By Theo Kik-Jansen and Eduard Puig, Edited by Theo Kik-Jansen

Ok, so I promised a report on Worlds singles last week. Like many people I spent a good portion of my Amsterdam trip with my pants down, but unfortunately not the fun kind. It meant I had to drop out of day two and the aspect of the tournament I can most accurately describe is the inside of the hotel toilets (review on request!).

I’ll say I played some absolute gems of people in the games I did get to play. A special shout out to Matt Beasley for one of the best games of Warhammer I’ve ever played, especially in terms of sportsmanship, and he is an overall great guy. If you want to know how to play a devastatingly efficient game of Warhammer and remain an absolute gentleman, look up some of his games.

Anyway, have you all been wondering what the Spanish have been up to in Amsterdam? Wonder no more, Eduard, take it away!

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Here we are again! It has been a rollercoaster of a weekend, but I will try to sum it up a bit without skipping too much information (most things will be from my point of view obviously, but will try to do it for the team as well).

WEDNESDAY

This year we didn’t participate in the singles tournament, as we planned to do a scrim against Scotland. We flew in 4 groups, and by 5pm or so we were all somewhere in the hotel in Amsterdam. Nice little detail, we checked-in our luggage 7 minutes prior to the desk closing due to me being late since I was printing pairing cards and other stuff. Peak Warhammer! We all made it onto the planes, in different groups depending on our departure location:

The Northern Group

The Central Group

The Catalan Group

The Pedro Group

After meeting up and having a look around the venue, we went out to a nearby town to have some dinner and well, visit a coffee shop. Turns out food is REALLY expensive there, we ended up on a Turkish kebab where we paid 2 times what we would’ve paid in Spain for the same food. We came back to the hotel and spent the rest of the evening in bar, where we met Theo among others!

Theo in-between toilet visits!

After that we just went to our rooms to prepare for the next day.

THURSDAY

We started the day with a training match against the Scottish team (absolutely great people!). There I finally revealed THE PAIRING CARDS. 

The traditional backside I always use on our local team cards

We even got to recreate the meme:

After a very nice round, we ended up taking the victory for 121-39 so it helped us take out some nerves and build up confidence on the players that were here for their first Worlds (half the team!).

Then we went to eat something and to do a bit of tourism in Amsterdam. Here… well, some things happened. First of all, we had to go to the airport in the shuttle bus and take the train there. We noticed the huge AMSTERDAM letters so we wanted to take a picture there, but once we arrived, the police didn’t let us approach as they were arresting 2-3 people thet they had cuffed on the ground, guns included (didn’t take a pic of that). So we kept our initial plan and went to Amsterdam, leaving the police to do their job but with a mandatory stop at the WC (and you thought I wouldn’t put this one, huh?)

The city itself was great but I still don’t know how they don’t crash more often with their bikes, it’s total chaos. We stopped to… err… delight us with the… well, local pastistry in a coffee shop, where some of us enjoyed themselves a bit more than the others. 

After that we went to dinner at a TRUE ITALIAN restaurant, where they served, of course, pizza with pineapple. Kudos to the personnel in the Ristorante Il Primo for an amazing service and taking care of us! I can’t tell all the details of what happened or who did what, but I can assure you (and other teammates as well) laughed like we never did, and left with hurting jaws. We made our way back to the hotel, went to the bar and prepared a bit for the pairing against Sweden.

FRIDAY

After some needed recovery (for part of the team), we woke up ready to face the Swedes.

Apologies in advance because I noticed we didn’t take a group picture with all our opponents

We knew it was going to be a hard matchup, since they were top 3 last year. After some dice rolling (ones better than others) and a couple of… situations, Sweden ended up taking the round 58-102. The final result might not reflect how close the round was, since some games were just a priority roll away from ending in our favor, but that’s the game! We cleared our minds and prepared for the second match of the day against the home team, the Netherlands.

They seemed to like our pairing cards

Pairings went mostly to plan, and we ended up taking the round 95-65. Might not be a lot, but this round will be remembered all the Worlds’ weekend just for one picture, most of you might have already seen it.

THE.

PICTURE.

Just look at him, rejoicing in others’ suffering. What an evil creature. I love him.

The story behind the picture

Pedro null-deployed his army, and so did his opponent. Pedro had the first prio, so went first and proceeded to fill up the whole board so his opponent couldn’t come onto the board with any unit.

In the end, with the Rituals he could sneak in a few units and a small hero on the battlefield, but it was on a corner and in Twists and Turns, so the game was basically done. (They even joked about it being an Escape Room when the Dutch guy tried to make space to deploy something).

Fun Fact: Pedro did the same thing in the Bloodtithe teams event against one of the Danish guys, and that indeed was end of the game because he couldn’t deploy anything.

After this round, we went to have some dinner and prepare for one hell of a tough round that was awaiting for us the next morning: Team England.

All the concentration fades away when someone farts

SATURDAY

So, you wake up in the morning, take your shower and while you’re going down the elevator to get your breakfast, you realize that today you’re facing the current AoS Worlds Champions. In a very tight round (at least my game could’ve swung a lot to my favor with one prio), England takes the round 68-92.

