Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing hobby and competitive progress series for 2025. Previously on Road Through 2025, I was doing prep for Challengers cup and making the trip out there. This week I’m talking about my experiences at the event. I also ran through the team joining me and the lists we’d be playing, so if you’re interested in learning about the various armies I’ll be talking about in this week’s recap, check that one out.

This time it’s on to the event.

Thursday

I arrived on Tuesday, but it would be another two days before the rest of my team arrived, starting with Norman, who got in Thursday morning. That was a welcome change of pace, and we talked about content plans and upcoming projects for most of the day, interrupted at noon for some lunch – I bought a bunch of sandwich stuff – then waiting for the crew to arrive. We made our big run to the grocery store for the week and picked up dinner components for the rest of the rest of the weekend.

On that note, I kept it simple Thursday night, just doing burgers and dogs on the grill. Did some chili and cheese for the dogs, sliced some tomatoes and onions for the burgs. We sit around and talk for a while and prep our matrices for the next day – we already have our first pairing, against a team called Emerald Dreams. Despite feeling like we stayed up for a while, we were all in bed by about 10:30, so I actually got quite a good sleep that night. Go figure.

Friday

It’s time for Challengers Cup! James “Boon” Kelling makes pancakes for the crew for breakfast that morning over in Beta house – the two houses are next to each other but Norman, Campbell, and I got there first and so we’ve named the house we’re sleeping in “Alpha house.” There are only three bedrooms in each house, so Wallace crashes on Alpha house couch while Scott Horras, Shane Watts, Goatboy, and Kelling are in Beta House. Scott sleeps on an air mattress in Beta House.

The event is huge, and the venue for it is great – it’s large but not too loud, and there’s a ton of room for tables and pairings. We’re on table #1 in the first round, which means we’d get to play on stream… or we would, except that Art of War have apparently Big Time’d us and swapped us over to Table 14. This is a pretty lame move, in my opinion, but I’m also not super upset about not playing on stream.

Round 1: vs. Emerald Dreams

I’m technically team captain for this one, but I’m assisted by Scott Horras on this, and honestly I think we did pretty well on pairings, aside from the chaotic last round. We’ve looked at the opposing lists and are pretty comfortable with our match-ups. I put out Kelling as first Defender, reckoning that he’d need terrain more than Scott against these lists – we’d swap that on later rounds and just give Scott first pick. I end up jumping on the Death Guard mirror, since it’s a Mortarion Vectorium list.

vs. Hans Wolfgang’s Death Guard

Hans is on Death Guard, running a list that looks a lot like what I ran at Dallas earlier this year, albeit with fewer points and no Plague Marines. I learned in the first round of that event that the Morty list eats shit to the Hammer list, and so I’m not particularly worried about this matchup.

Hans' List - Click to Expand

The vehicles are a bit of a concern here, but I can out-range the haulers and once those and the drones are gone Hans won’t have anything left to challenge me save Morty. And I can largely just ignore him and kite him around the table. Or if he’s offered up too readily, I can dump everything into him and kill him. I’ve got more range and more units to work with.

The Mission: Terraform + Crucible of Battle

Hans is very worried about losing his Poxwalkers to mortars and so puts them in reserves along with his Deathshrouds. That’s even better – he has little to screen with and can’t easily extend contagion range, so I get all the upsides against him early. The Poxwalkers are a pain but it takes three mortars to kill them and my goal turn 1 is to take out the Tallyman, forcing him to leave an important unit on his home to sticky it. I win the roll-off and do just that, despite rolling 1s on my mortar counts.

I’m able to move in and screen Hans out early, terraforming two objectives on the first turn with Poxwalkers. Those will pay off big for me all game, scoring me 16 primary points on the following rounds. Not having Poxwalkers on the table gives me fewer targets to focus on and I take out the drones and blight-haulers early. I get a little too aggressive on the southern point with Mortarion and have to pull back but I end up dropping Deathshrouds on Hans’ home point and fighting over that. Unfortunately, his Daemon Prince makes some insane saves to stay alive and it takes two more rounds of Leechspore bullshit to clear him out. I eventually get there, though.

I kill Mortarion on round 5 but can’t take out all of Hans’ Deathshroud. That surviving Daemon Prince was a big help for Hans when he needed to hold his home, but he’s not able to make up a massive primary points deficit – he only scores 12 VP on rounds 1-4 and despite scoring 14 on the final round, I’m at 49/50, turning this into a 15-5 in my favor.

Result: 89-61, Win

This was a big first round for us – everyone but Shane won their games, giving us a massive 120-40 win as a team. Scott and Kelling both came up big, and even Campbell pulled of a big win over Chaos Knights with his Black Templar. We were feeling pretty good about this one.

