International wargaming event in Finland, and I decided to go!
Full travel report incoming, so buckle up 😉
I also want to interject here that I wanted to post this soo much earlier than now – this all happened back in early april, so today it’s almost a month ago. I mainly write for The Bench when it’s slow at work though, and these last weeks have been crazy.
Sooo even though it can be debated if that’s a good reason, there it is.
TLDR;
It was a super awesome trip, and I had a really good time, and played lots of Guild Ball.
Early friday morning. At 05:30 I took a four hour bus trip from Luleå to Umeå.
Cold but beautiful spring morning in northern Sweden.
Initially there were more of us going, but it ended up being only me from Luleå who could make it.
After the bus I met up with friends in Umeå and took the ferry over the Bothnic Sea to Waasa in Finland.
After arriving in Finland we were picked up by Atte, the absolutely wonderful event host, who came to the docks just to pick us up. We drove to the hotel Vallonia, where we were both staying and playing the whole weekend.
They had rented the whole conference wing of the hotel all through the weekend, and it was a super nice place for an event like this. Just recently renovated even, so everything was fresh and bright, and with good air and enough space for eveything. All in all, an awesome venue.
I met up with another international guest, Lorand (who was called “the french guy” but is born in Hungary and now lives in Austria) who flew in from a lot farther away than me. We shared the hotel room to save expenses, and also got to discuss wargaming and lots of other things a lot. He was there for the Warmachine event, but played Guild Ball as well back in the days. Great guy, really happy to’ve met him.
After checking in and getting a look around I got a beer and hung around in the play area poking around with the extra terrain I brought, and chatting with Warmachine players who were getting casual games in. I hoped to catch a game or two of GB before turning in, and after a while some more GB people showed up, so we did get some evening games!
I played one game against Order and one against Alchemists. Overall a great friday night after a long travel-day, I wish I had more fridays like that. 😀
Food blog interlude!
Breakfast on saturday included among other things, my first encounter with Karelian Pierogi – which is basically small baskets of thin bread filled with porrige, and then dipped in melted butter if what I was told is correct. Sounds insane hehe, but was really really good. Especially with bacon on top <3
I have a friend who’d call it “body building” so I’ll stick with that 😉
Back to gaming. During setup for the tournament day 1 we realised that some finnish players were only intending to play that first day, or staying but playing either MCP (Marvel) or Warmachine events on the second day. So we all agreed that it was better to remake the round structure, and we ended up on making two different events for the weekend instead.
I think in hindsight we could’ve kept it as a two-dayer and just dropped the players who wouldn’t remain for day two, but also at that point we weren’t sure if we could shake loose others to join for day two, that weren’t playing in day one.
The warmachine event was a big one with lots of attendees and really great prizes. Guild Ball is a lot smaller as usual, but honestly it didn’t feel “small” either. No less awesome, and the mood in the hotel over the weekend with all the wargamers was just great overall. Met lots and lots of new people that I hope to meet again when going to the Warmachine WTC in october.
Also! Big shout out to the hotel and event organizer, for having a drink cart going around the gaming area several times each day – that’s just so many kinds of awesome!
Link to the saturday event on Lonshanks.
I had decided to play Hunters, mostly since I wanted to give new Zarola and Fahad some playtime. In the pic there above you can see my old proxies from before I bought the Falconers box. Mataagi is a Reaper Bones ranger of some sort, with an added bird from Green Stuff World, and Minerva is a Raging Heroes model that I modified with some Warmachine bits 🙂
For my tournament roster 12 I really felt like I wanted to play everyone but in the end I decided on:
Theron
Skatha
Fahad
Zarola
Seenah
Egret
Mataagi
Minerva
oHearne
vHearne
Ulfr
vMinx
Which means the cuts were Steeljaw, Snow, Chaska, Jaecar, Edge.
* I didn’t own Steeljaw before this weekend (do now tho, thanks Tini!) and I knew I wanted to main Fahad so I also decided to cut Snow.
* Edge I know to be good but I tried playing her again for the first time in ages on the friday evening casual games, and I didn’t feel like I could do her justice, so I decided to cut her for the tournament.
* Chaska is my boy, but I also felt like everyone said he’s the lastpick, sooo since I wanted to try all models I could just as well cut him this time.
* Jaecar is the model in Hunters that I’ve gotten the least out of I think. I still want to try him more, but he was basically the only squaddie that I knew for sure beforehand that I would cut.
My first game was against Alchemists. It was an incredibly tight match, that I finally won on death clock, with the score 11-11 due to both of us clocking out.
I recieved and picked Skatha, but only managed to get 1 goal and 1 takeout, while Tini got 2 goals and 1 takeout. He spent slightly more time on his clock though, which is what ticked up my points that much and finally kill him.
I don’t think either of us played slow neither – both of us just managed to counter the other’s plans very effectively several times, which made for a long game. It was very tense, and at the end it felt like a final with people watching us trying to squeeze the last points from each other.
