So as I write this I am still pretty much in shock. I have today had my worst ever wargame I think I have ever participated in. Please note to get the most from this little story if you havent played kings of war I suggest downloading the pdf rulebook and giving it a skim before reading this. It will be worth it.
So lets backtrack a little bit. It started off with me basically wanting to get my army so far on a gaming table. I didnt do it enough with my old big hat army and I have decided these guys are going to see a lot of action.
I asked my brother if he fancied a game this weekend last week, and he said he might but graham also want to do another bolt action tank battle, so he would put a message on our clubs facebook page to see who is interested.
Now my bro loves bolt action so he managed to convince my stepdad and his 11yr old foster daughter to play kings of war with me. My stepdad likes wargames but not enough to buy his own stuff, he just likes to turn up and be involved. His foster daughter sophie is quite intelligent and likes game so I thought why not give it a go.
Then I got a facebook reply from a guy who shall not be named saying he and his girlfriend have new armies to test out, so I said come down and we can have a big game. So far so good, it sounds like a perfect saturday afternoon.
Now this guy turns up late with some of his models still needing assembly. They fanny about for about half an hour writing lists, checking every single rule, even about rolling off for sides and stuff. But the worst thing is that his girlfriend has forgotten her movement trays. They start an argument in public. And I mean an argument. I intercede and offer them some of my cardboard box I transported my army in so they can cut it up and use that. Not too bad.
An hour into the session (bear in mind the club is only open 4 hours) we finally start deploying. Now my usual kings of war games are usually onto turn 4 or 5 by now. So we take turns setting up. They are so busy arguing about their deployment strategy, pass me the dice, why did you put the lid on the box, how did you manage to forget the tape measure, they are paying little attention to use.
Sophie has never played a wargame in her life. This guy was correcting her moves for being a little off, like 100 degree pivot instead of 90 etc.
So can it get any worse? Well, I wrote the army lists for dwarfs and chaos dwarfs so that sophie could get an idea of the game from a balanced pov. Our opponents? I will say they played undead then skip to the next paragraph but before you read it I want you to think of the cheesiest army you can think of.
Force 1 of 2. All mummies and a pharoah. Nothing but 6+ damage values, all regeneration, all crushing strength 2. Unfortunately itwasntlegal as they had no solid units so couldnt take and heroes. I didnt want to point this out.
Force 2 of 2. Not as bad? well, werewolves, revenant cavalry, soul reaver cavalry, a catapult and 2 heroes. Most of it again 6+ defensewith crushing strength 2.
So how did it go for them against balanced forces? well, for anyone who has played both games warhammer fantasy kings of war is not. Small elite units need support. The dwarf guns took out a couple units of mummies, the chronus golem (counts as lesser obsidian golem regiment as its actually too big to be a greater obsidian golem base size wise) smashed his revenant cavalry. One of her mummy troops counter charged into the golems flank, but even doubling their attacks they dont have enough to rout it. They opened themselves up to a flank charge from some orc archers who put the hurt on them.
3 turns in and they had nothing left on our left flank. They were now arguing about whose fault it was why they were losing. It obviously had nothing to do with the fact that they had made their armies 1 trick ponies.
The argument they had about why didnt she pivot her mummy in its advance because the dark surge can only go straight forward, it lasted about 5 minutes and was a proper shouting match. It was getting to the point that they were practically ignoring us to play amongst ourselves. We could have rolled anything with our shooting and they wouldnt have noticed.
This things started to look better when I let him do a charge that was probably illegial, but i couldnt be bothered to go in depth into the charging rules. Give him his dues he was willing to accept it wasnt a legal charge, but allowing it let them actually kill some of our non speedbump units before the game ended.
To top it all off this guy actually owns and runs a game store somewhere. :o
Lessons to be learned? Well, this is actually only the seond bad gameive ever played with a stranger. The first was a boardgame that only the other guy knew the rules to yet also cheated and still somehow managed to lose. Will I play them again. Probably yes but only seperatly. The worst aspect is that it wasnt really a very good first experience for sophie. She did enjoy it (loved rolling all the dice for her organ gun and slayers attacks) and wants to play again.
So does anyone else have any similar stories? I would love to hear any that can top this.
