Clash of Kings ’23

So, I went to Clash of Kings last weekend!  It was a great time meeting new opponents, catching up with the guys from last year and I even got to play a couple of battles. Clash of Kings is the celebration of the hobby, allowing middle aged guys (and even a couple of gals) to show off why they spend hours painting miniatures instead of going outside for healty activities. 😊  

You can find all pictures here, Courtesy to Martin Ofner from Austria.  I even stole a couple of them as his picture quality is a lot better than mine! 

But holey moley, what a lot of beautiful armies there were!  A couple highlights: 

This nightstalker army was gorgeous! 

André Bal’s forces of nature are also one of my favourites.

Thirdly, this is the most beautiful (or at least, the most colourful) army on the field. Great conversions, beautiful painted trident realms.  

The most beautiful diorama would be Andy Marshall’s “Abyssal slaves”army.  

Tourney organisation

Thanks @Steve and his team for organising this! It’s a volunteer job that has a lot of hassle, so thanks for doing this!

The TO’s did a wonderful job getting everything ready and making sure everything went smooth. Aside from the timing hickup (later more on that), everything went as it should, and that’s not a given! Thanks.

Battle results 

My battle results were not fantastic. The first day, I lost all three of my games. Of course, I should blame the dice (don’t we all?) but the truth is that I brought the wrong army to battle my first three opponents.  I’ll do my best to describe each battle and the highlights there. 

You can find all army lists here: 

The first battle was against Chris Christopherson. Chris is a nice guy who started by mentioning that he isn’t really experienced.  Christthen continued to solidly thrash my goblins. Truth be said, much of that is because my goblins have dificulty dealing with high nerve/high defense lists and his dwarf list brimmed with defense 5+ and 6+ high nerve units. Chris pressed the advantage and didn’t make any mistakes which could have let me turn the battle around.  

Despite the fact that he solidly beat me, he was a good sportsman about it and it was a very enjoyable battle. 

My 2nd battle faced Jon Gunn’s order of the Green Lady. It was a hard fought battle on the right (his left) flank. Jon’s a quiet guy, but a great tactical player. The battle went back and forth and could have gone either way.  After six turns Jon had four tokens, I held three and I had one final shooting phase to win. I did a couple more wounds and had to roll a six twice and a seven once to rout two counter-holding units. If I routed both, I would have won. If I routed one, it would have been a draw. In the end, I rolled a 6 and a 4, and I lost the game. 

In my 3rd battle I faced Daniel Reed’s imperial dwarves. Since I couldn’t deal with Chris’ dwarves in battle one, facing a list that was for 80% the same  in battle 3 was not my dream scenario.  Furthermore, Daniel outdeployed me, placed his tokens on a def 6+ special character and pushed it through my lines, supported by most of his fastish-units. I routed his support, but couldn’t deal with the def 6+ units. While the battle wasn’t that pretty, the army, at least, was. 

At the end of the 1st day, I sat at 3 losses and 29 points. (which isn’t too bad for 3 losses, but nothing great at all). I had some revenge to take at the 2nd day!  

Day two! 

The 2nd day, I started with a mirror match. Robert Burman brought a goblin list that was remarably similar to my list. He also had the formation, mincers, 2 hordes of rabble, Groany and the wizz.   I think “great” goblin lists think alike!

It appears that, once you go south in the rankings, the battles become infinitely more fun. The battle I had with Rob was the best I had so far. It was an engaging faction rivalry (blue goblins vs blue goblins) in which the results didn’t matter that much! We had so much fun playing!

The fact that this mirror match turned out to be a draw with 1.250 killed vs 1.255 killed is icing on the cake! @Rob, thanks for the battle.  

Here’s his army: 

My 2nd battle was facing Simon Robinson’s orcs. Simon was the sole orc contignent on Clash of Kings. Like me, he had lost three battles so far and we were just playing for fun and giggles. And fun we had! Simon is a great guy. He’s not that experienced in Kings of War, but a gentlement sport!   

In the end, he deployed everything he had in his right flank, which I countered with my fleagbag formation, some thrash and a trio of goblin blasters. The resulting carnage was predictable and very messy. At the end of the game I had a horde of rabble and blaster left on that flank, while his troll bruiser ran to the rear with a loot counter. In the center, I had some more units snatching the counters, so I managed to win for the first time with 24 points. 

Sadly, no 3rd game

Sadly, I couldn’t play a 3rd battle on sunday. Our ferry would sail at seven, which meant we realy had to leave at five. As the day had some delays, we could have started battle six and played for an hour so so before we would have to leave. We chose not to burden our opponents with this planning trouble and skip the 3rd battle altogether.  

When we booked the ferry, the tournament would have been over at 5. (which could have had us out just in time). Later, the tournament had to expand the schedule a bit to allow the kitchen more time for lunches, which made our already tight shedule impossible.  It’s a pity, but I look back at 5 wonderful games.