Team Yankee at Charicon

And just like that, it's been five weeks since I last posted.

Last week in Wellington there convention named Charicon, conceived and organised by one of our club members. Over 100 players attended, with the systems represented being 40K, AOS, FOW, TY, Warmachine, DBMM, Guildball, and Bolt Action. The convention ended up raising over NZ$6000 for the Cancer Society of NZ.

I helped run the Team Yankee event. This was originally planned to be Saturday only, as I wasn't going to be available on the second day, but Pelarel offered to run the Sunday. A number of locals were only able to play on one day or the other, so in order to have the flexibility needed to get them involved we decided to make the weekend a Firestorm: Red Thunder event, rather than a traditional competition.

The format we went with was 60 point lists on 6x4 tables, with a total of five two-hour rounds. We had eight players on day one and six on day two, with three people playing both days.

While the flexibility that the format allowed was great for getting more people playing, it was a challenge to juggle red vs blue numbers across the two days. One player with multiple armies offered to play on either side as needed, we had to ask a Saturday player to switch from Warsaw Pact to NATO, and one Sunday player with a Berlin Brigade list played for the Warsaw Pact. It was further complicated by a late NATO entry for Sunday, so rather than Chris playing for NATO on Saturday, I ran his British list and he joined the Soviets on Sunday in order to accomodate this.

We generally followed the Firestorm: Red Thunder document, but with a few changes:

• We didn’t follow the three phases of the official campaign (Surprise Attack, Breakthrough, and Exploitation). For round one, all four Battle Arrows were placed by the Warsaw Pact team. For subsequent rounds, each team got as many arrows as their number of wins in the previous round, dicing off to see in which order teams placed arrows.
• Once an arrow had been placed, the attacking team nominated one of their players for that game. The defending team offered up two players as potential opponents, with the attacking player choosing one of them to play. The defender chose to adopt a Counter Attack or Static Defence stance, then diced on the Mission Table to determine the mission. We repeated the process until all matchups for the round had been decided.
• Hasty Attack was replaced in the Mission Table with Contact, which is similar but seems to be a much better mission.

We made two changes to the rules, taken straight from FOW V4: Reserves being 40% of points, and Unit Last Stand tests being taken in the starting step after remounting bailed out tanks. As far as I could tell, the players were accepting of the changes, and they didn't seem to have any negative impacts on gameplay.

The weekend ran really well, with all games being played with great spirit. As a player on the NATO side, it was particularly enjoyable being able to call a NATO Summit before each round to plan the matchups that we wanted. 60 points was good for the table size and time limits, giving space for manoeuvre and only one game (LAVs vs T-55s) timing out, but might have disadvantaged NATO compared to if we'd run slightly larger games. The main reason we went that small was for people who are still building armies, to provide a stepping stone towards the 85pts needed for Nationals in April.

I think the system of getting as many Battle Arrows as victories was good, giving a real sense of strategic momentum. In the event, NATO was always on the back foot, never securing enough wins at any stage to gain the initiative. It was interesting that they chose to expend most of their attacks in a drive on Berlin in order to get the Victory Points, rather than trying to cut off the Soviet advances. A potential future improvement might be altering the rules about where arrows can be placed, to try and encourage different behaviour. For example, this could mean needing to draw a supply line to your map edge (or to a North Sea port if you're NATO). Other tweaks could involve permitting airmobile lists that are the strategic attacker to take a defensive posture as a seize-and-hold type play, and letting Marines make attacks into coastal territories as amphibious landings.

This is where the campaign finished, with a solid Warsaw Pact operational victory:

Thanks to all those who came to play and support the cause, to Pelarel for running the second day, and to Bede for making the convention happen. We are looking forward to running a Firestorm: Stripes event later in the year.