Throne of Skulls Recap: Part 4

The Good, the Bad, and the Drunk.

Okay, so there is a small amount of hoopla around Throne of Skulls. Most of this deals with lack of prize support (The army winners received a framed paper and an invite back to next year, overall winners got trophies)

The Good: The place was awesome. They reserved a huge ballroom inside of the recently renovated Tropicana resort on the Las Vegas strip (That likely was NOT cheap).
There was catered food on the two tournament days, which was EXCELLENT. This was great because food in Vegas is by no means cheap.
The atmosphere was incredible. I was lucky enough to have ~8 friends also going to ToS. That coupled with the laid back resort nature of the place made for an excellent time. I can't really describe it effectively to someone who was not there. It was an awesome time.

The Bad: Pairings and scoring. On the first day, it was possible to get paired against someone you already played. This was corrected on the second day, but in reality it should never have happened. The sportsmanship scoring was kind of bullshit. You could get up to 5 points off of sportsmanship. This could effectively net you an extra win and two draws worth of points. This is how some people won their army despite having a worse record than their peers. The lack of prize support has been spoken about to death so I will not cover it here. I will add that GW put in some serious cash to even get that place.

Terrain: A bastion and two ruins on a Realm of Battle Table? You need more fucking terrain. Why do you think I had a field day with guard? Making hills 6+ area doesn't count.

The Drunk: Having a bar with 2 for 1 cocktails (cheap ones too) was an excellent way to bond and energize the gaming floor. There were no disruptions or anything of that kind during the tournament. I thought this was an excellent addition to an already fun tournament.

-Mike