EndGame Oakland Commands the Largest Dropzone

Mike Montesa sent me an email about a month ago reminding me to sign up for the DropZone Commander tournament in March.  Of the 14 spots available, there were only 12 left!  Come on Mike, no need to sensationalize it.  I'll sign up, don't worry.

A few weeks later, I see another announcement on Facebook: just 8 slots left in the March tournament.  Uh huh, yeah, I'll do it.  You only have 6 people.  There are like 10 who play at Endgame.  Don't rush me.

A week later, I see the last fateful post: 2 spots left.  Wait, what?  How did you go from 6 to 12 in a week?  Okay, okay, I'll sign up, I just have to find the URL, and check my calendar, and oh shit its too late, they are grabbed.

DropZone Commander is a 10mm combined arms, dropship focused miniatures combat game by Hawk Wargames.  If you are thinking that you know that name from somewhere else, you are wrong, they have produced literally nothing else.  Each player alternates in activating groups of units to move, shoot, stab, or search for objectives.  The game is set in the year 2670, humans from Earth have expanded out to colonize the stars, found alien races and inevitably gone to war with them.  They fight mind controlling aliens, post scarcity war-loving aliens, cyborg human aliens, and rabid, savage (and yet somehow extremely effective and technologically advanced) humans.  There is a lot of history and story to the game, which can be compelling.  I play the human faction that generates a surprising number of jokes about Will Smith's character in Independence Day, mostly revolving around the oft misquoted line, "Welcome to Earf!"

Who's Annette, and why is she Running?

A friend sends me an invite on Facebook for an event: Official Net Runner Tournament.   The catch was that it was at a card shop near me called Anime Imports, and it was a Friday night.  That means that Magic the Gathering events would be going on at the same time.  What the hell - I need to write an article, so I plan to show up.  Nathan tells me that I should play in it.  He'll teach me how to play on the day before.  That sounds like a recipe for success, right? (No. -Ed)

Game On! SF Foundry: Geek Mecca

Something nerdy is happening on Tuesday and Thursday nights in San Francisco's trendy SOMA district. At the intersection of 10th and Folsom, the Folsom Street Foundry is a relatively new, astoundingly popular bar that caters to San Francisco's burgeoning population of geeky twenty and thirty-somethings.

Early on a Thursday night

On any given Tuesday or Thursday night, the vast remodeled factory fills to the brim with people playing everything from Beer Pong to Magic: The Gathering. Every type of gamer that can be catered to in a social setting has been. Tournaments, emulators, food, booze and board games are all provided for a $5 entry fee.

Star Wars: X-Wing is the New Hope for Miniature Gaming - by Seth Oakley

So I’m sitting in Gamescape playing D&D Next (aka 5th edition) when my ears twitch and I hear something over my shoulder:

“No, I have an X-Wing tournament to run that day,” Shane Case says to somebody, and I whip my head around. Whhaa?!?! Is this a lead on a competitive game that I can write about for the Ace of Geeks blog and get one more story out of the way in my quest to win back my soul? I dash over to him and hover until I there is a socially appropriate time to interject and ask awkwardly worded and poorly prepared questions. Case is completely unprepared. I can only imagine this would be like someone seeing Spider-man fighting crime and then turning into Peter Parker so that he can be a reporter for a moment.

Case is happy to answer questions for the leading competitive gaming reporter for the largest blog that starts with the letter “A” and ends with “ce of Geeks.” He tells me about the game and gives me the time and location of the event.  I’ll show up there next week, after I get some Dropzone Commander squeezed in.

Necromancy at the Bay Area Open 2014

Spoiler Warning: These guys win.

The first time I ever heard about Warhammer 40,000 was when my neighbor Corby came over and saw my brother and I playing Weapons & Warriors. He said it looked similar, and we thought that was cool, so he tried to teach us. We tried to get into it, but he wisely warned us not to. The cost of this particular wargame is little much for a 10 year old. We loved looking at the pictures, and my first memories of this game are pictures in a magazine and extrapolations from our imaginations. 16 years later, the hobby has changed significantly, and my understanding for the game, the lore, and the hobby have developed. The magic, the possibility, that wild, unfounded extrapolation born of inspired imagination is mostly dead. I say “mostly,” because after last Sunday, I will never say “dead” again. Well, except that I will, but I’m reminiscing here, cut me some slack.

