Clash of Kings Australia - Summary

Greetings!

I would like to wrap up the series of reports and overall experience from the first Clash of Kings in Australia in this short post. It was an amazing event and once again, many thanks to Matt and Tas for organizing and running such a great tournament! I am very glad I could attend!

There were 62 players attending and all of them showed up on day 1. I think there were only a few drop outs which, unfortunately, can always happen. In any case it was the biggest Kings of War event in Australia to date and I hope there will be more spots for Clash of Kings in 2018!

All armies were represented too! If I remember correctly, no faction had more than 6 players which, again, shows how nicely varied the armies were.

Ok, let's have a look at a few aspects of the event in more details! 

Final Standings

Here is the screenshot from the tabletop.to website with some details about top 10:

As you can see forces of evil dominated the field! There were only two armies that were either neutral or good. However, there is also quite a nice variety between the factions and that is always a good thing. 

For full table and to check some of the army lists you can follow this link: Clash of Kings - Australia 2017 - Results

Player's Pack

Clash of Kings Player's Pack was in use, naturally, but we had one modification, i.e. there were 7 games played during the event. I believe that was an echo from the past when fantasy tournaments at CanCon had 8 games total, although over the course of three days. 

It was good to have so many games as it provided lot of opportunities to play against variety of players and armies. No matter if you were from Canberra or not, the idea was to play as much as possible. Especially, that for some it is the main event of the year. 

But it was a bit of a marathon too so one needs to be prepared for it too!

Personally, I like this tournament pack and it is always good to have some kind of standard one can refer too. I am very curious how the new version of organized play will affect the tournament scene this year as well! It is good that the rules set evolves with the growing number of players.

Terrain/Maps

The terrain quality and the tables were simply great! It is only thanks to the contribution of some of the participants who provided their own terrain (often preparing it until the very last moment before the event) that each table had enough pieces of every type required.

We also played on nice gaming mats and that further added to the great experience. I would like to thank any and all who contributed their own terrain and other pieces to make this event so great! 

The maps that you can find on this website: http://epicdwarf.com/ were used during the event. Each table had a printed out version of the map to refer to if required. In general, I like the maps a lot. I was familiar with majority of them thanks to the games on Universal Battle. 

There is one thing I would consider though for the future version:

1. Please, remove map 2 - it is just a highway for Pathfinders - it does not create a situation where there are relatively equal opportunities to use for different types of armies.

Potential Improvements

It is really hard to suggest anything that could be done better after the amazing event like that. The only thing I came up with after long time of thinking on that matter is that it would be fantastic to have a dedicated person or small group of people that would take care of life coverage. Just walking around the tables, taking pictures of the beautiful armies and updating on the event on various social media and the forums.

Simply because such a wonderful events deserves as much publicity as possible! :)

How did the Outcasts do?

One of the reasons I attended the event was to test my skills with the army I like against the variety of armies and opponents. I ended up 18th out of 62 players, with 4 wins, 1 draw and 2 losses. More importantly, I had a pleasure and honor to play against 7 fantastic opponents. Once again, many thanks to Ken, Jules, Josh, Micky, Tony, Clint and Michael for great games! I hope we will meet again to play some more Kings of War in the future!

I consider this result a success because there is still so much to learn for me in the game in general and with MSU Elves in particular.

I was also very happy with that performance because to me it showed I can compete at a big event. Even in the case of my two losses I am optimistic that if I can make fewer mistakes and come up with better plans then I can put up a decent fight against the best players too. 

I really enjoyed using my army, in particular when the maneuvering allowed me to execute the combined charges I was looking for. I also came to the conclusion that I don't necessary want to change the composition of the army. 

The reason is that I want to continue with painting in the color scheme I have painted Drakon Riders and Silver Breeze cavalry so far. Seeing all these beautiful armies at Clash of Kings I would like to make an effort to paint mine to such standard for the next year. 

But I also think I can improve my skills by sticking to the similar army list and keep playing against the variety of the opponents. After all there are armies I have played only once so far. There is such a great level of variety in that game that there is always something the opponent may surprise you with, so I'd rather keep practicing with the army I know a bit better.

Thanks a lot for reading the reports! If you enjoyed the Clash of Kings series I have good news for you, there are more coming as I attended a local event that used some of the new ideas for the organized play. 

Watch this space! :)