Two weekends ago was the UK Nationals, a good Warmachine event for players of all levels. I went last year to play and did okay by my standards, however, a year on and a lot's changed. The meta's shifted, the rise of a new faction or two have come to play properly, and Barry has evolved into "TO Barry".
I went to Nationals this year, not to play, but to help the team run the event. I travelled up on the Friday morning, having booked the day off work, in order to get a 300 point game of Warmachine in. Afterwards, I got ready to muck in and help set up for the weekend's event. This was really good fun and I'll put some pictures in to show off what we had going.
Around 5 pm, the team (who've been running Nationals for about 12 years now) arrived and I had some introductions followed by a good curry. After going out for the meal, getting to know everyone and eating more than I should've; we went back to the venue and started rolling out mats. There were 88 players attending Nationals, which meant setting up 44 tables. For one person to do this would've taken hours, but thankfully we had a team of 6, as well as helpers, which certainly made the process much faster. I believe the last pieces of terrain were laid around 10:30 to 11 pm and we allowed the bar staff to lock up and go home. I turned up the next day around 8:30, to set up scenarios and finish off the terrain that looked a bit off. Not too long after, the arduous process of registration began. Each player at Nationals had to be booked in, given a raffle ticket, and receive their participation bonus prize (this year, a battle-box a piece). Once I'd finished with terrain, I hopped behind the desk and helped by handing out battle-boxes. At the time, it suddenly struck me how many people I know by name from other events. It really showed me how close the Warmachine community is and how friendly everyone is as well.
Once we'd got everyone registered, it was on to announcements and getting the show rolling. After the obligatory Health and Safety announcements from the venue (I often forget these at my own events, I should really start doing them properly), there was a short announcement saying that I would be handling pretty much all the judge calls for the weekend as practice for my future attempt of the judge's exam. Then the event was off and rolling, clocks all started on time, with a 2 hour round time and only 15 to 30 minutes late (it's hard to keep track of actual times when you're busy doing a whole bunch of stuff).
Over the weekend I had a few easy, a few moderate and a couple of tricky judge calls, with most of the trivial ones regarding terrain or interactions between two rules.
The trickiest judge call was, in fact, the difficult decision on awarding a game loss. These are a rare occurrence (this being only the second one I've had to issue in the last year) and are, usually, only for either unfortunate accidents that influence the game greatly or for poor player conduct. Both the ones I've issued have been the former. The judge guidelines provided by PP are great for identifying how to resolve issues that get to this level. In this case a player had accidentally hit the reset button on the clock instead of the pause button. Sadly, neither player could agree to the time remaining on their clocks and the player who hit the reset button had to be awarded a game loss. It's important to note, that had they been able to agree a time, no game loss would have been required and they could have finished their game.
The semi-finals tables and finals table are always a source of interest and this isn't exclusive to players, these tables are usually given a closer watch by the judges than the others, for obvious reasons (these games are quite important to those of us playing toy soldiers). I was assigned to these tables to provide judge calls for them (and the rest of the tables) and to monitor the play in general for mistakes and anything that might not be above board. Thankfully, there was nothing odd or strange occurring and the finals went off without trouble.
Overall Nationals was a really good event, run by some really good people. It was a breeze to judge and very interesting to learn from. I got more valuable experience judging and I feel like it has taken me another step towards the judge's exam and being a better TO.
Shout out to Rob "The Punning Man" McCormick for some a-grade proof reading.x
