Steam-powered Gamer: Templecon is coming!

I'm now starting a series for the next couple of months on the Road to Templecon (2012), chronicling my preparations for what is bound to be an epic convention of gaming. Templecon is historically one of the biggest conventions for Warmachine/Hordes games and I plan on entering with my team into the Team Tournament this year. Part of my preparation includes list building, playtesting, and lots of painting. Let's first start with the history behind this decision (Pictures from Templecon 2011 were taken by my awesome girlfriend).

So Templecon is nearly upon us! What is Templecon? Well it's one of the biggest (if not the biggest) Steampunk convention in the US and it takes place in Warwick RI. This year the convention will take place Feb. 3rd-5th and it is sure to be EPIC this year since last year there were over 250 people playing in the Iron Arena alone!!! This year the convention is taking over the Grand Ballroom and it's certain to be a much bigger event than last year.
Last year was my first time going to Templecon. While I have been to conventions before, I have never been to a convention where there was quite so much miniatures gaming going on, specifically Warmachine/Hordes. I was fairly new to the game system at the time, and had really only been playing for almost a year, and was riding the excitement of having a complete Circle faction book. I vowed that when I went, I didn't want to play in any tournaments, and I just wanted to play in the Iron Arena. It was like Chuck E. Cheese for gamers! You could play all kinds of neat scenarios on really awesome looking boards and earn tickets! Once you got a certain number of tickets, you could exchange them for prizes. It was tons of fun but I was a little sad that after I had earned so many tickets, they ran low on prizes (there were way more people than they expected) and so I was only able to come away with a hardcover copy of Hordes Primal (Mk I). They even ran out of Templecon dice, which some people believe are cheaty-good. Sad, but at least I got something.

At least the artwork is cool

I vowed that I would return in 2012. Flash forward to the spring and I found out that our LGS was going to be hosting the New England Team Tournament - the oldest organized Warmachine/Hordes tournament on the East Coast. This tournament was actually started at another game store that I frequented when I was younger and learning how to play 40k. The trophy has survived all of these years and me and my buddies thought that we could actually stand a pretty good chance of winning the team tournament between the three of us, even though we had to compete against some real heavyweights who had been playing the game since it started 8 years ago!

The New England Team Tournament trophy.
The first game store I called my own was Avid Games

In July, the team tournament commenced with our General taking Menoth (Harbinger, eFeora, and eKreoss), our 1st Lieutenant bringing Legion (eLylith, Saeryn, and eThagarosh), and myself bringing my Circle (Baldur, eKaya, pKrueger). Come Round 3, our team was in the running for first or second place, depending on the other teams! I had two great games - first bashing eHaley in the face with a teleported Megalith, and an awesome matchup with pKrueger against unit-heavy MacBain where I used Chain Lightning spam on my own Wolves of Orboros to take down eEiryss, Harlan Versh, and a unit of Kayazy.

It looked just like this

Round 3 we were facing against team Cryx aren't for Kids - 3 local Cryx players. Ugh! Their captain is a local player who plays many armies and has thrown down with the best players in the country. We knew everyone on their team and play against them regularly at the store and we knew that they were really solid players. Their team was solid and Cryx has a lot of great matchups, and we were sweating a little because we knew that if we went 2-1 that round, we would likely secure 2nd or 3rd place in the tournament! I played against Terminus for my first time and made some silly mistakes - forgetting about some really basic rules and I thought that my opponent was about to run out of time. I got cocky and it cost me the game. Unfortuantely, we went 0-3 that round and saw our grip on the Tournament fade away.

CRYYYYYX!!!

When the dust settled, we realized how great we actually did, that we could have won it if we had not made such silly mistakes. We were convinced that the Regular Team would be reunited for the Templecon Team Tournament, certain that we have the potential to seriously compete for the top. The X-Factors being A) Hordes: Domination being released tomorrow and only having 2.5 months to practice with/against it and B) Templecon is historically the testbed for Steamroller 2012 scenarios. With event registration officially open for the gaming events, Regular Team will reunite to practice and prepare for what is bound to be our greatest challenge yet.

Stay tuned for more of my chronicles on the Road to Templecon! Here are some pictures from 2011:

I got to play against a friend on the ice table. There was a
whiteboard installed to make an ice lake, and you could break
the ice and draw holes into it (on the left) that were deep water