My first game was against a chaos marine khorne list. The first round was not night fight and the Stompa had a great time throwing a land raider into a brass scorpion... causing the scorpion to be immobilized! I did a little cheer inside as I thought I wouldn't have to worry about it charging the stompa. Sadly enough on turn two it rolled a 5+ to fix the drives and came charging into the Stompa, quickly dispatching it. Night fights on turn 2-4 caused a lot of pain as I rolled terrible for visibility, never getting many shots off.
I made a mistake early by misreading the rules (we'll blame this on a lack of sleep) and turbo boosted my ork nobz forward to contest his quarter... then coming to realize their suicide mission was wasted since I only gained points after turn 2 (not at the start of turn 2). Ah well, in the end I tied the game due to a lucky scatter of the vortex grenade... it scattered over the top of my opponent's rhino wiping them off the board and allowing me to hold an objective.
WARNING... no my pictures at this point, I was tired and didn't get around to taking out the camera. Ranting and raving below as the lack of sleep and exhaustion caught up to me!
The second game was against an all infantry imperial fists army. My opponent showed up 10 minutes late into the round, one of my big pet peeves. It went downhill from there. Being a little flustered I wanted to get things moving since I struggled to get 4 turns in the last game. He started out by trying to disqualify me stating that I couldn't have anything with 4 structure points. Looking around at the 5 other stompas on the field, I thought there was no way I screwed that rule up. Another 10 minutes went by and after finally talking to the head judge we got it clarified. I knew all along it was to keep Reavers off the field...
Rant on... It only got worse. I started setting up, and explained what my stompa did so there wasn't any confusion. That wasn't good enough, and I was repeatedly asked "Show me where it is in the book". Maybe I'm just used to being taken for my word since I'm an honest guy, but constantly being interrupted to take a few minutes to show him each and every rule was getting rude. I handed him the book right away but that wasn't good enough. Sadly the forgeworld rules are all over the book (I didn't scan them since the photocopies didn't turn out right). This wasted another 10+ minutes and caused a ton of frustration. I would have been happy to walk him through it once I was done setting up. ...Rant off!
That was probably the one and only game I ever got close to raising my voice in a game and had to restrain myself from stepping up to the guy. As the game progressed, we both cooled down and chalked it up to a lack of sleep and exhaustion.
Since we wasted 45+ plus setting up, we only got three turns in. Had I had more time, it probably would have been a landslide since nothing in his army was able to do any damage to the stompa. In the end I got a solid win, but only 3/4 the points I could have. I did give him a kill point because my 40 point grotz in reserve didn't come on the table!
Game three was much better, and laid back. I played a blood angels player and wanting to get my full game in, reserved my whole army. He had a warhound titan with twin lasers of doom so I didn't want it ko'ing the poor stompa before it got to fire. Luckily on the reserve roll for turn 2, the only thing that came out was my stompa. It proceeded to lifta drop the storm raven and randomly throw it 24" back towards the warhound in the opposing corner. Good times! The rest of the turns were a good back and forth as the warhound eventually killed off the stompa in a salvo of pew-pew lasers. In the end it was a pretty even draw in points as we both took objective markers.
Next year I think I'm going to hang up my hat on the Gladiator and try my hand at the team tournament for Warhammer Fantasy.
