Congratulations to store new-comer, Eric Hoerger! The first time in the store and you schooled us…well it was close and several deserving people had 3 wins but still – your Necrons played very well. The Iron Fist League had a strong showing as always with their players Vaden Ball, Jeff Payne, and Mike Taylor taking 2nd-4th place respectively. IFL Player Kevin Bashford’s Necrons won top spot for peer-voted best paint job.

I have pictures of armies, terrain, and players. If you would like anything removed from our website please let me know and it’ll come down immediately. Thanks go to Jennifer Hoffstee for these amazing photos:

I guess this isn’t a bad problem to have…unless you want to come in and sit down to play. There is no room! We have 28 players for our 40k tournament today. There is absolutely no room and we can’t make room anywhere for any more players in the store. Sorry. I’ll post when we have space. I expect that to be around 7 or 8 pm.

Roger's Imperial Guard take on Eddie's Tyranids

Charles contemplates how to make his Death Guard Chaos Space Marines crush Don's Sisters. I'm not sure how successful he was.

My thanks go out to everyone who showed up for the 40K Beginners’ Tournament. It was absolutely amazing! Saturday (01/21/12) I woke to cold snow and ice on the streets. Surely this would deter the players – no one wants to slip with 1500 points worth or models in their hands. I came in to work thinking we would get maybe 6-10 players. My first belief that we would only get veteran players and make it a simple game day was quickly shattered by the two novice players, brothers Chase and Chandler, waiting at the door when I arrived. By 10:45 we had 20 players. By just past 11am we had 25!!! A perfect split of 12 novice players were paired with 12 veteran players. CJ Fontenot graciously acted as a roving rules judge.

Since there was such a variety of armies we were able to match every player against armies that were different from their own as well as armies they hadn’t played earlier in the tournament. We ran 3 basic scenarios – Seize Ground, Capture and Control, and Annihilation – that hopefully taught the newer players enough to play in a real tournament in the near future. Not only was each scenario different, Matt Craig (who chose the scenarios for us) set it up so players would learn different deployments – Pitched Battle, Spear Head and Dawn of War. He worked in Night Fighting and Reserves to round out the educational benefit of the games. It’s our hope that the novice players asked enough questions that they are more confident in their games and can continue playing and learning on their own.

We had such a great turnout we will re-instate our Thursday-night 40K open gaming. Show up from 6pm-midnight Thursdays for a pick up game. (Maybe post on our forums that you’re coming for a bit to make sure we have the player base for it.)

Special thanks go to CJ Fontenot for helping out with rules questions and sitting out Round 1 because of an odd player count. Scott Hull, thanks for helping set up the boards when we had to scramble to handle the large number of players. And most importantly – thanks to all the veteran players for furthering the game! You guys were patient and helpful in teaching the next generation of 40K players. The game lives on because of your efforts.

James uses his evil Orks against Jack's novice Blood Angels.

Greg Hajduk's Tyranids were just too pretty not to take a picture of - even if it was after the game.

Eaten by Zombies!

# Players: 2-4 (best with 4)
Suggested Age: 13+ (if your child can read and isn’t bothered by brain-seeking zombies go for it)
Playing Time: 20-40 minutes
MSRP: $25.95
Our Price: $20.76

Thanks go to Todd for demoing this game to Tillman, Zach and me at our board game night last night. The Zombie theme is perfectly executed. Each turn you venture out of your house looking for bigger and better swag. Zombies are lurking everywhere so it’s only natural that each turn you encounter at least one. If you successfully fight or flee from it you can scavenge your neighbor’s houses for swag – guns, ammo boxes, sandwiches, etc. The last player standing is the winner…unless the Zombies win by driving someone insane. That’s the best feature of this game – even if you lose as a living player you may win as a Zombie. You’re never out of the game.

Eaten By Zombies! is another in a long string of deckbuilding games. Like Dominion it has many different decks – called swag here – to play with making this a very variable game depending on which combination of swag items the players select. Each piece of swag has one or more of 4 symbol types on it meaning it will add to your fight or flight score, add extra swag points, or allow you to draw cards. The symbols are very clear and easy to remember making reading the cards almost unnecessary.

Those Zombies wandering around that I mentioned earlier come in 4 types each with varying degrees of swiftness and toughness. (The toughest is a little girl – go figure.) Your turn starts with you flipping a new zombie over. Sometimes it’s just one. Sometimes your “friends” might add to the zombie horde you have to deal with. Bastards. You can run from zombies or fight them. Fleeing always results in you dropping items. This is good if you want to lose low level cards from your deck or get lucky and drop Zombies from it. Successful fights result in a Zombie going into your deck. This is only good while you can screw your buddies. If you’re caught with 6 zombies in hand you go insane. Successful fights and escapes result in you picking up new swag. What I found frustrating – but great – is that no matter how good a hand you just played you are limited to 6 cards in hand. Even if you could pick up 20 pts worth of swag, if you have one spot open in your hand you can only take a single card. Ugh!!! But it does balance the game nicely. As much as this frustrated me I still liked it.

You die when you have no more items in your deck – you’ve been overrun by Zombies. Once you start losing a lot of items this can happen quickly. When you die you become a Zombie. Flip your player card over and start playing by Zombie rules. These are evil. Make it so live players can’t play Zombies, thus filling their limited hand with Zombies and driving them insane. Or make it so they have to drop two items at the end of their every turn – also frustrating. There are 6 evil ways Zombies make the living players lives harder. This means once one player dies it quickly comes to who can outlast the rest.

Another selling point: the box for this game looks like an ammo box and has plenty of room for expansions. They provided tall dividers for each swag type making the game easy to set up and easy to put away. Since each swag type only has 5 cards I expect the expansions to come quickly and cheaply. We’ll see.

Vampire Counts

New this series:

	Onslaught
	Nemesis
	Frost Giant

The Black Dragons are extremely limited. I only received 4 so these are at a premium price matching internet sales.

Brick (16 small packs + 3 large packs) $74.99 Large booster $5.99 Small booster $3.99 Black dragon $33.00

New York Time article about the change

Have your say here:
Wizards Community Page specifically for discussing changes

• Forums – sorry but this will not continue the old forums so everyone will have to create a new account. We’ll keep the old forums as an archive and provide a link but threads will not be connected from one to the other.
• Blog – a running blog that will talk about upcoming products, tournaments, past tournaments, trends in the gaming community, or whatever strikes our fancy. We will also have guest bloggers who will write articles for us based on their experience either at a tournament or on something gaming related. If you have an article you want to write you’re welcome to tell me about it. If I think it should go up it will.
• Calendar – a new and improved calendar that goes to 2012 and beyond! It’s sad that that excites me. We’ll get this up and running as soon as possible.
• Upcoming Events – you’ve seen these on other pages. These will link directly to our calendar and will no longer have to be manually updated so they’ll be much more timely than they have been in the past.
• Special Order Page
• Online Store – yes – we’ll have a real online store at some point relatively soon! This will be the last addition to the page. Items on our online store will also be sold directly to you at our brick and mortar location for the same price. Don’t worry, I won’t screw the local players to benefit customers across the country.