VICC's and Grey Knights, oh my!

  The Victorian Inter-Club Championships (VICC) were held over the weekend, and they are perhaps my favourite tournament of the year! The guys over at wargamers of Latrobe devised the idea a while back, and this is the second year my club has entered. Clubs from around Victoria come and enter teams into Warmachine, Warhammer fantasy and Warhammer 40k and the club who does the best across the board is crowned as the best wargaming club of Victoria! (Australia)


Last year I was drafted in to play 40k, despite the fact that before the tournament i'd played one game of 40k since 3rd ed. This year however I was slightly more prepared, I even finished my own army, the Grey Knights above. As for gameplay i'd still only managed to get about 6 or 7 games in with them before the tournament, but I'm a pretty quick study. The tournament format is a bit different from usual, and this is where it becomes really interesting and fun for me. Each team has 4 players, with a possible 5th player sub, or simply a 5th army. The teams are comp scored as an average score for the entire team, so some teams use the 5th army as a extremely soft list, that will never see the table, so they can get away with some harder lists for the 4 players. We however had 5 players so went with what we had.
  Day one of the tourny is solo matches, 3 rounds , 4 games per round solo matches, but the difference here is we're given 4 scenarios before the round starts, and we get to decide which of our armies fights which scenario. Basically with a bit of strategising you can stack the games in your teams favour (in theory).
  Day two is different, its 2 team games of 2v2, again with scenarios before you decide on the match ups, this can lead to a lot of fairly interesting combinations, and this is where having a 5th army really shines, because there are a lot more options covered in terms of objective grabs, or kill point options.
  The team we entered for 40k had 3 returning players from last year, myself, our team captain Brad (over at http://landomisfittoys.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/viccs-come-around-again.html) and nick. Then our newly drafted players were Adam (over at http://thegoldend6.com/) and Aarron, who's claim to fame is he got paid by the Army to play in a 40k tournament over the summer.
  Now to the interesting stuff, the armies, as you can see above my grey knights got done for the tourny, finishing touches went on litereally the night before. Sorry for the shitty blurred pics, they looked decent on my phone at the time.

This is a different pic to the first i swear, its slightly more or less fuzzy depending on how you squint.. also there are legs behind it

 The list had a librarian, 5 termis with psycannon, a 10 man strike squad with 2 psycannon in a rhino, a 5 man strike squad with psycannon in a razorback, a purifyer squad with 2 psycannon in a razorback, a 5 man interceptor squad with a psycannon, and 2 rifleman dreds, a liberal addition of thunderhammers, and psybolts to the vehicles and the 10 man squad of marines. The army was designed to be a slow moving wall of torrent fire, able to move 6 inches and fire to near full effect, with A LOT of shots. Usually maneuverability would be an issue, but given we could pick and choose armies to match scenarios I was able to heavily stack the firepower with this list.

Ok this is an interesting army, it is in fact a fully scratch built Tzeench deamon list, the small eyeballs are the horrors, the white things are flamers, the blue and pink large balls are deamon princes, the tounges are screamers, and the giant white eyeball is the greater deamon. This is actually a very shooty army, and when things work out can shoot people off the board pretty fast. Sadly nick who played it did not get his prefered half to show up once all tournament, then managed to have his greater deamon die 3 times to to basically the first unit that shot at him.

 The next armies were mostly suplied by Brad, 3 of the other 4 being his armies.

Sorry for the blurryness, just squint a little

 This is the army Brad played, the imperial guard Air Cav, ridiculously fast, with lots of guns. 4 valkyries and 2 vendettas, and the boys inside them at 1500pts is a scarey prospect. This was what we planned to use in a lot of the games where we had to push out and seize objectives, and for the most part they worked pretty well.

The final of Brads armies is the "alien" themed nid list, alot of troops, with only a couple big monsters, one being the tervigon (alien queen) who can pump out babies, (the eggs) this was backed up by a trygon , alot of little things, some genestealers and the DOOM in the easter egg.  This army was another army we'd liked to use for capture points ect, rather than kill points, given the vast amount of troops.

The final army on team Hampton was this chaos warriors list. Adam over at the golden d6 brought this, it is remarkably friendly, 5 rhinos with 6 troops in each, typhus and some buddies, not even 1 lash. Thankfully adam actually knows what hes doing with this army unlike the rest of us, and didn't drop a game with them on day 1, he coudlnt make it on day 2 but we subbed this army in instead of the air cav for one of the games.



   Overall we did pretty well for a bunch of guys who havent played much 40k, in the past year, the competition actually had some of the best 40k players in victoria there as you'd expect. In the end our team came 5th overall, but we did win best sports, which im stoked about! and we came second in best painted, infact it was so close they had to get an extra judge in to decide the best painted.


  As for the rest of the tournament, our warmachine guys clean swept, they went into the last round so far ahead they could have napped under the tables and still won overall best warmachine. Fantastic effort from them. The warhammer boys however, disapointed us, they went into the tourny with the best warhammer player in australia, and the rest being top 20 easily, and somehow only managed to scrape out a second place. But also got a best painted for their efforts.



   The tournament as a whole was looking pretty close, but the solid effort across all 3 game systems brought us home with a win, and we retained our title of  Best Wargaming Club In Victoria (and lets face it australia) , Incredibly stoked and proud of everyone involved ! and already looking forward to next years event.

The organisers even sculpted this prize for everyone from the winning club!

And here it is, proof we're the best, now we're going to fight to the death over who gets to keep the plaque

As for the grey knights, expect better pics and an update on how they performed next time!