I met a guy who had started a dwarf list and he fielded a gunline packed with warmachines… He was a notorious cheater and people usually only played him once. He was also the one who introduced the “I can shuffle any way I want” rule when playing mtg, always placing a one turn kill on top of his deck.
Last I heard about him was that he lives alone and is an overall lonely guy these days…
This hobby is just to much work to not have a good time, win or loose, it’s all in the fluff. I can’t stand the attitude of more competetive players and I can’t stand to much cheese. Concious cheaters never plays me again and I’ll most likely degrade and make fun of him.
My first Warhammer fantasy tournament was ok, but I played with the newly released 7th edition Dark Elf, so I managed to win my first 2 og 5 games.
Game 3 put me up against an avid polish tournament player (the tournament was in Denmark), who didn’t speak much english, and surely was used to going to tournaments. He didn’t really look at me unless he has to, which could be because of the language barrier. After a quick presentation (and I mean quick!) the game started.
…
Think of a speed run in an old console game, just against a living person… This guy wanted to get his points and move on as fast as he could. I’m not mad at loosing and I’m pretty sure he didn’t cheat, but it’s just not a good experience being up against an army you don’t know well, with a player who finishes every phase at 1-3 minutes. When he rolled his dice he didn’t say fx: “3+ to hit because I’m WS5”. Just silent dice of, where I didn’t know what was going on, but constantly got dice pushed into my hands and when I asked what to do with the dice he replied “armor” and pointed to one of units. I tried to ask him to slow down, and then he would play slowly for 30 seconds before taking off again. I was defeated in around 30 minutes in a completely unrewarding fashion, and haven’t been to a big tournament since
What really grinds my gears is when you hit a unit with you’re flame template and your opponent says… You’ve hit about 5.
You sit and think for a second, is it worth arguing.
The rule say if the template touches the base it’s classed as hitting. But so many people just count the ones directly under the template only.
I’ve learnt to carefully count with them and remind them of the touching rule.
I’ve had another experience when my hellcannon scattered onto the same players Hydra, the hole hit the back of the model. He said it’s not a direct hit as it only hit the back of the base.
I was not impressed with this guy at all. I had to call someone over to double check, very annoying.
Mentioned it to a couple of people at the club and they said he used to be a lot worse but had to pick up his game as no one would play against him.
I feel sorry for your step-sister; that really isn’t the sort of thing she should see in her first game
I’ve had a couple of bad experiences lately at my club:
Experience 1:
Let me start this by admitting there is blame on both sides here and I was hardly a paragon of virtue myself.
My club is currently running a campaign (well more a league actually) and about a month and a half ago I was playing a Vampire player. All throughout the game every single time he had to remove a casualty he pulled a face and grumbled a bit despite 90% standing back up in his magic phase. The only lasting damage I was able to mange was against units that were outside this resurrection spell’s range; a single unit of hex wraiths that looped arround wide and a unit of skellies who wandered out of range as they closed in on me. All through this I bit my tongue thinking I’m probably just paranoid/reading too much into it, and even if I am it’s not worth starting an argument over.
Then came time for charges. He declared a charge on my blunderbusses with the unit of skellies who were directly in front of them (and at the extremes of charge range) and a zombie horde off to one side and at almost a 90 degree angle to my blunderbusses. Now it was very likely that due to the position of the skellies and zombies that if one unit charged the other would get blocked, but just in case fancy manoevering allowed both to get in I decided to stand and shoot the skellies as I thought with some lucky rolling I might be able to take them out whereas there was no way I was wiping out the 80+ zombie horde.
The skellies survived the S&S and he chose to charge with them first. Predictably they failed and stumbled forwards taking them into the wheel arc of the zombies, blocking them, so when he went to roll the Zombie charge distance I commented that it was an auto fail as there was no way for them to charge without going through the skellies. This elected a confuse “whuh?” from him and I pointed out the fact the skellies were blocking the zombies’ charge.
His reply was an angry “But you shoot them!” (Pointing at skellies). I replied telling him it doesn’t matter and he chose who moved first (I even grabbed the rulebook to double check). He replied with “but you shot them!”. And again I repeated it didn’t matter and he was the one who chose which to move first.