One can’t help just loving these guys, they were amazing. Team England was nice also.

That leaves us at half the tournament, having played against the Top1 and Top3 from last year, and still happy with the results. We look at our next round and we see that we got paired with Austria, Benedict’s minions (lots of love for this guy).

So after having lunch and a last-minute pairing check, we start the round against Austria.

Thanks to the work of the matrixes and the pairing ability of our captain, coach and assistant pairing player (and the performance of everyone on the table, of course), we end up with a favorable round that we take 111-49.

We then check who could be our next dance partner, and we find out it’s another of last year’s big ones: Team Wales. So we went back to the bunker to prepare for the final day, as we were quite well placed on the classification and this could give us more wings to propel ourselves up the ranking or just drown us in hell.

SUNDAY

(Will you believe me if I say that Eye of the Tiger just started playing as I’m typing this?)

With all the team ready, we went to face the Welsh. I’ll just mention that when I ordered THE SAME breakfast Saturday and Sunday, it cost me more on Sunday (and the next Monday as well). And you thought I could focus on only one thing? 

Well, after the pairings we were really happy with the result, as they expected my list to defend on Lurkers Below but we changed that the night before.

When we finished, most of them had already gone to eat so we couldn’t take a picture all together 😦

After a very well fought round against the Welsh, we took it for an amazing 101-59 willing to go all in against whoever dares to confront us. And for sure they dared, as the Welsh fear no one.

I know you liked the cards, don’t poker face me!

We got good pairings, and I had probably the most tense game I had in Worlds (tense in terms of scoring, in-game decisions and stuff like that). Roger was amazing to play against and pushed me to the limit), and in the end we only won 3 of the 8 games, but we ended up getting the round for a final score of 84-76. 

At this point we were very happy with the team’s performance, and since the scoreboard was hidden we couldn’t know but we expected to be Top 8. While the prize ceremony was being prepared, we got a bit of time to assault ask people to trade shirts and dice, and we got quite a good pile of loot.

And then… time for the final ceremony!

Tom started thanking everyone in the organization as well as sponsors, community, etc, and then proceeded to announce the first prize. The Baron of Banter prize. You just have to love when your work gets you a commemorative plate!

This means next year there’ll be more competition in this matter, so I need to keep it up to defend my throne.

Then they followed up with the painting prizes (going to Mathew from Wales and Ritchie from England if I’m not mistaken), the Best Newcomer Award going to Team Canada, and the Sports Competition going to the USA (“We made it, we were nice to people!” – Jeremy). Then he proceed to announce the Top 3 of this year’s Worlds:

3: England

2: France

1: Denmark

It was a nice celebration and a speech from Rune Holse (Denmark’s Captain) which closed the event officially. We then checked the final results as they opened them, and…

6th place BABY!

With the mandatory Twitter Guy arm-band

CLOSING

As I said, we’re really happy with the result and the effort we put in. We’ve shown ourselves (and the rest of the world) that we’re capable of reaching high positions, and we will continue with that mindset. We would like to thank Tom, Alliance Open, all the Refs, assistants, Hotel crew, sponsors and everyone that made this event possible. Also to Rob and all the tSN crew for the coverage. We want to also thank DKHM, the National Circuit they run, and all the AoS Spanish Community for letting us represent our country in this event. Thanks to all our marvelous opponents for such great matches and moments, and all the other teams for the matches that we could’ve had. 

To anyone that’s reading this, if you love Age of Sigmar and you like to compete, don’t think twice. AoS Worlds is THE event. THE major AoS celebration. You can just exchange a few words with someone and will be a friend for the rest of the weekend and next years’ tournament. I can’t just put words to describe all the mood, feelings, and experiences you get. And after that, the emotional hangover. What’s next? How can you go to a tournament now, after getting the taste of the world’s finest? Well, that has an easy answer. 

Prepare for next year. Go again, get stronger, play fairer, but go for it! 

As for me, in the personal matter (including all the above, of course) I would like to thank Darren and the Onwards crew, for their help and for the inspiration to keep improving. To Big Phil, for being such a great person to talk to and being so warm. To all the people that joined my absolute banter shitfest on Twitter. To all the Team Spain staff, for their invisible work behind the scenes. To my teammates, for getting to know each other more and forge a strong bond as a team despite being rivals in our scene. To Jorge for counting on me, to Pedro for supporting me, to Victor for his cheering capabilities, to Marc for keeping my mind straight, to Javi for his memes, to Jesús for all the hard work he put in, to Miguel for his shark mentality, to Juanma for being the best coach anyone could wish for. Thanks for believing in me and letting me be part of this adventure, and I hope I can be there next year. Thanks for making me laugh till my jaw hurts. Thanks for an incredible experience.

And obviously, thanks Theo and the PlasticCraic crew for cheering for us on and giving me the opportunity to get our point of view across and write up this diary, which will be a nice memory to have for the future

And with that we wrap up our coverage of the 2023 worlds event. A huge congratulations to our adopted team, with a fantastic 6th placing.  We’re already looking forward to what the Spanish will bring for 2024. Adios!

Sneaky picture taken on the return from the last dinner together. Love you guys.