Altrincham Altercation Event Writeup Thing

Good evening. Matt and Chris have been good enough to let me abuse their portion of the Internet and spew forth vaguely informative words about what we get up to at Dice Not Included and why it's fun. I do this against my better judgment - not because I don't love the sound of my own cybernetic voice, because I do, but because every time I talk about the games I/we play I am revealing myself to be an absent-minded prematurely-senile balding duffer with only the vaguest grasp of strategy or, for that matter, basic mathematics.

So, the Altrincham Assault. 750 points, three games, Steamroller 4 scenarios: Mosh Pit, the one with the four vertical strips that I can't remember the name of, and the one with the six quadrants between the deployment zones that I really can't remember the name of. I feel this indicates the amount of prep work I'd put in to the tournament - rather than thinking about what would suit the scenarios or the likely opponents like some sort of sensible person, I just brought along my regular "lots of helljacks that hit you in the face" list and my regular "go ahead and kill all my steam-driven doom zombies, they'll only come back as ghosts and rip your face off" list, neither of which exactly excels at taking and holding areas of the table.

Game one was against a pleasant chap called Rick who'd brought a Privateer army. First time I'd seen one of those since the book came out, and Rick claimed he'd be riding on the fact that nobody ever seemed to play against Pirates that often or have the faintest idea what they did. It was a disappointing game - not because of Rick, but because of my seeming inability to remember either what my army did or how to win the scenario. I shan't bore you with the details (because they would bore you) but suffice to say that I got two turns, Rick got three, and we both spent half an hour sitting around not doing very much instead of having the hilarious punch-up that the two armies could have accomplished. It left something of a bad taste in my mouth, and I really hope Rick shows up to the next event so we can have a proper barney.

Lunch, cups of tea all round (Chris, bless him, spent most of the day running around with mugs of precious, life-giving warmed caffeine), and a quick conference with the other Dice Not lads revealed that none of us had done that well. Rick's club, who play a lot of these land-grab scenarios in a league context where winning matters (as opposed to the pick-up games we play, which usually end on a warcaster kill and don't have much in the way of context), had conversely done rather well.

The generally poor Dice Not Included performance meant I was facing our local boy Tom 'The Quiet Digressor' Kinsey and his meticulously planned Cryx army. I'd planned on the prospect of facing at least one Cryx opponent and felt I could have a good go of it even if my opponent hadn't been so good as to feed me souls and new recruits by bringing living troops of their own. Alas for my brilliant planning, I was bitten on the bum by the scenario again - one of those ones where your army has to spread out and have things right across the board. I have a peculiar horror of doing this (years of playing Warhammer Undead where you have to huddle around your army general if you want to ever make it even halfway across the board, maybe?), especially when my army has things that have to hide behind other things and things that need to be near other things to serve their purpose. The Quiet Digressor was able to creep ahead on points by holding the one area I hadn't been able to spare anything to hold. This game left an even worse taste in my mouth, mostly because I lost the ability to add up numbers on dice about halfway through and didn't/couldn't really handle the scenario, and thus felt like an even bigger idiot than I had in the last one.

At this stage I was honestly thinking about dropping out. Ben applied his unorthodox motivational technique and convinced me to stick around for the third game, and I'm glad he did because the third game was bally good fun and reminded me why I come to these things in the first place. Ruth and her Circle army gave me the best game of the day - something like her fourth or fifth game ever and she fought me to a draw. Mistakes were made by both players but they weren't the sort that loses you the game before you've started because of invisible lines on the table. Moments of genuine miniaturised excitement were had. It was a slow game (neither of us really knowing what Ruth's army was capable of) but it was thoroughly enjoyable and our armies actually got their teeth into one another, which is always nice.

Onwards, then, to the award ceremony, in which visiting gamers took away almost every award and left the Dice Not crew (those who'd not scarpered home to their infernal lightnin' boxes at the end of the third round) very much in the loyal applause category. In fact, the only one of our regulars who left with anything prize-shaped was, rather surprisingly, me. I ended up taking home a rather snazzily top-hatted rubber duck (the Pretentious Twonk Who Turned Up In A Waistcoat Best Dressed Gamer Award) and a £20 gift voucher for painting my army and being lucky enough to have my name tugged out of a hat.

Despite having had a rather poor time of it on the table, I'm looking forward to the next event. One or two alterations to the format spring to mind (at least one game that doesn't revolve around occupying imaginary zones of increasingly abstract construction and timed turns spring to mind), but the essential goal of the events - bringing in some new people and introducing some variety into the club's games - is being achieved. Long may it continue to be so. I may even have decided what to spend the twenty quid on before the next one.