The Second Annual Rapid Fire tournament went down on Saturday at Game Vault.

Turnout was shockingly low.  We’d had nearly 20 people signed up for it and had 6 at the start of the tournament (with 2 more showing up through the day).  Some folks gave a heads-up (which is fine), but many didn’t (which is less so).  You always expect a little of that (because life happens), but the scale (> 50% of signups) of it was pretty disheartening.

Regardless, it really seemed like everyone who showed up had a good time, which means the event was a success.

Results were:
Most Battle Points: John S (Space Wolves)
Best Army: Doug McN (World Eaters)
Longest Streak: (tie) Jay P (Space Marines), Matt M (Orks)

Because we had so few people, Matt H and I played a number of ringer games to ensure that 1) everyone who’d signed up was playing and 2) that people got to play different people.  This unfortunately undercut the point of the format a bit, but nobody seemed to mind.  The person “on deck” would have had to have waited around a very unreasonable amount of time.  (To offset this, we decided that losses to the ringers wouldn’t break winning streaks, but it never came up.)

That meant I finally got to use the ringer list I built for last year’s Rapid Fire:

Tau Empire

• Ethereal
• Fire Warrior Honor Guard x12
• Crisis Suit x1 – Flamer, Fusion Blaster, Multi-tracker
• Fire Warrior Team x12
• Kroot Carnivore Squad x20

It put up a better fight than I thought it would.

I was very excited and interested to see how the opposing scenarios would work out.

In short (because it’s detailed in the RF post), each player rolls for scenario.  Each player works towards their scenario and tries to prevent their opponent from succeeding in their scenario.  So, Player 1 could roll Seize Ground and Player 2 could roll Annihilation: Player 1 would try to hold the objectives and lose fewer KP/VP than Player 2, while Player 2 tries to kill more KP/VP than Player 1 while trying to deny them objectives.

Frustratingly, in the vast majority of games, both players rolled the same scenario.  So, there weren’t many cases of opposing scenarios… certainly not enough for me to get a feel for how good/bad an idea it is.

Similarly, the change to Annihilation (VP on a per-model basis vs. KP on a per-unit basis) didn’t come up often enough for me to get a feel for it.  I’m quite sure that it’s wildly impractical in a larger game, but at 500 points, it didn’t seem very hard to work out at all.  It also has some odd impacts on rules, like Combat Squadding or blobbing IG squads together, but I’m not sure that’s a big deal in the small, small points levels.

Despite the turnout, I had a good time and it looked like everyone else did.  It’s always a treat to get down to Game Vault, which is simply a great store.  (I wish it were closer to Manassas.)  We’ll be doing it again in 2011 (though likely with preregistration).