LA Battle Bunker 1,000 Point 40k Tourney Review

Saturday 1/28/12 was the first tournament for the LA Battle Bunker league.  They are running a series of escalation style tournaments and will be keeping track month to month.  The culminating event is a invitational tournament that will be run in July.  I could be wrong, but I think the point values are 1,000 (January), 1,500 (February), 2,000 (March), 1,250 (April), 1,000 (May). Each event has two standard book missions and one random mission.  The random mission for this event was 3-objectives, Spearhead deployment with Night Fight (until someone rolls a 6 at the end of a turn).  It looked like a fun mission and I would have loved to play it (more on that later).

The event was a blast.  There was a huge turnout of 38 people, and best of all it was free.  Major kudos to James and the bunker crew for deciding to run such an event.  I hope the turnout continues to be great, and they run more events like this in future years.

1,000 Points of Dark Eldar!!!

While I did have a great time at this event, I do have some suggestions / minor complaints that I hope are addressed for the 1,500 tournament next month.  Some issues, like uneven terrain, I cannot fault the staff for.  I think everyone (myself included) was surprised by the turnout, so they had to do some last minute scrambling to reserve tables and get everything set up.  One table has literally no LoS blocking terrain, while others had large bastions and other buildings.  It's something they may be able to improve on, but was not a major issue.

The biggest issue I had was that the mission packets were not all the same.  That is, they all had the same three missions, but were out of order.  When the staff was made aware of this, the ruling was just to play whatever was next in the packet.  The problem with that is the missions packets were scattered, and would inevitably result in some duplicate missions being played.

Lucky me and my Dark Eldar got to play two Annihilation missions, and missed out on experiencing the custom mission.  In the future this could easily be solved by announcing to the group which mission to play, or labeling the missions (1,2,3) before printing them out.

My final gripe was with my third round match-up.  Not my opponent, but how I became matched up with him.  After getting 19/20 battle points in game 1, I got matched up with my buddy Adam who had 20 battle points.  I lost game two and received a paltry 5/20 BP's.  This gave me 24 battle points going into the final round.  My last opponent received 18/20's in his first two games for a whopping 36 battle points.  24 vs 36 when there are 30+ players to match up is a pretty big discrepancy.  From what I could tell, everyone else was matched up appropriately, so I'm not sure why I was the lucky one.

So, overall I still had a great time at the tournament, but it was quite a 1-2 punch to have to play Annihilation twice and get matched up with someone with 12 more battle points than me.  My third opponent ended up winning Best General, and my second opponent, Adam, won Best Overall.  So at least I can say the road to victory was through my Dark Eldar.  I hope some of these minor kinks are worked out for the next one because this series of events has a lot of potential.

Was anyone else there?  Did you have a good experience? Bad experience?  Has anyone had similar experiences at tournaments?