AAR - Biggs (and Garm) at the Empire Games Center Regional Championship

On Saturday I got to play in the Regional Championship at the Empire Games Center in Streetsboro, Ohio.  I had been practicing with a Clonisher style "Go first and smash with Black dice" list, but I hadn't been liking how it performed, so the evening before I put back together something from the archives, that I updated for Wave 6.  I had won my local store championship with the original list, partly by getting lucky and having my buddy Chris beat Q in the final round to let me leapfrog into first.

Plus, Shmitty wanted Garm to win Regionals, and he had given me a Garm card signed by Zahn himself!

I did pretty well.

Wave 6 - Ranking the Commanders

Back near the end of Wave 4, we ranked the Commanders.  Today we're going to smash them together into Tiers again!

Sloane: Savior of Ship Builds

Provocative enough of a title for you? I'm sure I'm going to catch a lot of flak for this one. It goes heavily against the accepted orthodoxy, especially in the good ol' US of A. Regardless, it's a trend I'm seeing in my games. Time will tell if I'm just crazy (which is the norm) or if I'm actually onto something.

Games Shmitty Plays - (Riding to the Defense of Rohan!)

How do you feel about "dead" games?  Every gamer seems to have their own take on how they approach them and games can die for different reasons.  Sometimes the designing company goes out of business or finds the game is no longer profitable.  Sometimes, the community surrounding the game just dies out instead.  The Lord of the Rings/Hobbit Strategy Battle Game from Games Workshop falls somewhere in the middle.  It gets really irregular support from GW and because of that, most of the communities around the game have died out.

However, sometimes dead gaming communities can be brought back.  Every time I have attended GenCon I have always been impressed by the massive events held for games that are years dead.  Thanks to the efforts of one local gamer, I had the opportunity to play in a LotR tournament last Saturday.  Read on to find out how I did...

To Bid or Not to Bid

As the Madine Trials continue, I'm finding myself thinking a lot about bidding: what kind of lists want to bid, what level of bidding is acceptable, what you get out of that investment, etc. I more or less see about four distinct levels to bidding in Armada right now.