Skitterleap - What the TO Learned!

Scenarios

Scenarios are the glue that hold 8th Edition together. Importantly, as a suite of games, GW's rulebook scenarios act as a balancing factor on army construction.

At Skitterleap there were groans from the two players who only had Fortitude of 4 when we played Blood and Glory. In this instance the loss of a single standard cost them the game. Guess what? They both lost. Will this inform their list design in future - I hope so. On the flipside it made from some really interesting and tense games where they were on a knife's edge from Turn One.

Only brought a gunline - Watchtower is not your friend.

What I think was critical was keeping the integrity of the scenario. You held the Watchtower, you won. You broke your opponent's fortitude, you won. To do this in a 20-0 scoring system there needs to be some adaption. I did this by making the "objective" worth 1000 points AND by limiting the losing player to 9/20 Battle Points. This worked really well, I thought.

The Meeting engagement scenario was played last round. There were a lot of draws as players held their arms back. This created an opportunity for someone to come through the pack....but they didn't. The top three tables were either 10/10 or 11/9. However I'd suggest that you can't always count on that. Again I see this as a list design factor which mitigates against single big units in your army. Or at least a game plan that relies on certain units always being where you want them.

Game Time

Skitterleap was 2400 points and 2.5 hours a round. When 8th Edition came out there was instant agreement that the game was faster which meant bigger games could be played.

A lot of games had to be called before they finished. This is generally unsatisfactory for the players and is definitely so for the TO.

The fact of the matter is that some players are slow players. As a TO you'd hope they'd realise this themselves and either not take a horde army or come prepared to play fast. That is/was not always the case.

I appreciate it is a new set of rules but there was just too much slow play (all unintentional IMO).

So what is the solution?

Well players need to address this issue themselves. But as a TO the best thing I can do is decrease the points size until players get up to speed (pun intended) with the rules.

For the next six months any tournaments I run will be at the 2000 point level with round time of 2.5 hours.

Guidelines

These worked really well - scroll back through posts to find them. I thought the lists were balanced in the context of the scenarios we played. The top four players scored 70, 70, 69 and 67 out of 100. So in this instance no list swept its opposition. The more extreme lists failed to do well across the breadth of the scenarios.


As a TO I'm pretty happy.