WINTERS END - The Walking Dead Tournament...

 

Last weekend I drove over to Stockport to take part in the Winters End tournament at Element Games. Organised by Paul from "Weight of Fire", it was a thematic 4 round tournament for the Walking Dead All Out War miniatures skirmish game from Mantic Games. There were 16 players.

 

WEIGHT OF FIRE - WINTERS END

 

Participants had to design their own 250 point team - plus a 50 point mysterious survivor who would join their group at some point during the competition. Paul introduced some limitations on team building to try and level the playing field - weapons & armour items could only be taken once across the team - I thought this was a great idea, and it led to some interesting teams. You can download the PDF of the tournament rules etc from the link below:

 

WINTERS END SCENARIO BOOKLET

 

 

My Team - Sandra, Derek, The Survivor, Greg and Charlie

 

This was my team (including survivor) - I didn't have a particular strategy in mind, I wanted to try out the new "Hunters" faction that has just come out, and my thinking was to try and get a mix of skills across the team. My team was 4 people plus the survivor. It turned out that the most popular team size was 5 plus survivor. The extra person giving more actions. I spent the equivalent in points of an extra person on a couple of the new Veteran skill cards for my team - which I didn't really get much of an advantage from.

 The Hunters are interesting characters, but I couldn't use their special rules to any advantage in any of the games I played. They have cool benefits whilst in area terrain, but there wasn't any area terrain on any of the tables. The "Pick them off" skill never came into play - 8" is quite a large distance on a 24"x24" table, and when opponents are aware that you have it, they don't let you get the chance!

The 4 new scenarios that had been designed by Paul and Daniel were very very cool... (they are all in the booklet pdf - see link above). There have only been a handful of official player vs player balanced scenarios suitable for tournaments from Mantic (I'm not including the many scenarios in the expansions in this - they are for playing through scenes from the comics - and are great... but not designed for tournament style play) - so this has really opened up the game for me.

GAME 1 - (pic from Weight of Fire)

GAME 2

GAME 3

 

(pic from Weight of Fire)

GAME 4

(pic from Weight of Fire)

Some of my loot... in addition to this all players got two booster packs (one signed my Mark Latham the game designer)

I came 15th out of 16.... but I won the "BEST PAINTED" mug!!!
 

(pic from Weight of Fire)



Andy from the BLACKJACK LEGACY Youtube Channel was taking part in the competition, and he was live streaming on the day... Here's a link to the coverage of the top table in the final round (you can find the 1st 3 rounds plus a load of other gaming content on his youtube page)...

What a fantastic day out. Congratulations to Paul (and Daniel) for such a well organised event.  Everyone was really friendly and helpful. I learned a lot from the experience, and I can't wait for the next one!!