*watches the last scene in Land of the Dead to gain sufficient anger*
Day One
Wellity Wellity Wellity, where to begin eh? Little culchie me visiting the big smoke and the horribly posh D4 location. Oh, this should be good. So in we go to this very very big monster of a hotel and fork out the extortionist amount of cash for 2 days of wargaming. One moment while I sell one of my kidneys on eBay to pay for this event.
So the games come quick and fast and low and behold I have a rules query, so where are the judges do you say? There's one wondering around here somewhere, well yes you'd almost be literally right there using the word one...... Yes I'm serious some 48 Wargamers with 2 judges over the entire event left to deliberate. Ah lads, I think there's a problem here! At minimum you need 4 judges for this size of event and one of them is going to be handling the scores while the others should be wondering around but no, two will do....
Ah second game in. Kill points. Such a refreshing game type or so it should be! I did hear the phrase: "Wait what? It's 2 kill points?" a few times and while I chuckled every time I heard this, there should have been big blatant reminders that "YES THERE IS A 2 KILL POINTS DIFFERENCE TO WIN GAME!", invest in a whiteboard or something guys, this needs to be said. While the change didn't overly bother me it needs to be said that 1 kill points work. It does result in the odd "Oh I just popped your rhino and now I'm going to run away" but 2 kill points difference makes a lot more draw games. Increasing in turn the possibility of playing the same person again the next round, which then results in swaps which screw the swiss system. So lets just stick to the standard rules shall we?
Day 2
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh is all I can say for waking up in the freezing fecking cold on a Sunday morning in Ballymun and then travelling to D4 to play 3 rounds of 40k again. 6 rounds is too long, seriously! Ouch, no more please, pretty please!
Low and behold again we have a an issue with judges, while I'm not going to get into how or when judges need to be patrolling the top tables, especially in the last few games as tensions can get high and debates come up. Which did happen!
*watches ending of Dawn of the Dead to cheer up*
Ah the video above describes this weekend a little too well for my tastes....
To Craig and the other two organisers/helpers: This was a great con and as the above rant is pretty small, as you can see, it was very difficult for me to find fault in your event. A few bones to pick with the number of judges as already mentioned but take that as a learning experience and if you run this next year you'll know you need more people to help.
Thanks to Martin from Gamer's World, The Warheads, the WAC, and anyone else I'm leaving out, who brought terrain as it was all fantastic and we had loads on every table. I didn't hear any complaints on this over the entire two days.
The scores below are good but there are some points I've laid out that could be improved on. Tea and coffee for the entire war gaming group, if not the entire con, wouldn't be overly expensive and other conventions get it provided for free by the hotels. I'm sure every other hotel would welcome it also.
Some sort of freebie would again be fantastic to see in events in Ireland when the cost is this high and while I realise it's down to the convention for the majority of the cost but something small in there would be a nice addition (like NWG with the free difficult terrain templates for vehicles or Dominion Day with the buns etc at the con).
This R0ot of all evil has been short and sweet and honestly I'd prefer this, the shorter the first part gets the better the Tournament scene for 40k is in Ireland and that can't be a bad thing! Thanks again to Craig and his helpers (I can't for the life of me remember their names) and of course thank you to all the attendees as you were all a pleasure to meet and play (Mike, Tadhg, Cairan, Darren and a WAC Ork player I can't remember the name of: thank you all for the 6 games).
Venue 5/5 (Lovely place, big area not overly crowded, some comfy chairs floating around for when your legs were about to give way, so yay for that. Easy to get to also so another plus. Good choice to Gaelcon organizers.)
Opponents 5/5 (I gave away 5 dice so I gauge that as a a good event, I played Cairan twice and he wasn't getting two Warheads dice in one event)
Rules Pack 4/5 (The two kill points brought this down)
Organization: 4/5 (Everything ran smoothly but as already said lack of an adequate number of judges brought this down)
Tables/Terrain: 5/5 (Plenty of terrain, personally I didn't like some of the hills as placing models on them was not possible if you had a lot but the amount and quality of the terrain was fantastic!)
Food: 3/5 (As noted for NWG the lack of any sort of tea or coffee for attendees, unless I missed something, it's a let down for me but from what I heard, saw and of course ate the food in the venue was fantastic if not a little overpriced some times but that is D4 for you)
Prizes 5/5 (Assigned prizes and lots of them, good to see)
Value for Money 2/5 (Not much the wargames can do to lower this as the con price is the kicker but still very expensive)
Overall 18/20 making for 51/60
P.S. Does anyone know where I can get some of that fudge that everyone said was delicious, as I missed out on it?
*Any issues/complaints/comments/hate mail/death threats/etc. post them below and I will answer when I see them*