Rinse and repeat a couple of times, each time him getting angrier and angrier (and each time me getting slightly more annoyed and not knowing how to say it clearer than “It doesn’t matter, you choose which order they move in” and the last once or twice stating the stages of a charge in order). Escalate to me opening the rule book and showing the rules for charges pointing out each stage as I explain them a couple of times. Again I get an angry “but you shot them!”.
Sensing tensions rising I took a breath and thinking maybe I was talking to fast (which I sometimes do - but normally I get tongue tied and I wasn’t during my explanations), so repeated, talking slower to (hopefully) make myself easier to understand. In only got through about half a sentence (and I wasn’t talking super slowly) before I got a very aggressive/borderline violent "Oi. DON’T. Treat. Me like. a Child!"
I could only stand there open mouthed for half a second before throwing the rule book to the floor in frustration as the flight or fight response kicked in. After a few more seconds and realising how stupid that had been I went over to where another campaign game was being played (one of which was the guy running the campaign). Both players come over and on the way I explain the situation (vamps declare two charges, I S&S one, one failed and is now blocking the other). They take one look at the situation check to see if the skellies have moved (I confirm they failed and currently are where they ended up). The organiser checks the swing of of the zombies and turns to the vamp player and says “yeah it’s a failed charge.” The vamp starts to protest and the organiser says "It’s not like 40k, in fantasy you don’t S&S the first charger…"
The vamp player nodded and I sat down prepared to carry on the game, but the vamp started packing away and sulkily stated he didn’t want to play with me any more. The organiser and his opponent just shrugged and went back to their game. When I was sitting in my car later on getting some fresh air and waiting for some pain killers to kick in for my back the vamp player came out and I overheared him talking to other members sneering and saying “He just blew up for no reason and threw his book down - why would you do that it’s your own property you’re damaging.” All I could do was sit there and and shake my head. Later on when I checked the club forums I noticed the organiser had awarded me a win, so I messages him and said as there was blame on both sides I’d rather he changed it to a draw. As he’s friends with the vamp player I also asked him to pass on an apology as an intermediary as I didn’t want to risk confrontation with tempers so high. I’ll give you three guesses to the level of response I got from the vamp
But like I said, I’m not entirely blameless and in hind sight i should have gone for help after the first couple of times the vamp ignored me.
Experience 2: I really have no idea what’s up with this second guy.
I was playing a dwarf player a few weeks after the vamp incident. The guy has only skim read the rules and is more interested in chucking dice than following the rules (by that I don’t mean he literally throws dice, I mean he’s more interested in just rolling lots of dice rather than why they’re being rolled). Multiple times throughout the game the following exchanges happened -
Me: The rule is X
Him: grins and shrugs
Me: The rule is X
Him: Whoah, chill man chill. It’s just a game.
Or
Me: what does the rule say?
Him: shrug. I dunno man, I dunno.
Me:…what does it say in your book
Him: shrug
Me:…Try checking your book.
Him: Chill, chill, it’s just a game hurh hurh hurh
Add on top of this him not having read the rules on runes properly (including something that me and the campaign organiser had to explain the week before), 70-90% of his rolls being 4+ and him constantly wandering off during my turn (which makes a change from when I played him at Bloodbowl a few months ago and he spent all my turns playing on his phone), and you get a thoroughly unenjoyable game.
Unfortunately that’s not the end of it.
As some of you know I’ve been updating the Path to Glory rules. A few days ago I posted them on the club forums and this player has been throwing a temper tantrum because I won’t spontaneously change them for him just because he doesn’t want a warshrine and (at least for the first complaint or two) hadn’t bothered to read the rules properly. I also told him the first few times to wait and see what other thought and if the consensus was for it to be changed, it would get changed, but he still complained. His first complaint was demanding a giant or chimera, and when I pointed out no one else gets monsters and that monsters go against the theme of warbands, went on to moan about what others get, despite the fact one of those was a neutral table everyone can roll on (and has a 1 in 216 chance of being rolled anyway) and the other could be rolled by him if he rolled lucky. He kept on moaning about not wanting warshrines and not wanting to buy other stuff for non WoC units and I had to point out count as and listed what Beastmen units could be used for what WoC units after the campaign. And he’s kept on moaning about adding choice to the WoC table even though it has no less than others (and actually has more variety than either CD or DE tables). He has since PMed me accusing me of having an attitude with him
In your first instance the guy should really just cut his losses and take it as a lesson learned. If it was a friendly game I may have let him take the move back and do them in the other order, but in a competitive league game you need to take the harsh lessons.
