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

Toronto Results

 

Thanks to everyone that attended this year’s Astronomi-con Toronto event!

After a fantastic weekend of 40k battles and celebrating all that the hobby has to offer, with just shy of 300 man-games of 40k, we are pleased to announce that Best Overall was awarded to Jeff Brown and his White Scars Space Marine army!

Also congratulations to Devin Swann for being awarded Best General.

Special thanks to those that provided terrain and their time to help make this all possible.  We truly appreciate it.

Also a huge thank-you to Bill Kocher from Phoenix Games in Kitchener for his ongoing support of our events.  We encourage you all to drop in and visit there.  They’ve got a wide selection of GW products there to meet your hobby needs.

Follow the link to visit the Results page!