Four out of Five games...

...were lost and a bye given at the end.

This past weekend was the Hammer of Wrath Tournament at Game Empire in Pasadena. It looked like this when I walked in.

I am pretty sure that guy is wearing a shirt...

The space was great and I was excited, until I saw my first opponent which looked like this:

Yeah, that's right. My first ever tournament and I play repulsor spam! With Bobby G. A Primarch. The owner of this army was Sean and probably one of the coolest cats I played. He was methodical and precise in his actions and rolling. He even had little pieces of paper that showed me where each gun was shooting:

This was very helpful Sean!

I thanked him many times on explaining what he was doing. I am not sure if you know this, but repulsors have like 100 shots each depending the load out. Not good for my Orks at all. I pretty much go shot off the board. One of the coolest thing for Sean (not me, but still really cool) was Bobby G. needed a 12 charge to prevent from being charged in the next turn... 

This was the result:

HE MADE IT! no re-rolls, no nothing, just straight boxcars. That allowed him to squish the storm boys and take the obj. The game ended great for Sean, as he took a W for his first game. I played as expected and tried to play to objectives, but mostly scored secondaries. The game ended at 32 to 15.

The next game was against Chaos! Which will be the rest of the tournament, but they could not have been different armies... This was psykers and plague bearers. 

It was like I was playing 7th ed. again with the death stars protected by the lesser troops. This game was against Chris and his Chaos Demons and a splash of Death Guard. The plague bearers were tough. I've never fought them before, but they are talked about all the time. He kept doing spells/abilities that gave them -1 or -2 to hit, which really sucked. He had a bit of shooting, but was mostly spells that took me out. He allowed me keep a bunch of stuff on the table because of that. My Jets were on the table for 3 turns; that happened in no other game. Something else that happened in no other game is having my battle wagon surrounded when it was destroyed. I lost a bunch of models when his blight lord terminators moved in the psychic phase then charged to surround it. This is all I had left out of 10 Nobs, A Waagh Banner, and my big mek warlord:

That game ended 24 to 12. Again with the secondaries scoring more than the primaries.

This was the most interesting and learning game I played for two reasons. First, I asked everyone after the game how I played, and Chris's feed back was the best. He wondered why I did not charge into a ruin to engage his plague bearers. Upon reflection I was able to figure out I was afraid of loosing them while I should have lost them to take the objective, even if for one turn (as it was the second mission for ITC and only 3 objectives were on the table) to take points away from him and get me some primaries. I just thought it was only a 10 ork mob, and the bulk of his army was coming. I was timid and that is not what a good tournament player does, much less an ork player. The second part was that we played on a chess clock that he brought. In ITC rules, I cannot say no if the opponent has a clock. It was a bit intimidating at first and as my first turn army is small I powered through my turn quickly. But my army almost doubles turn two and with him not killing stuff very well, I slogged through turn two and three. By the end of turn three we had about 15 min left each, and I have to prioritize my turn and leave stuff out that I would have done if I had time. That sucked a bit, but he had to do the same thing. However, I felt the game was in its ending stages anyway, so it felt complete. Also, knowing that it had been very eaven by the end showed that we had balanced turns.

Up next is Greater Demons and Knights for the next two games, but that'll be on the next post...