Cut him some slack too, it's not easy being green.

I started playing Warhammer 40k when I was about 14. My friend got a bunch of models from his dad, and I bought some with my allowance, and we tried to figure out how to play. We went down to the local comic book shop on Saturdays and bit ankles until people took pity on us and let us join in. We met nerds for all walks of life, all ages, genres, and stereotypes. Goths, bikers, teachers, bouncers, software developers, insurance agents, we all had something in common and it brought us together once a week. I was raised by my parents every morning and evening, by my teachers 5 days a week, and by the foul mouthed, uncouth, irreverent, tough loving nerds of DNA cards and comics one day out of seven.

The Super Blood Bowl, er, wait, The Blood Super Bowl, hmm, no….. by Seth Oakley

On Thursday, my friend Tau Kid messages me and tells me that the championship game of the Seaside Blood Bowl League is this afternoon at 4, and if I want to cover it for the Ace of Geeks podcast and blog, I should show up. His name isn’t actually Tau Kid, it’s Steven, but I’ve called him that for as long as I have known him, and I don’t feel like giving up traditions today. I show up at Anime Imports, the shop where the game is to be held (and hereafter known as Anime Imports Stadium), and there are about a dozen screaming fans there to watch the match. By “screaming fans,” I mean “stereotypical nerds,” and by “watch the match,” I mean “ignore Blood Bowl and play Magic.” Oh well. Steven, Lee, and Efren are crowded around a Blood Bowl mat and the game is about to begin.

Blood Bowl is a game created by Games Workshop and then handled off to Specialist Games. It would have died when Specialist Games folded, but the fans picked up the banner and now maintain a "Living Rule Book" that is shared among players. I think "Undead Rule Book" would be a little more appropriate, considering that they are essentially playing with the corpse of a previous rules set, but that’s not for me to decide. Now the rules are maintained by an organization called NAF World Headquarters. In the original rules, NAF stood for Nuffle Amorical Football, the fictional organization that controlled the fictional league. If you think that this is a parody of “North American Football,” you might be right. It is a game produced by Brits that exaggerates the violence and mayhem of Football as Americans know it.

Doesn't look THAT exaggerated. -Ed

The game is played by 2 humans that control a set of models which represent players in the game. The teams available come from the Warhammer Fantasy setting, so you will see elves, facing off against dwarves, orcs and goblins, ogres and minotaurs, skeletons and zombies, and more. NAF is constantly approving additional teams. Furthermore, there are a number of miniature lines that sell a variety of fantastical football miniatures. These include gnomes in mechs, platypus sportsmen, and dwarves with beer helmets. Players also convert and sculpt a lot of their own miniatures, since there are so few models compared to other games by the same company. With only 18 or so models to assemble and paint, many players have more than one team.

League play starts off by the human “hiring” a team of players and playing games with the same list. Injuries, upgrades and even deaths are tracked as the seasons progress. Rosters change as teams win games and get more money to hire new players, or retire older players that don’t help them out. All of these are tracked on the league website, seaside.bloodbowlleague.com. This league has a round robin format: each player is scheduled to play another and given two weeks to find time for a game. The results are then reported to the league managers and recorded for the next round. Once everyone has played everyone else, the top two teams are given byes, the next four put in the playoffs to determine who will make it to the semis. The top two teams of the playoffs then play in single elimination tournament with the two who received byes earlier.

First place is given the top prize, a full 18 model team, purchased with the proceeds from the entry fees collected at the start. Steven said there were 11 teams this season, which is on the high end for them. Typically they have 8 to 12 teams, and it takes about 5 months to run an entire season. They had 2 “Challenges” so far, smaller events with 3 or 4 teams. Registration for season 5 is coming up, so if you are interested, head on over to their website.