One thing that peed me off about our game yesterday, sophie forgot to move her slayer lord on pony as it was hidden behind a house. We had started the shooting phase when i remembered it. When pointing it out all I got from the woman “we noticed that, but didnt say anything because we thought it might be part of your strategy”. That was very sportmanslike of you, getting one over on a 10 yr old girl in her first ever game.
Im just used to my normal gaming group, where for the sake of a good competitive game we remind each other of our special rules and options open to units and even offer advice on what we would do in that situation.
Your second opponent doesnt sound like a good opponent at all. If they are playing on their phone, havent bothered to read the rules, etc, I would be tempted to pack up and go. I get really irritated if im wasting my time like that.
Wow Dïnadan… Where do you find these guys? They sound horrible!
The vamp incident is my biggest fear. When a sore looser gets mad I’m never fearing for a ruined game, reputation or relationship. I’m however terrified by the possibility of a madman harming my miniatures. Intentionally or unintentionally. If some bastard swiped my table it would be at least 500 US dollars to compensate damage on OOP chaos dwarfs. No store owner could demand that from a regular player in the club. The idiot could just walk out of there, without me being able to do anything, except yell and cry…
Wow, you guys played with some veritable douchebags. Luckily (for me) I always had pleasant gaming experiences…
The worst that ever happened to me was a comped tournament where I managed to land at the second table one game before the end… You see, I could have won. My opponent was using Bretonnia. I had Lizardmen, mostly a skirmisher force…
And the table was flat. I mean, totally devoid of terrain (aside of 2 hills which anyway couldn’t hide anything). I complained to the referee, who shrugged his shoulders. Funny thing is that even my opponent was keen to add a couple of forests! The game ended with him winning in turn 2-3, with his army systematiccaly charging forward and eating Kroxigors, Slann and Cold Ones… I admit that I was a little upset, but the I won Best Painted and my mood improved straight away!
In your first instance the guy should really just cut his losses and take it as a lesson learned. If it was a friendly game I may have let him take the move back and do them in the other order, but in a competitive league game you need to take the harsh lessons.
torn
To be honest, if he'd said "oh sorry I didn't realise" I probably would have let him take it back and do the zombies first, especially as he'd only been playing for a few months. Which reminds me, one of his sneers I overheard later on was about how he's a newbie (although he's been playing 40k for years and has been playing for a few months so it's not like he has 0 experience and I was rules lawyering things). I just sat there thinking "then why didn't you pay attention when I was trying to explain the rules instead of ignoring me and saying the same thing over and over that didn't change a thing?" :/
One thing that peed me off about our game yesterday, sophie forgot to move her slayer lord on pony as it was hidden behind a house. We had started the shooting phase when i remembered it. When pointing it out all I got from the woman "we noticed that, but didnt say anything because we thought it might be part of your strategy". That was very sportmanslike of you, getting one over on a 10 yr old girl in her first ever game.
:o that's really underhanded and they should be ashamed of themselves.
Your second opponent doesnt sound like a good opponent at all. If they are playing on their phone, havent bothered to read the rules, etc, I would be tempted to pack up and go. I get really irritated if im wasting my time like that.
To be honest I'm more annoyed at his Holier Than Thou attitude and his belief that I'm having a go at him just because I have to repeat a rule to him than anything else. He had a similar attitude just after campaign began - the fluff for the campaign is about 200years in the future of Fantasy and is based around an invasion of the Zorn Uzkul; after the opening T&T game it turned out he'd used an illegal Lord because he hadn't read the army book properly (if I recall correctly this was around the time he was moaning about only being able to put runes on hand weapons when he wanted to put them on a great weapon), so he went away for a few days when told to retool the Lord to make it legal (we're keeping the same Lords throughout) and came back (in a group discussion on Facebook) declaring he was now using Ungrim Ironfist. I simply replied informing him that he may have to use a different name for him, and the guy started b***hing and saying "no I'm using Ungrim" which just got worse when I tried to explain about fitting into the campaign fluff and even continued when I pointed out I only said 'may' and not 'had to' and just to check with the organiser. The guy's reply was 'it says any lord in your army book so that's what I'm taking'. My reply to this was simply 'yes but there's campaign fluff and the polite thing to do is try to stick to it' and the guy declared he was quitting the campaign. Don't know about you, but I think it's a bit immature to quit a campaign just because you're too lazy to call a special character say King Bob instead of King Joe. :/. I just shook my head and left things alone after that and when the organiser came online and saw the discussion told the the guy "Calm down. You can use him and call him whatever you want; you can call him Ungrim II, Bob or Daisy the Magnificent for all I care". That seemed to mollify him and he did end up renaming the character for the campaign.
