Weekend Tournament Roundup

People who are acquainted with me know I love to go to Shadespire tournaments in and around the London area when I can, so in this article I’ll be focusing on the 2 events I went to this Saturday and Sunday.

As part of my training for Grand Clashes I spend a lot of my time attending local gaming nights and tournaments when I can. A big belief I have is that is important to play in new places with new opponents to help expose yourself to new players with different playstyles to the people you normally play as well as helping to support local scenes. It helps highlight things that you wouldn’t normally see or have thought about as well as tests the strength of your warband in new environments.

If you’re interested in seeing my current competitive progress with Shadespire, please do check out the Tournament Tracker page which has all the results of every tournament and event I have been to.

Saturday

The first event I went to was the Shadespire tournament run by Marquee Models in Harlow on Saturday, a nice hobby store located inside the local shopping centre. It was a 3 round best of 3 tournament with official prize support from the Quarterly OP kit (once GW ship it out to stores).

Sadly I was only able to come 2nd partly due to my own mistake. Normally I play with a 90 minute timer in all my games but this time I decided not to. My opponent was new to the game so the first game was quite slow and I ended up losing 3-5. The next game was much faster and I won 14-1 but then we were told there was only 10 minutes remaining. I had the option to take the draw but I decided to take the risk and play game 3 but with only 1 round. My first turn gamble failed so turn 1 ended with me losing 0-2 on glory. The next 2 games I won comfortably but as I had 1 loss and 2 wins compared to the guy who beat me who had 2 wins and draw, I came 2nd with the highest glory differential of 70. A few of the people there had already heard of my blog so that was a win of its own.

While 2nd place is still a good score, I go to tournaments with the intention to win as my end goal is for winning Grand Clashes so if I don’t win a tournament I feel as if it is a loss. It may not make sense to a lot of people but my mindset is if you don’t go in with the goal of winning then getting that first place finish becomes more difficult.

On my way home from the event, I thought through what I did wrong and what I could learn for future events. These things were: always play with a timer at events and tournaments (I use my phone for this), write down notes for how to play Skaven against different matchups, take the draw when given the choice if you don’t have time to play the third game.

Sunday

Going into Sunday I played at Wargames Workshop Milton Keynes. I had played at their Northampton store last week in Shadespire and came first there and the last time I played here back in January I came second with my Orruks so this time I was planning for victory. WGW MK is a great store located inside the Kingston Centre that runs many events for tons of game systems and has a great crowd.

Taking into account what mistakes I made on Saturday and what I did to counter them, I implemented them all into my games for the day and ended up with a strong win of 3-0 with a glory differential of 74. I was able to take what I learned from the loss on the day before and effectively implement them into my Skaven gameplan to great effect.

Overall I got 2nd place on Saturday and 1st place on Sunday as well as all the loot from the Quarterly kit (once the shops receive it). I also got to meet a great bunch of people and helped expose the flaws I had with my current Skaven playstyle. All in all a great Shadespire gaming weekend and I totally plan to go back to those 2 stores whenever they host their next Shadespire tournaments and would recommend others to do so.

Although the most important thing to remember when playing Shadespire is: can you roll a crit?