When I was 14 years old and mucking around with WHFB minis on the kitchen table¹, if you’d asked me what my hobbies would be in 30 years’ time, I’d have said I’ll still basically be doing this. But I’ll be an adult by then so it’ll be even better: I’ll have a way better table to play on (true)², I’ll be drinking beer while I’m playing (true), and I’ll be married by then (also true) so I’ll obviously be having loads of sex every night (umm….).

Well sometimes dreams come true, at least in part, and here I am getting pissed up and rolling bones in my 40s. But AOS has slipped off a bit locally – so to light a fire under our group and get people back rolling dice and on the beers, Jay started up the local Spring League³, which came to a conclusion towards the end of the year.

The idea was that we would all play each other once over the space of a few weeks, and then the two players with the best records would play off in a Grand Final, with the others there to watch, sink piss and sledge support, and then we’d all get out on the beers afterwards. So that’s what we did.

The Format

The main goal was to get people playing regularly. We live in a small town that will never have an FLGS, so we all play in each other’s garages, and it was up to each of us to arrange games on nights that suited both parties. We had to submit our lists in hardcopy to Jay, so he could upload a list reveal to the group chat. Mine came with a little message and sketch:

Aaron’s came with a bit of bait:

We did end up changing up our lists as we went along: I started out with Ironjawz (MSU pigs) but I found it incredibly boring⁴, so I switched to Mega Gargants and loved every minute after that. We’ve got about six or seven⁵ AOS players in our local group and four of them committed to the Spring League.

How’d it go?

Aaron is a hard-core BOC player who used to take them to every event, so he was a bit lost when Beasts got the arse, and he took the Spring League as an opportunity to start building up some experience with Stormcast. He’s an experienced tourney player, and I reckon he’s got the edge over me in our many head-to-heads over the years – and when we met in the regular season, his Stormcast smacked the tar out of my Giants.

We both beat Eddie’s SCE and Jay’s Gloomspite in our other games, so the final standings were:

1. Aaron – Stormcast
2. Pete (Me) – Ironjawz / Giants
3. Eddie – Stormcast
4. Jay – Gloomspite Gitz

So that means it’s a rematch between Aaron and me in the Grand Final!

The Showdown

I took my Brodd’s Stomp tourney list, which I really enjoyed playing at Bush Bash recently. It’s pretty competitive and it feels great to play, so if you’re interested you can read about it here:

3-0 with King Brodd’s Stomp: The List

But if you can’t be stuffed with that, here’s the list itself:

Having played both, I find it a lot more competitive that SOB allegiance. One key thing to note is that the mortal wound shooting Rampage on both players’ turns is a great way to whittle down elite units before they get to swing into you; attack being literally the best form of defence in this case.

Aaron ran a slightly tweaked version of the list he’d beaten me with during the home and away rounds:

It’s a bit of a work-in-progress list and that 70 points left on the shelf is a killer. It’s got a whole barrage of teleports and the Annies are the obvious sledgehammer in the list – so I guess the rough plan would be to harass people with Longstrikes to the point where 3D6 charging Prosecutors can pick them up, and batter a big threat with Annihilators off a short charge. Then teleport all of the above and go again.

So although your best units have great core stats and you’ll be 2s-and-2sing your way through the combat phase, it’s dicey as fuck in other ways – in particular, it relies heavily on sticking charges out of deepstrike to pick up what needs to be picked up.

How it went down

We rolled up Passing Seasons, which I was pleased about because it meant I could re-use this crude graphic from my recent Bush Bash write-up. I won the roll off and put Aaron in to bat. He played it cagey then on my turn, I ran the two Gatebreakers (Super Smash Bros) up to the top objective, and King Brodd plus his Warstomper sidekick over to my bottom left.

So the first battle round was a phoney war. Aaron won the first Prio and forced me to take an early double while his important stuff was in the sky, getting it out of the way while I hadn’t killed anything of note; but zig zagging around largely unopposed for a couple of turns did mean that I’d built up a decent lead on VPs.

At the bottom of Round 2, Aaron slammed down his hand on that big red button: the heavy-hitters came down from the clouds and it was time to chuck the kitchen sink at Brodd.

Aaron’s Annhilators dropped in 9″ away and did that little shuffle so they were on a 6″ charge. The general plan was shaping up to be smash Brodd’s head in, double me and then drop the Warstomper in the following round. Then you’re looking at a full Stormcast army tackling two Gatebreakers, with plenty of harassment Dakka and all the teleports he’d need.

All he has to do is make a 6″ charge.

He fails it – here comes the reroll. Being a smart arse, I called out “Don’t roll a 5 mate”.

He rolls a 5.

Aaron picked the dice up before I got a chance to take a photo⁶, but they were right there: a 4 and a 1. Whomp Whomp.

He did double me and duly picked up Brodd in Round 3 (not even Aaron could fail a 3″ rerollable) but it left Slim Jim the Warstomper alive, which in turn meant that the Stormcast hadn’t fully “won” that side of the board yet.

The latter half of the game settled into a pattern of Longstrikes pinging a few wounds into the big guys, and the big guys picking up entire units with every swing in combat. Glorious.

It needs to be said that the KBS shooting rampage is game-warpingly powerful, especially into elite armies, and by Round 4 I’d shot off the Annihilators from full to zero across various Rampages and hucked rocks. The Prozzies were sent packing in combat and although Aaron was racking up a lot of VPs by zipping around the board, I was killing his shit quicker than he could teleport away from me, and the early points lead I’d built up was never under serious threat.

So the mighty King Brodd’s Stomp won the Spring League, and Stormcast could piss off back to the clouds to explain themselves Golden Balls. I’ll drink to that!

Thoughts on the League

Thanks to Jay for getting this going – it definitely got people together and throwing dice more than we would have done without it, so I’d call that mission accomplished. The list reveal video was fun and so was the Bingo Card that Jay put together for the Grand Final – everyone in attendance had a slightly different version including a blend of in-game “Achievement Unlocked” stuff and the kind of in-jokes you’ll get between any group of mates. Definitely something to consider adapting for a gaming day with your own group.

In terms of the format, one thing we did struggle with was lining up the Grand Final. Like a lot of AOS players, we’ve all got jobs and kids rudely getting in the way of the hobby, so if we do a Summer League (and I hope we do), maybe we could start by agreeing on the Grand Final date first and work backwards from there.

The Prize: Bragging Naming Rights

There’s a tradition in our group chat that whoever wins something gets to rename the local chat. Bonus points if you can come up with something incredibly rude and embarrassing that flashes up during a work meeting, or on the car dashboard in front of the wife and kids. There’s been a few over the years that were pretty raw.

This time we kept it fairly tame, but on theme:

So now Aaron’s getting daily reminders that I smashed him. Ah well. Should have thought of that before you chose to fail a 6″ rerollable charge, ya flog.

So are you counting this as a tournament win?

LOL no, of course not. This was just a bunch of mates playing some casually competitive games, giving each other shit and getting on the beers.

In other words, it was peak Warhammer.

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1. I mainly collected Undead at the time, believe it or not. Along with some Orcs and Goblins cos I loved Grom the Paunch. ↩︎
2. The peak of my ambitions at that time was to have a big table with a green tablecloth. I could not conceptualize a better playing surface than that. ↩︎
3. Yup, it’s we’re heading into Summer on this side of the world. Try to keep up. ↩︎
4. Regardless of how Ironjawz are going competitively right now, they’re just so bloody boring. ↩︎
5. Don’t say it. ↩︎
6. What a fucking dog act. ↩︎