New Edition – New Format

As we’ve hinted at over the past number of months, we’ve been working on an updated event format for 8th edition.  One focused on the things we have always taken great pride in – story-driven games of Warhammer 40,000.

We have made a lot of changes which we hope will give players a very enjoyable Narrative 40k experience.

The foremost change is to drop the ‘Tournament’ label.  Our signature events will no longer follow the ‘Swiss’ Tournament style. Ours will now be promoted as Narrative Events.  Players will be paired-up across factions to better support narrative play.

We’re also moving away from the conventional Matched Play Points format into new territory – Power Level will be the new standard for army selection – with a few restrictions to help ensure fairness.

Players will represent their army’s Faction and compete with other members of their Faction for a Best in Faction award.  However, they will never directly face each other across the table, due to the narrative nature of game pairings.

Scenarios will continue to be one of the things that makes our events unique.  With 8th edition, we have the opportunity to revisit all of our scenarios and give them some much needed streamlining – but also added twists with things like Stratagems, Warlord Traits, and Battlezones! Scenarios will also have their own Narrative Objectives for players to try and achieve in addition to the Primary Objective.  All in the name of good storytelling!

We’ve listened to our players asking for larger battles, and we expect armies to have a little more going for them with a 90 PL cap.  To help ensure that players get complete games in, we’ve brought the time limit for each round up to three hours.  Without the need to determine swiss-pairings each round, we’ll be able to have player pairings posted in a fraction of the time it required in the past.  So less time waiting and more time gaming!

We’re also making a change to the number of games.  For our upcoming Toronto event we will be doing five games – Three on the Saturday, and two on the Sunday – this will hopefully allow players (and us organizers) to wrap up the event at a more reasonable time to allow everyone to be present for awards and better allow us to tear-down in a reasonable time-frame to give us all a chance to visit over dinner and drinks afterwards.

While we still have plenty of work ahead of us to have everything ready for September, we wanted to share our new format with you all so you can be better prepared for what’s ahead. We are excited for what’s ahead and hope that everyone will try and approach our new format with an open mind and an expectation of a fun weekend of what we hope will be the best the hobby can offer!

 

Astronomi-con – Thoughts For The Future

Christian and I had a deep heart to heart on Astro this past weekend. We talked and schemed and thought hard about the game’s past and the game’s future and the possibilities provided by 8th edition.

We have come up with some very exciting new ideas.

When Astronomi-con was first begun, we were in many ways a ‘standard’ Rogue Trader Tournament event. One of the very first ones in fact. However even at that very first event in 2001, we did some things that were completely different and ground breaking and that no one else did.

One thing was that, instead of trying to ‘make every game the same’ which was the standard from GW on down at the time, we realized that we simply did not have the resources to have matching terrain for 20 odd tables. Really only GW could do that. So instead, since the terrain would never be ‘the same’ we decided instead to embrace the differences. Make every table different, not only the terrain – but the actual scenarios that went with it too. This would give each and every person a truly unique tournament experience. Yes, it sacrificed some ‘balance’ but the more we thought about it – well games were never perfectly balanced anyway. Some armies have always been more powerful than others and there has always been a certain amount of ‘rock paper scissors’ with some army interactions, where army A could beat army B almost every time but army B would beat army C which would then, surprisingly, beat army A every time. We couldn’t make 40k play like Chess. It wasn’t designed that way. Instead – we chose to embrace those differences and try as much as possible to keep the game and the event ‘fair and fun’ while understanding that perfect balance was not something that was possible.

So – different terrain, different scenarios. Transparent scoring systems (almost unheard of at the time). Converted models. Forgeworld (also close to unheard of at the time). When it came along we allowed VDR – something no one else ever did that we know of. We allowed flyers when they were FW only, the rules were clunky and pretty much no one else did. We embraced difference.

That is our legacy.

Now the world of 40k has changed. There are now specific rules for ‘matched play’ and very specific expectations of the word ‘tournament.’ But there is also Open Play and Narrative play.

So – we are going to take a chance and again lead the way. The Astronomi-con ‘Tournament’ will now be the Astronomi-con Narrative Event weekend.

Okay – that seems a change that may startle, but take a deep breath and bear with us here. In many ways, Astro will not change. There will still be awards, points, scoring for the things that we have done in the past. We will change some of how that works of course, but 8th required that anyway.

We’ve tried a number of things recently and have had some very good success with them both conceptually and at our Narrative event at JimCon. We will be looking at ‘narrative’ match ups rather than pure ‘who kicked butt’ swiss systems. So that the whole eldar on eldar, guard on guard, marine on marine thing will be reduced or eliminated.

