2016 Warhammer 40k GT

Warhammer 40k:

The Tournament Pack, which includes army construction rules, schedule, and the first two missions, can be found here

Summary:

  • 1850 points; 6 rounds – 2.5 hour rounds
  • Lists Construction Rules (3 Detachments, Forgeworld Allowed)
  • ITC FAQ
  • 4 Rounds Saturday (7:30 am to 8:00 pm)
  • 2 Rounds Sunday and awards (9:15 am to 4:15 pm)

Please read the thoughts below to help qualify some of the decisions we made for our tournament:

Concern #1: The Bugeater is losing its unique format and becoming a standardized ITC event.

If you were one of the people expressing this concern, rest easy.  This is absolutely not the case at all.  The goal of the Bugeater has always been to run the event the way we think it should be run, but have enough standard, recognizable elements that people do not have to completely change their approach to the game to attend.

So what are we taking from the ITC?  Two and a half-ish things.  First, as you’ll see in a few days, most of the list construction rules are in line with the ITC.  This was the biggest thing we wanted to line up with the ITC on because it would mean that players would have the easiest time attending the Bugeater if they’re also going to other, ITC centered events.  And this matches what you wanted (more on that later).

But what is NOT changing?  Soft scores – painting and sportsmanship are not going anywhere, and their values will remain just as they have the first five years of the event.  We will also develop our own missions again, but they will be blended between traditional missions and maelstrom.  We had some growing pains doing this last year, but based on our lessons learned and some great feedback you provided in the survey they’ll look better – look to the primer pack missions when they come out.

So bottom line -there are no drastic changes to how we’ll be doing business at the Bugeater!

Survey Results

List Construction results were not surprising.

  • 80% wanted 1850 points.
  • 74.4% wanted the proposed ITC based list restrictions (3 sources, can duplicate 1, etc.)
  • We’ll be banning Come the Apocalypse allies.  51.3% wanted this rule, and 33.3% would tolerate this rule.  Only 15.4% said this would cause problems.
  • Forgeworld is in.  Only 7% said they don’t think it should be allowed.  33.3% wanted Forgeworld, and 48.7% said they were fine with it so long as they provided the rules.
  • Forgeworld lists will also be in.  64% were fine with it in some fashion (either saying they love FW army lists or they’d be fine with an opponent so long as they had a list of special rules and such to look at).
  • Obviously for both of the FW items, we will have a list of approved choices.  This will be our OWN list, but obviously we’ll look at Adepticon/ITC/others for inspiration
  • 90% wanted us to limit to one fortification.  That’s an easy one.
  • 56.4% want us to limit Lords of War to one choice with the ITC exceptions

Other Items Of Note:

  • Although many favored the ITC FAQ, there were some vocal concerns by some, especially for certain armies (*cough* Tau *cough*).  So what we’ll do is provide an open comment period on what rulings you feel are important to include, which ones you don’t like, etc.  Our tournament staff will look it over, and by February we will have our own FAQ document, borrowed heavily from the ITC.
  • We’ll still be fine tuning how we do Maelstrom missions.  Literally half wanted the chart style that we used last year and half wanted cards (37.5% want us our deck, 12.5% want a GW deck).  So this will require some internal thoughts on our part.

Hopefully this gives you something to chew over until the primer is out.  And if you have any questions let us know!