The game I watched was simple enough to understand in observation, but the moves and maneuvers made by the players definitely had a hidden logic to them. The championship match was between Efren and his Rage City Brawlers, a Chaos team, against Lee and his Rotland Reapers, an Undead team. The Reapers started off with the ball and proceeded to run it up the field to score. There was a lot of pushing and shoving from both teams, rolling of dice and moving of models. Finally a hole in the defense opened up and the Ghoul ball carrier went for it. Efren brought up one of his half beast, half man defenders to hit him, knocked to ball out, and we all watched as it bounced over the pitch. Off the back of minotaurs, over the thick skull of zombies, past the mummy line man, the ball knocked its way around the pitch (moving randomly on the determination of a die roll), until it landed in open space. All the while, players are still beating on each other, pushing each other around, and tossing the opposing side into the stands. That last part is especially rough, since the fans are so blood frenzied that they can do more damage to a player than some of the players.

And that is the spirit of blood bowl. What looks on the surface to be a silly parody of a game we know, made by people an ocean away who are ridiculing it for being exceptionally violent, is actually a strategic game where the bouncing of a ball make the difference between victory and defeat. Beneath the “beer and pretzels” facade is 10 games of team planning, player acquisition, injury management, blood, sweat, tears, and lot more blood. Humans keep careful records of the game progress, who injured who, what skills that guy has, and when they should use the re-rolls that are purchased at the beginning of the game. If one of your players is a wild animal, who knows what he is going to do next round? Do you rely on him to make an important tackle, or do you draw resources from somewhere else in case he doesn’t listen? These sorts of questions show on the faces of the coaches as they puzzle out their next move, and consider their options. Don’t let the goofy looking cheerleaders or the medic model with a bone saw in one hand and oversized syringe in the other fool you: this is still a thinking man’s game.

The community in the US is not that large, Steven says. They have a league of 8 to 12 regulars. They have contact with the Freebooters Alliance Blood Bowl League, a southern California league. There's also the West Coast Quake, a Blood Bowl Tournament with 6 rounds. Last year they had 16 participants in Pasadena, California. These numbers seem low compared those seen at Warhammer Fantasy or Warmachine/Hordes games, and Steven admits they are. While there is a competitive aspect to the game, he sees the social draw in it too. When life or work or family get in the way of this, the game falls to the side, and other social activities take its place. In Europe, however, the scene is booming. In 2011, the Dutch Bloodbowl Community hosted a “World Cup” which brought in 478 teams. After 3 days and 9 rounds each, an Englishman took home the trophy. Steven says that 50 or 60 team leagues are not uncommon in Europe. Maybe that’s because we can play actual football here.

Seth Oakley is an educator and Returned Peace Corps Volunteer who lives in Daly City, CA. He loves costuming, analog gaming and role playing games. He got this job in a bar after making poor life choices and has to work through 94 more articles before Mike will give him his soul back. If there is an event you would like to see covered, let him know.

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Smash Up: How a Thirteen Year Old Game is Still Going Strong. by Mike Fatum

When I was growing up, I thought wavedashing was bullshit. I was a massive, massive fan of Super Smash Bros, and an even bigger fan of Melee, and I was beyond a shadow of a doubt the best player that I knew. I'd invite my friends over, and within two minutes the complaints would start. "Well, you're only this good because you own the game!" they'd complain, while desperately trying to avoid my unbeatable Marth tactics of dodge, dodge, smash them off the screen, wait for them to come back, and repeat. I was a living god of Smash, and there's no way anyone could be better than me unless they were cheating.

So wavedashing, L-cancelling, and all the other advanced Melee techniques that I saw glimpses of on grainy video from tiny tournaments around the country - well those were exploits performed by cheaters. No real Melee player would ever resort to such dirty tactics. I put it out of my mind and moved on with my life, blissfully aware that I was the greatest Marth player who ever lived.

Boy was I wrong.