He's also pissed of the organiser slightly recently by selling off his army before having played all his games claiming that he can't win the campaign (even though he's at the top of the pack atm and if he played the remaining games would probably only lose if the Lizardmen player keeps on winning his). It's 'only' two games, but it's still a bit of a dick move if you ask me.
Wow Dïnadan... Where do you find these guys? They sound horrible!
The vamp incident is my biggest fear. When a sore looser gets mad I'm never fearing for a ruined game, reputation or relationship. I'm however terrified by the possibility of a madman harming my miniatures. Intentionally or unintentionally. If some bastard swiped my table it would be at least 500 US dollars to compensate damage on OOP chaos dwarfs. No store owner could demand that from a regular player in the club. The idiot could just walk out of there, without me being able to do anything, except yell and cry...
Malorndk
They're just people who attend the club, and bizzarely don't normally kick up a fuss.
I've only ever played the Vamp player a handful of times before (once at Fantasy a while before the campaign began and once or twice at 40k ages ago) but never really had a problem with him (biggest problem was when we played the Fantasy game last year we made a mistake regarding duplicate signature spells - we played it as you can't but you can; after the game he posted up on the club forums stating 'this is for everyone but especially Dinadan's benefit'. I remained quiet but thought 'was that really necessary?'). I've had two (non-gaming) issues with him since the game, but I'm writing one off as me being paranoid and reading too much into things. Other than with me I haven't heard of him creating a fuss.
As for the dwarf (well ex-dwarf) player, it's only recently he's been getting worse, and again, he hasn't really created a scene with others other than the naming incident i posted about above. :/
Considering I was constantly bullied in school from Year 3 to halfway through Lower Sixth (about ten years non-stop for those not familiar with the British education system), I'm not surprised that a bullying attitude by these two guys has been directed solely against me :/
I terrible to think that in a hobby as open as wargaming that people would resort to bullying.
It think its pretty safe to say you will never got along with everyone despite having a common interest, but their should always be a certain level of mutual respect between players to get along. I think in your case you will probably find in years to come people will still play games with you and some of the less adult personalities will struggle to find opponents once everyone realises what they are like.
It boggles my mind how some people manage to reach adulthood alive.
People like those mentioned above are why I generally prefer tournaments - the guys there are serious about the rules, have fully painted armies and have to play properly or they get disqualified. Moreover, they are usually nice people too.
So the incident I’m going to recount is a bit of a tricky one. I played a guy at a one day tournament in the UK last year, I’m not naming names. We were both using OnG, he had the typical netlist Savage Orc bus with all characters, I had a more varied mish-mash. Essentially, I cleaned up his chaff for few losses and was winning the game with a clear lead by turn 4. This is when things got interesting. Over the next two phases, Foot of Gork came down a total of 20 (yes, 20) times, and rolled a truly astounding amount of Hits on the Scatter die. This gave him a minor win as it just squashed loads of my stuff and there was nothing I could do about it. At the time, I just chalked it up to Gork being an a**hole (as we all know he is). However, as the game ended, one of the refs came up to me and asked if my game went ok, if I had any complaints or issues, etc. I subsequently found out this guy has a reputation for massive cheating on the UK scene. Is this a bad game experience? I can’t actually say for sure if he was cheating, but once I knew his reputation I couldn’t help but suspect him of basically every kind of tabletop evil imaginable. But then I thought, “Would I care this much about his possible cheating, or even at all, if I’d won the game?” The answer was no. Now, I like to think of myself as fair and more concerned with fun than winning, but this really made me stop and think.
No, at most a somewhat bad one. Everything else has been decent to really fun. My mates have probably had a few really bad gaming experiences from tournaments, though, by the sounds of it. Especially one couple of lads on tagteams they describe as hard to stand and actually cheating.
