RCR2022 Wrap Up
Last weekend Jon and I had the joy of running the Rose City Raid 2022! For those who don’t know, this is an annual tournament that started its life in a local brewery, but the last two years I’ve held it at a private vineyard just outside of Portland.
Playing at the RCR2022
Jon and I are a bit notorious for putting together a combination of brutal missions with challenging tables. We both love complex problem solving exercises, so it’s something we are more than delighted to subject our participants to! The goal of the design is to explore the depth of the Infinity terrain rules and use them in unique and interesting ways to provide additional complexity that takes a bit of extra thinking to work out. Here you can see a gallery of exactly what I’m talking about. Some of the tables seem fairly standard, while a few others are mostly covered in difficult terrain, saturation zones, etc.
The missions were Capture and Protect, Rescue, Countermeasures, Decapitation, and Biotechvore, using the ITS Extra Reinforced Command, as well as the Red Classified Deck.
Day 1
Capture and Protect, and Rescue, are both difficult missions to score full points with, and both require moving across the table and back. Countermeasures with the red classified objectives meant the highest amount of Objective Points that anyone had scored after three games was only 17 out of a possible 30. There was only one other player who had more than half of the possible points. You can see here that the the range between first and fifth was extremely tight, and was less about the most OP scored, and instead getting the offensive bonus off of a win or not.
This is something I like doing when I can when designing a mission lineup. By having the closer games up front, it makes the top tables more interesting for the final rounds, with less potential for a submarine score from popping up later in the event.
End of Day 1 Scores
Lauren enjoying a well deserved break after a long day.
Day 2
The second day was much less stressful than the first. We had a later start time, which actually allowed people to start early if they wanted. I highly suggest if there’s going to be drinking after an event, that your second day start a bit late. We started with Decapitation, which is one that can have some big blowout scores, and when the separation in the placement really started to stretch.
After a hamburger and hotdog BBQ lunch, we went into the final round. Polynikes with his Combined led by an Avatar faced off with Pumadriftcat and their vanilla Ariadna, with pair of Bearpodes. Two vanilla armies in Biotechvore.
Final Scores
1st Place: Polynikes with Vanilla Combined
Fortunately, Polynikes put together his thoughts and lists over on Facebook, so we don’t need to guess. He’s a long time Vanilla CA player, and I believe this is the first time I’ve personally seen them take an Avatar, a choice I half suspect was inspired by the recent memes:
I attended Rose City Raid last weekend which was hosted by Adam Bienvenu. Great event held outside on a vineyard! Beautiful venue and we had beautiful weather; a great time all around.
Here you can see my 2 lists.
1] The Anathamatic list which I played in 4 of the missions: Capture and Protect, Rescue, Countermeasures (which I played against an Avatar), and Decapitation. Knowing the tables would feature lots of terrain zones and rules I decided to build lists for the missions rather than for opposing forces, which I usually do.
2] The Avatar list, which I build for Biotechvore. As most players know, Vanilla armies can struggle in Biotechvore. As it happens, Biotechvore is one of my favorite missions to play! Its always exciting and dramatic. I approach it in various ways, this time with an Avatar list. Make what you will of that. This final game, for first place in the event, was against one of my regular opponents, Joe Lai, and his Vanilla Ariadna force containing not one, but two bears.
In the end Vanilla Combined triumphed over Vanilla Ariadna, though I assure you it could have gone either way.
We also have the lists for the rest of the top 5 below:
2nd Place: Chainsaw with Vanilla Yu Jing
3rd Place: Fkaos with OSS
4th Place: RattlerNxt with Morat Aggression Force
5th Place: Pumadriftcat with Vanilla Ariadna
The Prizes
One of my favorite parts of putting the Rose City Raid together is building the prize table. This year we had the usual suspects, lots of minis, ITS packs from our FLGS (Glimpses of Wonder), but I also included a few odd items, like dice towers and holders from Dog Might Games, a few pocket sized retro game emulators, as well as genre-relevant books and DVDs.
More Tables
Speaking of tables, Jon made sure to take a photo of every table in the event, so in case I missed any above you can find them here:
That’s a Wrap!
I want to give a huge thank you to all those who attended. We also were able to raise $250 for our non-profit, the Rose City Game Organization. Now to start planning for next year…