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Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Throne of Skulls Recap

So,

I am back for the Throne of Skulls and here are a few pictures from the event, first up my army list that I entered. Since I was taking the Uruk-hai from the White Hand list, I came up with a unique army list. I wanted my list to be a piece of skin, as if the Uruk-hai had cut it of of one of their victims. So I contacted my good friend Eric in CA, who used to do make up effects for a certain movie studio and asked him to make me up a latex "skin"army list. This is what it looks like front and back. The funny thing is he used his wife's own back for the mold and he used cold water to get her skin to raise so he could get that goose bump look. Creepy but cool!

By the way, everyone that saw my list loved it and I think they were a bit creeped out by it, which means Eric did an awesome job!

Now on to my army, the Uruk-hai, which was very themed but not over the top (which would be an issue at this event). The list had:

1 Uruk-hai Captain
1 Uruk-hai Shaman
22 Uruk-hai warriors
10 Uruk-hai pikemen
10 Uruk-hai scouts
10 Orcs
1 Isengard Troll

55 models and a very themed list. I also built a custom display board that would make the army look like it was marching out of the pits of Isengard. I carved all the rock work out of blue foam and spent at least a day building and painting it. I think it turned out pretty good and I had a bunch of people take pictures of it.


The event was held at the Tropicana Hotel and the room for the event was large and spacious. The tables had plenty of room between them and each table was made out of Games Workshop Realm of Battle and current GW terrain. Now most followers here at Cursed Treasures know that I love terrain and I love a ton of terrain on my LotR tables. When I walked into the venue and saw the terrain for the LotR tables my heart sank, here is what all the tables looked like for LotR.

Not what I expected but at least they were all the same on each board. The 40K and Fantasy Battle tables were pretty much the same. I understand that John Scaffer did all the work on all the tables and while I was in Memphis I saw much of this stuff being built. John did a great job but I would have liked more terrain as well as other folks in the other games.

I got in on Friday with Tom O and his wife around noon, we did lunch and got checked in at the Excalibur, across the street from the Tropicana. I headed over around 5:30 to hang out and get registered for the weekend. I also hung out with Kyle, Chris, John, Brent and a few others, did dinner and then participated in the conversion building contest. Built a shoulder pad chaos marine and that was about it. Then headed back to my hotel to crash for the night.

Saturday morning saw me up and ready to play, headed out to the Tropicana and started looking for food and my first opponent. After a decent breakfast, I headed over to the postings and was glad to see that I got Chris Thomas as my first game. I met Chris this year at GitD and he is an awesome guy, plus he loves Big Bang Theory, Bazinga!

First game was Clash of Piquets against Chris and his wood elf's with Treebeard. Chris noticed that I had the Troll so we decided to charge the Troll up against Treebeard to see who would win, we agreed not to use any other models or to shoot at the large monsters and sent them charging towards each other. Needless to say I lost and the troll died after two rounds of fighting.

Well not to bore you, but the Fighting Uruk-hai lost and Chris got the win. This was the best game of the whole event and Chris is an awesome guy to play, he had a very balanced list and it was well themed.

My second game was against Marc R's Mordor list that was rather interesting. The scenario was Storm the camp and I felt pretty good about going into this game. Now Marc's list had a ton of Black guard orcs as well as regular orcs and Black Numenorians. It also had a a ring wraith or two as well as a captain. The thing that made this game tough is that the whole army was painted the same! I mean everything was painted in the same colors, the same way, Blue and black. It did look cool, but you could not tell what was what. The game was okay, but there were a few issues with movement in this game. Needless to say I lost, but was glad to have the game over with. Here is a blury shot of the army.

Game three was against Tom Keegan and his 21 model all mounted Dol Amoroth army with Gandalf the Grey leading the way. To make matters tough for Tom, we were playing Domination, which I thought I had in the bag. Tom's army was awesome looking, it is a wonder why he did not win a best painted award.

Tom is a great guy to play and he made me laugh the whole game. I need to make it down to Florida for his event. Tom thought I had the game, but then the unthinkable happened. My cheating dice (Adepticon Dice that everyone has coined Cheating Dice) decided that it was time to roll 1's and 2's the rest of the game. So once again I took a loss to a 21 model army but I had a blast, not the most fun (since Tom Kicked my butt, thanks Tom!) but it was a close second.

Well I was now 0 & 3 with the day ending, I noticed that I was feeling wiped out again and decided to skip the Pub quiz and crash in my hotel room. I was wrangled into hanging out with Tom Keegan and a few others to play an interesting game of Prostitute or No Prostitute while watching folks pass by. But after an hour of laughing I finally headed back to my room.

Sunday started and I forgot my camera in my room so no other pictures from here on out. game 4 was against John Adams from Florida playing Seize the Prize. Needless to say, this was the worst game I played all weekend. I will not go into it here and just leave it at that. I lost this game by just one model but that is all that it took.

Game 5 was against the ringer army being Lead by Don, a GW staffer from Memphis. This game was a blast but my dice were still being mean to me (or the Dice Karma finally caught up to me) and I lost the game. Great game but still a loss.

So out of 5 games, I had three great games, one okay game and one game that I wish I could forget. But all in all not a bad weekend.

Os there you go, my adventures in Vegas. Now that ToS is over, I can get to planning GitD 2012 and get working on my June installment for Tale of Four LotR gamers.

TK

3 comments:

Jerry said...

Nice write up and great pictures! I think a round of "prostitute or not" would be a good addition to GitD. Let's discuss how to make that happen. (Probably have to hold the event around Van Buren.)

The tables did look a little disappointing. Not exactly a lot of cover or tactical options presented with the terrain, from what it seems.

Scottswargaming said...

Nice looking force and good report. And yes that bit of skin is seriously creepy!
I agree you need more terrain to make skirmish gaming interesting.

Jason Meyers said...

Great stuff! Thanks for sharing. I'd love to see WotR get some events like this.

Cheers,
Jason