It was a crazy year this year for Adepticon. As I'm sure most of you know, the major events sold out in hours, not days! I was one of the unfortunates to not get signed up in time, placing my team on the waiting list. If we didn't get in the Team Tournament, I knew we would go. This fact left me tentative to sign up for any other events or classes, so I didn't bother.
What I liked about the event:
- Loved the energy! Tons of great armies and great players. Everyone I had the pleasure of facing across the table was excellent. If memory serves, our 4 hour drive from Lansing was the shortest journey made in my 5 games. California being the longest journey. Now that's some dedicated hobbiests!
- Registration was smooth and painless. Swag was good too, especially for a late registrant.
- Loved the vendor hall being in its own area. Lots of awesome vendors showing off great new products and aspiring Kickstarter projects (If you live in a hole and haven't heard of it yet, google it and search the gaming category.) Picked up some awesome lava pools from Mr. Dandy. I'm going to have to squeeze them into the painting rotation soon.
- As a Death Korps of Krieg player, I loved that the Forge World event miniature was a DKoK Quartermaster. Great miniature.
- Painted armies are a requirement. It's such a pleasure to play against another painted army. The game is awesome with unpainted miniatures, but it's simply amazing with painted forces. It really brings the game to life. I wish more tournaments required painting.
- Getting to hang all weekend with 3 good friends. Weekends with the guys are always filled with good memories. The Tilted Kilt on Friday night was an experience in and of itself.
- The terrain placement rules worked very well. So well that I'm planning on implementing them for events I run in the future.
- It was great that they incorporated the random objectives and terrain rules. Adepticon worked hard to incorporate all the new rules subtleties of 6th edition and they hit a home run. We truly played 6th edition, not some hybrid 5th/6th you hear in some of large tournaments out there.
- I love that this event gave me the motivation to get 1000 points painted. Nothing like a deadline to get you moving in the right direction. I'm happy with the fruits of labor to this point.
- The Crystal Brush competition by Cool Mini or Not was pretty awesome. Many incredible miniatures on display there.
What I didn't like (disclaimer: many of these have NOTHING to do with Adepticon):
- They sold out too fast. I wish they had expanded the field more and allowed more teams in. I would have signed up for a bunch of painting classes and maybe another miniature event had I not missed out on the initial sign up. I probably should've taken the chance that we'd work our way in via the waiting list, but I was hesitant to do so.
- The charity raffle should be done Saturday night, not Sunday night. I think they'd create way more buzz and raise a lot more money when more people are around (and drunk).
- I signed up for the text notifications of table assignments and never received one text. Guess there's some bugs to work out there.
- Toll roads suck. If your teammate tells you to skip the tolls booths and pay online afterward, don't. It's a pain in the ass. Just pull over and pay the stupid tolls.
- We gave ourselves way too little time to get our force together. By choosing Dark Angels when the book came out only gave us about 3 months to assemble, paint, and practice. Not nearly enough time. Most of our army wasn't painted up to snuff, and it really hurt our overall score.
- While our display board was OK, in the future it needs to be well above OK.
- The number of Heldrakes and Necron Flyers was stupid. Expected, but stupid.
What I learned:
- If you have to go on the waiting list and you're in the top 20 on the list, assume you're going to get in and make sure you sign up for anything else that interests you ASAP, don't wait. This was my single biggest mistake.
- It's hard to do well with elite armies in 6th ed. With our combined 1/2 Ravenwing, 1/2 Deathwing force, we just couldn't afford to absorb casualties. Every lost model really hurt, bad. I've been feeling this about 6th from the get go, but this event really sank it in deep.
- In an event like this, you have to be able to deal with flyers. Our plan was to ignore them and play against the rest of our opponent's forces. Well, when your opponent pretty much only has flyers, it's kind of difficult to ignore the rest of their force. This strategy proved difficult for us.
- Army lists should pretty much be solidified 6 months before the event. Practice is critical for success. We had some practice but didn't really have a chance to practice against really high level type lists. We didn't have time to truly expose and address the holes in our lists.
- Make sure I don't have any plans when registration goes online. I'd better be hitting the refresh key 2 minutes before it opens.
- Take more pictures! I don't take nearly enough at events. I need to make a concerted effort to rectify this bad habit!
Even when you don't do as well as you had hoped, 40K is still a damn fun game and a great way to spend a weekend. Thanks to everyone who runs Adepticon and donates their time to the enjoyment of the hobby. It's greatly appreciated! Here are a ton more pics from the weekend!