably picking up Tidal Swarms and putting relevant chip on other melee threats.
This state of affairs actually lasted until… I think turn 5? Maybe Ian’s bottom of 4, idk – I just know I played four turns of nothing. Literally just staring at each other, seeing who blinked first. I don’t know if real fish can blink, but these ones certainly did, and the headlong charges and pressure plays began, with as much of a commitment as possible on the left flank, while the right continued to hang back and avoid a sledgehammer blow. We thus tried to pack seven turns of piece trading into three, knocking seven bells out of each other. Unfortunately, Ian simply knocked harder – dice always average out, and his poor fortune earlier on was reversed with a vengeance, leaving me with insufficient resources to stop him taking the middle for a well-deserved win.
This was a great start, even if it was sad to be out of the running (Blackjack scoring heavily punishes falling behind). Ian was a pleasure to play against as always, and we had a good chat after the game catching up on old friends and recent happenings. However, I can’t avoid talking about the venue any longer – bluntly, it wasn’t great, being very noisy due to the cramped space. There were separate areas for the stream and the bottom table, and I suppose I could have requested the latter by playing the autism card. But, frankly, I didn’t feel great about doing that, so I ended up sticking it out in the main room to my cost. My solution to this, dear reader, was to get absolutely sloshed on HRT. Yes, this is a thing you can do. No, I am not explaining. We transfems have to have something for ourselves. You might be wondering how I had time to do so, and the explanation is that the lunch break felt like it was measured in decades.
Round 2 – George Kirke, Basileans, Protect and Raze
This was a pleasant surprise. I certainly didn’t expect to see George in the loser’s bracket, but given that we’d narrowly avoided a game at Warfare this year, I was excited to finally get the chance to face him. He began by handing me a bunch of Basileans I’d bought off him a month prior, which led to moderate confusion as I had completely forgotten doing so. I don’t know why, but my memory disorders most consistently manifest whenever I’m receiving stuff I’ve bought. Every Amazon purchase is like surprise Christmas, it’s great.
Unfortunately, George is a softly spoken fellow, and the venue made that a detriment. I was also, by this point, beginning to mentally float off into wonderland. This basically meant that I stopped all investment in the outcome – I was still doing my best to win, because it would be easier to stop breathing than to stop tryharding, but I was in this weird state of being almost impossible to rattle, and just accepting whatever George was saying in that way where you half-hear someone and take a best guess at whether to nod.
Army list - click to expand
The scenario and table were very much not my friend here. Defending open spaces against an army that trades Pathfinder access on its hardest hitters for other beneficial rules is a bit of an uphill struggle, and even more so when they out-threaten me. Nonetheless, I gave it my best go, setting up in a defensive bunker on the right and left (where the only relevant terrain was) and hoping to hard stall in the centre ground.
This, predictably, did not go particularly well for me. Don’t get me wrong, there were some successes. I took some early scalps with Night Raiders, and thinned out George’s ability to shoot me back with Phoenixes by chipping Elohi. My logic was that while my shooting was speculative at best and pointless at worst, he had to get lucky every time to avoid the chip racking up, whereas I only had to get lucky once. Thus, the longer the engagement stalled out, the better a chance I stood. George realised this, and inexorably pushed his advantage in the centre, right up until he (in his own words) got bored of not charging and yeeted in his Paladin Knights. I had planned for this, but overestimated the width of a Cavalry base compared to a Large Infantry one, so suddenly a Hindered charge, uh, wasn’t. Great plan. Fortunately, George didn’t manage to crack the Fallen he went in on, so I ended up getting to pick them up in response.
Unfortunately, this is where my woes with Julius began. I simply couldn’t hit him hard enough to make him go away, and lacked the backline mobility to keep him in sight for charges. So, he got to work his way across my front line, cementing George’s centre field advantage. Meanwhile, the long staring match on the right flank came to an abrupt end, as my efforts to push a passable threat up against the Men-At-Arms simply ended up tempting the Drunken Ram Elohi and the High Paladin on Dragon out into the world’s most doomed Draugr unit. Seriously, the degree to which their death was all-but-guaranteed was hysterical, even without the girly pills sloshing around in my system.
This meant that, while I was able to roll up George’s back left objective, and tempt him off his other two, he had me dead to rights everywhere else on the board. I simply couldn’t hold on, and took a convincing loss. However, at this point I was well and truly in my happy place, so I couldn’t begrudge George a well-earned victory. It was also nice to get a masterclass on my likely next faction, which made all the hard knocks just feel like backwards practice for me.
Round 3 – Florence Maunders, Sylvan Kin, Stockpile
Finally, some guns. Florence wasn’t happy about being paired with me, as due to the weird way Kings of War pairings are done she would usually have had a much more shooting-friendly matchup but for some arcane pairings weirdness involving the spare player, but I would happily have faced down anything at this point. The board was once again a bit of a bowling ball, meaning I was definitely going to get shot, but at least I had a nice Night Raider-friendly forest to play in on the left. Florence, recognising this, deployed mostly to the middle and right, to which I responded with a small bunker similar to game 1 on the right and a prepared push in the middle.