Scenarios will become even more engaging with Stratagems for each scenario making CPs even more important than ever. There will be scoring for Army Narrative – how well the army tells its ‘story’ within the 40k Universe (this will replace ‘theme’).

Awards will still exist – although we are looking more toward ‘Best Faction’ so that the person you are playing against will never be someone you are competing against. Instead the Necron players will be striving to do well as a team, with the one who does the best taking home the trophy (as an example).

We plan on using Power Level for army building, rather than matched play points, but there will be a hybrid system so that summoned critters are not ‘free’ etc. in order to keep things fair and fun.

The end result will be something truly new. Not a ‘tournament’ in the sense that LVO is – but something different, exciting and – we hope, huge fun and rewarding for every single attendee, win lose or draw.

We hope you’ll enjoy it – certainly we are SUPER excited about it. More to come as the work continues.

Mike M. and Christian A.
Astronomi-con Co-Organizers

Open War! – Scoring

We’ve released the Scoring rubric for the upcoming Open War! event at JimCon 7 on Saturday, November 18th.

As primarily a narrative event, we wanted to ensure that all aspects of the hobby were well represented – and thanks to player feedback from previous events we’ve posted scoring guidlines for our attendees to ensure all participating are able to score their opponents accurately.

We’re looking forward to a great day of 40k and hope you can join in on the fun!

Open War!

We’re excited to formally announce our upcoming event Astronomi-con: Open War!

This will be a one-day three-game narrative style event, taking place Saturday November 18th as part of Winnipeg’s JimCon 7 tabletop gaming convention.

Registration is only $10.00 plus your JimCon membership fee.  We encourage those planning on attending to go for the JimCon Weekend pass (Fri-Sun) and to experience even more of what JimCon has to offer!

Space for this event is extremely limited, so we encourage you to register as soon as possible to secure your spot at what we hope will be a fun-filled day of narrative-style 40k gaming!

 

 

Astronomi-con Toronto 2017

We are excited to announce that Astronomi-con will return to Toronto in 2017, on April 29th and 30th!

We will once again return to the Best Western Plus Milton, the home of Astronomi-con Toronto for the past few years.

Registration for our signature event is now open! Please visit the Registration Page to sign up.

For those that had registered for The Imperium Besieged and have not yet asked for a refund, your registration fees have been transferred towards this event.
We will be contacting everyone on this list to confirm their registration status.

We look forward to putting on another great event for you all!

The Imperium Besieged – Trailer

Objective Markers

As part of The Imperium Besieged, players will be required to bring two objective markers which will be used in all of the scenarios.

These objective markers should be on bases between 40mm and 60mm in size.  Players are encouraged to create objectives which are thematic in nature and suit the army being played.

We hope to offer an award for Best Objectives at the event, which would be voted on by the players.

The Imperium Besieged – Registration

 

Registration for our upcoming event: The Imperium Besieged will open on Tuesday, June 7th at noon Eastern time.

The registration fee will be $100.00 CAD per player.

To ensure a balance between Imperium and non-Imperium players, the Imperium Faction will initially be capped at 25 players.

Players will include their Faction information at the time of registration.   They will also have the option to provide an Alternate Faction, should they be willing to switch to another Faction at a later time due to Faction registration imbalances.

Astronomi-con Toronto 2015 – Registration Now Open!

Registration for this year’s Astronomi-con Toronto event is now open!

We have been debating the exact format of this year’s tournament for the past couple of weeks and have decided to go with a more traditional format which excludes Lords of War.

There are a few updates to the website which are still underway, so expect a few changes over the next little while, but we wanted to get registration open to allow everyone to get signed up and allow us to prepare for the event.

We would like to add some more sponsors to support this year’s event, by providing terrain, prizes, or both.  If you or your organization are interested in being a sponsor, please contact the organizers.

We look forward to seeing you this summer!

Astronomi-con Toronto – In The Books

Another Astronomi-con event is now in the record books.  This past weekend’s Astronomi-con Toronto event was a huge success.

Congratulations to Johnathan Ho this year’s winner of Best Overall.

 

We would like to also congratulate the rest of the Award winners, as well as thank everyone that helped make this event possible.

Full results can be found here.

 

Huge thanks go out to Jim Baidacoff, Dave Graham, Nick Itsou, George Symon, Peter Smith and the Stratford Gaming Union, as well as Warmaster’s Challenge and Phoenix Games in Kitchener for all of their support and dedication.  Also, big thanks go out to everyone that attended the event.   Without you all, the event couldn’t be possible!

We are already looking forward to coming back to Toronto for another event – hopefully sooner than later!