Seattle Open Thoughts and Reflections

Prologue:

The Seattle Open was last weekend, and I had been prepping pretty hard for it. I'd dojo'd out some sweet tech for Wurmwood with a Moonhound Argus and Woldwyrds a-plenty, and I had also decided to bring a massive ARM skew with Baldur 2 and two Woldwraths.

I had all my tokens, my templates, and other knick-knacks all ready to go. I even had a water bottle, which doesn't always happen.

I ended up going 1-1 and dropping, and the games I played were both pretty emotionally wrenching and tilting, so I won't be doing full on battle reports for them.

I would first like to make a SERIOUS disclaimer - this is all from my perspective, and I am human, flawed, and deeply biased towards myself.

That being said, I am going to do my best to give an objective accounting of what happened. I'm not looking for pity, nor for condemnation, although I might deserve a little of both. The goal is, as usual, to be informative, helpful, and honest.


Game 1:

Game 1 I was dropped into a Cygnar player who had Haley 2 and Caine 3. I dropped Baldur 2 and away we went.

The game went pretty much as expected. I slowly killed off his Shadowfire models and he killed off everything but my Woldwraths.

Caine's feat turn only did about 15 damage to one Woldwrath after completely taking out Megalith, and I healed the Wrath up to 5 boxes off full.

At this point my opponent proceeded to one round a Woldwrath with pow 12 shooting.

Needless to say, I was fairly frustrated after that turn, especially since over the course of the game my opponent had gotten minor rules on his models incorrect and I'd helped him remember. Examples include Ace having a Shadowfire gun, the Squire only being speed 6, etc.

The following turn, in order to keep my remaining Woldwrath away from Caine, he ran.

He measured 4 inches, placed Caine. Measured 4 more inches, placed Caine. Measured an additional four inches and placed Caine again. He then measured 4 more inches directly away from the Woldwrath and placed Caine once more.

Side note for those who don't play Cygnar - Caine is speed 7, so he can run 14 inches, not the 16 my opponent had attempted to.

At this point, I made a massive mistake. I informed my opponent that Caine was only speed 7, took my 2 inch widget, and bumped Caine back 2 inches from his ending position.

My opponent finished his turn, shoving everything he could in front of the Woldwrath, and at the end of the turn we realized that Baldur was now in charge distance of Caine, and indeed charged and killed him the next turn.

Now, this was massively not okay on my side, and I realize that. First of all, I should never be touching another person's models at a tournament unless I have their permission to. Secondly, I didn't call a judge.

That is the big one right there.

In this situation, I should have raised my hand, screamed "JUDGE" at the top of my lungs, and had the TO come over and resolve the situation. I am fairly certain that the TO would have ruled similarly to what I ended up doing, but this way it would have been legitimate and not given me a fairly illegitimate win.

I would like to say that I wasn't thinking clearly, that I was on tilt after an absolutely unreal turn of dice play by my opponent and after a game of constant corrections, and I was, but the truth of the matter is that NONE OF THAT MATTERS and what I did was WRONG.

I am not proud of that game, and I will remember it for the rest of my life. If my opponent from that round reads this, please know that I am incredibly sorry and that it will never happen again.

.........................

I nearly dropped after that game, and I almost wish I had.


Game 2:

I played Wurmwood into Zerkova 1. The details of the game don't really matter except for these few points:

1) My opponent had a lot of countercharging models, and at one point he forgot to clock back over to me after he did for an unspecified length of time. I feel that length of time was between a minute and a minute and a half, and my opponent felt that it was more in the 3-5 minute range.

2) I gave my opponent 1 minute of my clock.

3) At the final turn of the game, the clock was 29 seconds on my time, 3 seconds on my opponent, and the score was 3-3 tied.


.....................


On that turn, I quickly said that I wasn't doing anything with any of my models, and clocked over with 14 seconds of time remaining.

My opponent instantly clocked back to me, and I clocked right back, informing him that he had a 15 second minimum turn length.

While that happened, his clock ran out.

My opponent then tossed 3 dice twice, representing a mark 2 great bear swinging at the objective, and said that he killed it and scored to 5.

I called the judge over, but because there were no bystanders able to corroborate, and my opponent believed that he actually should have had more time left on his clock than he did, the judges were unable to give a legitimate ruling and were going to give both of us a game loss.

My opponent asked if he could have ten seconds of time to move 3 iron fang pikemen with ghost walk to charge the objective and see if they killed it.

Rather than have both of us take a game loss, I agreed, and my opponent killed the objective with exact dice.


....................


Heart-wrenching is how I would describe that experience. Certainly I haven't gotten so low on clock in nearly four years of playing, and that experience is stressful.

Lessons learned here - when the clock starts to get low, call the TO over to make sure that everything is done on the level. There should have been absolutely no confusion about who won that game, but instead there was bedlam and ultimately my opponent and I were forced into a really crummy roll off to see who would take the game. Don't let this happen to you.

Furthermore, check with your judge before the event and find out their clock policy. Most judges will say that each player is responsible for clocking back their time to their opponent. Establish this before the game.

Conclusion:

I am, to put it bluntly, extremely disappointed with myself and my performance at the Seattle Open. I still need to grow a lot as a player, especially as a competitive one.

I am glad that I have several months before the next large even I plan to play in. In that time, I will be focusing very hard on cleaning up my play, making my opponents and myself both accountable for our time, and in general just pushing myself to be a better player, opponent, and proponent of the game.

This won't be happening again.