Game two was against Order and I was on the back foot all through it to be honest. I got some work done, but in the end I just couldn’t keep up.
I played against the same Order player in one of the friday casual games, and in that match he surprised me with how effectively his Order models beat me down and got takeouts. So I was prepared for that this time, and thus of course he only ever touched the ball and none of my models, and I barely got to poke at his models. Well played Sir, well played.
The last snare was a huge play mistake I made where I spent one too many INF with Zarola to not be able to buy Chain Bolas for a ranged KD that I really needed. Might’ve missed anyway of course, but it was just a frustrating end to a match that I’d aaalmost not yet lost already, hehe.
Still had fun tho! No shade whatsoever on my opponent, and I’m not one to wallow in misery!
Third game was against Engineers. I got to do several big and fun activations where Zarola and Fahad and Seenah got to do basically everything I wanted them to do.
I clocked out this game however, and lost because of that. But if I’d had more time (or played faster… dammit) I think I would’ve had a good chance to win, with some good positioning and opportunities for more takeouts. All in all a really fun game even though I lost in the end.
So all in all I went 1-2 in the saturday tournament.
After the tournament was over there was still quite some time left of the day, and I really mostly wanted to play more Guild Ball. To my huge satisfaction the event organizer Atte wanted to get a GB game in for the first time since precovid, so he went home quickly to get his Morticians!
It was a really fun game, and it’s been ages since I played against Morts. It was really one of the highlights of the whole weekend to see New Obulus take me completely by surprise by PuppetMastering my Seenah to actually kill Theron that was fully stacked with inf and hoping to get a huge activation. With all of that inf gone though, the game was very much over.
So I lost spectacularly, but I enjoyed every second of it!
Quick shout out to swedish hobby store Alphaspel who sent prize support to the event!
They also still have some nice Guild Ball stock since back in the days, so check out their stuff. Regardless of prize supporting I can wholeheartedly recommend them whatever you’re buying.
Pic of my active tourney tray, just for fun 🙂
On the Sunday we had some switching around of players and made it a different tournament. We also got started rather late in the morning due to waiting for some people to arrive back to the venue and some organisational stuff like that.
But off we went at last, and I decided to play Masons to get some pitch time with New Hammer as well.
To make things interesting as well as save time since we were a bit behind, we decided that everyone had to pick a 6 model lineup and stick to that through the whole day. So no drafting.
I played Hammer, Wrecker, oChisel, vHarmony, Mallet, and Granite.
Link to the sunday event on Lonshanks.
I played against Hunters, Navigators and Butchers and had really fun games.
* Lost against Hunters – damn you Joonas, I will defeat you one day! 😉
* Won against Navs – on the clock, but I still take a little pride in the win since Mikko still claimed the overall weekend winner.
* Then due to time restraints on the venue and us having lost precious time at the start of the day, we had round 3 be ended and decided by a one-dice-roll-off for each pairing, which gave me a win against Butchers.
Ingame highlight of day two was during a charge where I rolled a huge handfull of dice into a juicy target hoping for a blowout attack, and got TWO hits in total. Pictured above. It was hilarious xD
And there we have it!
These three fine gentlemen (brutal finnish ballgame brawlers) won the weekend! They got awesome Steam & Fury swag dice in Gold, Silver and Bronze respectively.
Congrats again all of you, and thanks for several really good Guild Ball matches!
Those of us who didn’t get shiny prize dice still got these awesome purple and/or pink ones!
After the tournament and the prizes, we spent some time helping to pack up the venue a little, then Atte drove us downtown to check out the wargaming club (in a basement as all such clubs are universally located) and helped unload the playmats and clocks, and terrain and such.
Then dinner together, and then we were dropped off at the ferry. Huge thanks again to Atte, who organised such a great weekeng of wargaming, and for being an absolutely splendid host of us internationally traveling players.
Later this year, I’m hoping to be able to make a two-day GB tournament in my home town Luleå (northern Sweden) as well.
Attending this Steam & Fury / Finnish Masters was so inspiring!
I’m thinking September, but I haven’t booked anything yet. I really hope that some of the finnish players will be able to come join it.
I know there are lots going on in the wargaming world this autumn, with both Warmanchester and the Marmachine WTC, and other stuff as well, but I will be hoping and planning to get something going. Additionally of course, I’ll try to work more on my local player base, so that we have interesting opposition for the international guests when they show up. 😉
Keep an eye out – I will try to get plans sorted during the summer, and invite everyone!
And with that I’ll just bow and smile and thank you for having read this far. Cheers to anyone traveling to miniature games events like this.
Our international community is just wonderful to be a part of! 😀
Great review! I was surpised that despite the low player count we didn’t get to play against each other.
Thanks Jani! Yeah I agree. In hindsight I think we should’ve done the round-robin style over both days regardless of drops. But next time we’ll make sure to get a game in!