Army list - click to expand
Florence made the mistake of calling Night Raiders “budget Gladestalkers” early on, and apparently they took that personally, racking up a fearsome amount of damage in the early game on various De4+ things. Florence did her best to shoot back, and made a deep run with Gur Panthers on the right, but I simply Did Not Care at this point and eventually let them rear charge me to little effect. I was hoping to be able to pick up enough counters to allow a central collapse without losing, but ran low on resources there a little faster than I was hoping due to the total lack of places to hide my stuff. This meant that eventually, while I won the right flank decently enough, the left got rolled up by what few Sylvan cavalry made it through all the arrows and Magnilde, ending with a tight loss.
Not a great end to Day 1, in that it was the worst tournament run I’d had in this decade. Oh well, still floaty, not fussed, moisturised, in my lane, unbothered, etc etc. Then the fuzzybrain wore off, and the headache I’d been keeping at bay absolutely bodyslammed me. Any thoughts of writing up the day overnight were summarily put to bed, followed shortly by me.
Round 4 – Simon Cooper, League of Rhordia, Fool’s Gold
Rematch! Rematch! Simon gave me a very tough game at Warfare last year, honestly one of the toughest I’ve had in a while, and even though we were both in the laughs bracket I expected exactly the same here. Indeed, he’d revisited his list since our game, and had focused on stacking thick chaff, in the form of his delightful little chicken knights. I love his army so much.
Army list - click to expand
I was pretty knackered going into this game, but had just enough presence of mind to disguise my stupor as an attempt at tactical objective placement. I was fairly sure where I’d placed my low-value counters, and, based on Simon’s placements, was reasonably certain I could pick up whatever high-value ones he’d put down. Simon mistook my attempts to remember where I’d put the zero counters as deliberation, and put a fair bit of effort into his deployment, giving me an early clock advantage. This was a secret tool that would help us later.
At this point, I was thoroughly bored of standing off and not charging things. The left flank, dominated by a large hill (okay, I’ll give this to the TOs, this one was actually tactically relevant), got a sort of receding wave treatment, where I ran up onto it early, then, when Simon spent a bunch of time positioning to screen me out, I simply backed up off it, so that he’d have to spend a turn being visible to me if he wanted to pressure that side at all. I would later find out this was where he’d put his good tokens, making this a very impactful shuffle.
All this combined to make the bloodlust too hard to rein in, and so literally everything else I could charge with went in top of two. There was some method in the madness, with the idea being to stall Simon’s Dogs of War in the centre and break through on the left before the situation worsened any, but mostly I just didn’t want a fourth game of the same kind of stalling around terrain. The dice rewarded my aggression, and the game turned moderately in my favour – Simon took a bunch of damage on his right hand side, making it much harder for him to clear me off the flank all my good tokens were on (as far as I could remember).
The game continued much in this vein for the remainder of the turns. We bashed ourselves to mutual annihilation on the right, with the Night Raiders eventually having to flex their melee muscles (unexpectedly one-shotting a Battle Shrine) to make it up there, and the middle was a slow and hilarious stalling match between dice roll-heavy Phalanxes and healing heavy hitters on my side. Once loot counters were revealed, Simon was forced to stop bluffing on the left, and had to push into me, with a Snow Troll Prime doing Snow Troll Prime things to hold him up. This, I reckon, is what sealed the game – a small positioning error meant Simon’s stuff got stuck behind some Wavered Halfling Knights for just a bit too long, as Rally became a double-edged sword that kept his screen alive and blocking retaliation against me.
Thus, I was able to start day 2 with a nice win against a nice player in a nice quiet room. I naturally made preparations to put myself back in floatymode for a couple of hours and power through game 5.
Round 5 – Ben Hampshire, Forces of the Abyss, Hahaha no
As soon as this pairing was announced we just went straight home. This may seem toxic, unsporting, and unsociable. However, I would like to present my counterargument.
This is Sif. He is our dog. He was at the dogsitters while we were playing, and finishing early meant we could pick him up early. Ben and I have played more times than we can remember, and if we wanted to play a game, we could do so in the comfort of our home, where the noise levels are determined solely by the one strange shouty neighbour a few doors down and not twenty odd other players all trying to be heard.
I guarantee you want to see this dog being an idiot more than you would have wanted to read about this game anyway.
He hit that stick off another three cars before I could get him home that day. I have never been more proud of him.
Aftermath
With that, Masters was over. Was it worth the wait? I certainly had fun on the road, and it was nice to qualify, but I think if feedback requests go out I’ll have some stuff to point out. Not all bad, mind – I genuinely loved the first round map, and I’m looking forward to doing similar stuff in my own two-day tournament in April. TOs need to hear when people like stuff as well as when they don’t, because it helps determine what should stay or be focused on more. I’m also more hype about Kings of War now that I’m free of Varangur and my horrible month is over, and am excited to get some Basileans on the table for another two-dayer next month.
Oh, as an aside, you may notice or have noticed a name change for me on various platforms. Nothing to worry about! I just like it more this way. Articles may eventually change over, I don’t know how Discord integration works – I just titled this one with Stephanie to avoid confusion. For now, I’ll be working on Basileans as soon as I get a basing scheme in mind, and am also planning to write a shedload more content (including the long-delayed Competitive Innovations, I promise I haven’t forgotten). Thanks as always for reading, hope everyone had a lovely holiday season, and see y’all next time! <3
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