Cancon Day 2 and 3 - DBA and Pike & Shotte

Day 2 saw me field my newly painted* Malays (list IV/37a) for the DBA tournament with 23 other players.

The format was a fixed army open competition - each player selecting their 12 element army with even dismounting elements fixed as either foot or mounted at the start of the tournament, playing six rounds based on a modified Swiss Chess format. For this, the second day of DBA, all armies were from the Dark Ages and Medieval Period (Books III and IV). The tournment on the Friday had been for armies from Books I and II.

My army consisted of 1 x El (Gen), 1 x El, 6 x 4Wb, 2 x 3Bw, 1 x Ps, 1 x LH.

The Canberra standard scoring system was followed:

• A win scored a flat 8 points
• A loss scored 1 point for ending the game plus the number of elements killed (capped at 3) with an extra point for killing a general or taking a camp
• A draw was scored as a loss but without the point for ending the game

In the first game I faced Emil's Ming (IV/73). Like a monkey I decided that if someone’s going to have to face the artillery it might as well be my elephants that rush it. My non-general elephant duly exploded across the battlefield, however the rest of my army won the game for me. I lost 3 elements to Emil’s 4, 8-4 win.

Game two didn't go so well, I lost 8-1 to a wall of knights in Josh's Medieval Scandinavian (IV/54b) army.

Game three made me learn some of the changed rules in version 3.0. Lost your general? Who cares! You can now continue to grind your opponent and pull a win out of what would've been a defeat in version 2.2. I had lost my general, but through the ability of my quick killing warband against my opponent's fast Samurai blade and hard flanking his cavalry with my bow I pulled out a 8-5 win.

The rest of the day pitted me against Asian (another Post Mongol Samurai (IV/59a) army was to follow) or medieval European armies.

At the end of the day I had won three, but also lost three games for an overall score of 29. Great to be able get that many games in, even if the weather was hot and humid.

The next day was spent wondering around looking at all the great games on display, doing a little shopping and talking to people.

I took part in a large Thirty Years' War game hosted by Adam, Lon and Mark for about 30 minutes.

Afterwards I did a little shopping. Final haul included a bunch of Knight Models’ Marvel blisters for $5-10 each (including the Avengers, The Thing, Guardians of the Galaxy, X-Men, Brotherhood of Evil and Deadpool) , a couple of the Perry medieval plastic box sets, some MDF bases from Battlefield Accessories and a mix of Eureka stuff.

The drive back on the Sunday afternoon was long, but I'm glad I went. I miss everything that happens over three days of gaming.

* They'd only been in the lead pile for 10 or so years.