Big Waagh Final Review

Overall - a great tourney. Good bunch of folks running it. I had no feeling of any kind of bias or anything. They did a great job of not matching people from the same club against each other, fair and accurate rules judging, great availability of judges. All in all - very good. My local club (Blade and Bolter) took thirteen to this. All but one of us got a "door prize" from the guys running this. (New Wartruk for me that I traded for a box of Orc tank hunters! Woot!).

As you would expect with a new tourney in a new venue - a few hiccups with power availability etc at the start - but no big deal.

GW (with the exception of Dave Taylor - who seems like a good guy and was on-site) was totally absent. No retail presence, no representation. Was really sad. Memphis has a battle bunker and the US factory is located there. They should have showed up like in Chi town for adepticon, with forgeworld and retail. REALLY didn't understand this.

Location was fine - typical big room with concrete floor. Beer's allowed and even encouraged - George Flowers (the tourney organizer) was a great guy and was always quick to provide beer to those in need. Think he posts as Warboss on most forums.

Venue had a few restaurants - ie. cheap food - within walking distance. The Marriott I stayed at had a walkway to the convention center. Trolley gave a ride towards downtown for $1 and a couple blocks walk had you at a tourist type area - Hooters (although the absolute worst one I've ever been at), Friday's, Jillians, etc.

Missions were pretty cool. Four objectives per mission - 20 total points. VERY difficult to get them all. Most missions combined all aspects of an army -mobility to capture and exit board with an objective, Offense/Defense with Victory point based objectives, holding terrain objectives which required lots of units, kill character/make character survive missions (tactical). I really liked them a lot. Four of the 5 had special Loot counters (a bottle of beer, a stein of beer, jug of shine, box of chocolates) that were well done.

With some fine tuning and better vendor support - this could become another Adepticon level event in a couple of years. I'm biased to want it to succeed since it's so close to home for me - but for all of us in the South - it's a good thing.

Memphis in July is D@MNED HOT though.....