We grabbed lunch as a team. And the venue, while not cheap, was very solid – the Mexican options were decent and you got a lot of food for your money, making it feel like less of a bad deal. We talked about our round 2 matchups and pairings and made plans to switch up defenders a bit, with Scott going out first.

Round 2: vs. Xenos Petting Zoo Gaunts and Grots

This time Scott was first Defender and took Chaos Knights while I was an Attacker and played another mirror match. Unfortunately, I did not appreciate how different Vectorium could be in this one.

vs. Nico Urrea’s Death Guard

Nico’s running Vectorium but without Morty. I did not respect that nearly enough, and on top of that, he used terrain choice to great effect, putting us on a WTC board.

Nico's List - Click to Expand

Nico’s light on anti-vehicle threats but those Plague Marines can hit like a truck, especially with help from the Rhinos. Those Rhinos also make his list very durable against my anti-vehicle shooting, and if he can hide from me until they arrive I’ll be in trouble. This is of course why he picked a dense WTC board for our matchup – something else I didn’t fully appreciate. There’s no Morty here but I do want to kill the Tallyman early and take out his Blight-Haulers as quickly as possible. They’re going to be a major threat and once they go his list is massively blunted.

The Mission: Take and Hold + Search and Destroy

Search and Destroy makes this even worse, giving us closer deployment zones – it’s a recipe for disaster for me and I didn’t realize it until it was way too late. That said, things also just went about as poorly as they could possibly go for me in this mission. Not only did I underestimate Nico and his list, not only did he have a big terrain and deployment advantage, but he also diced the ever-loving shit out of me. I won the roll-off, struck out to the right to kill his MBH, and then promptly rolled a 1 on every single variable shot count for my drones and mortars. I killed the Tallyman but couldn’t take out the MBH, and that thing would stay alive all game, rolling 5 after 5 for its saves. Likewise, Nico continually dropped max shot counts on me while rolling 6s for damage and 5+ saves with the rest of his army, compounding that earlier issue.

I don’t want to put this on dice – I came into this game cocky and was humbled because I didn’t respect Nico’s list – but even with that error this was a game I could have won or at least kept close. Instead nothing went right for the entire game, from dice to bad secondary draws, and that turned this into a nasty 1-19 blowout. I was more aggressive than I should have been early, but the the terrain made it hard to do otherwise. I needed to kill that Blight-Hauler immediately and pull back on the upper-left corner, where I ultimately got wrecked by plague Marines. I also put my Deathshroud on Nico’s home objective and I might have been better off dropping them mid-table to kill plague marines and retake the center. Nico also just played this one well, and clearly knew what he was doing into my list with that WTC terrain pick.

Result: 54-100, Loss

This one felt particularly bad because it cost the team. I wasn’t the only loss, but given our team lost by only 4 points (71-89, with 75 being what we’d needed to tie), this one was largely on me, since I put up the worst score of the round. Losing to XPZ by 4 isn’t horrible but I do think I could have salvaged a 5-15 out of that matchup with some better dice or better play. I was pretty salty by the end of that game and it took me a bit to shake it off.

The other rough thing is that I largely felt like our pairings were solid that round, but our games just didn’t go our way. Shane had a rough game into Sisters, Goatboy got some rough dice into GSC, and Campbell struggled with Imperial Knights. Scott was our only big win and I countered his hard work.

Friday Dinner: Grilled Ribeye with Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Asparagus

The upside was that there were only two rounds that day, so we went back to the houses for dinner. I’d picked up some massive choice cut ribeyes the day before, planning for a big ass steak dinner. I picked up some fresh rosemary and compound butter at the local Smith’s grocery store – basically butter with garlic, parsley, and peppers in it. I patted the steaks dry, gave them a dusting of salt and pepper, then set them on the hot side of the grill for about 6-7 minutes the rosemary on top, letting them get some grill lines, then I flipped them and transferred them to the cooler side. Meanwhile I tossed the asparagus in olive oil, salt, and pepper and dropped that onto the hot side while the steaks finished.

The potatoes are just small diced, combined with a few cloves of garlic and boiled until soft, then combined with a stick of butter, some milk, and a ton of salt and pepper while being mashed.

This was my favorite meal of the event – the steaks turned out absolutely perfect; a wonderful medium rare-to-medium finish (I find you want to be less bloody on ribeyes, where the marbling needs a bit more cooking to render into the meat) and the butter was a perfect flavor fit. The potatoes and asparagus also turned out great, though I should have bought and made a bit more of them.

After dinner we hang out and chat for a while, and I throw something on the TV. You need something in this situation that’s good background noise but interesting to look at occasionally. My go-to move is to throw on YouTube with a video of old MTV, based on whatever year your crew watched. We throw on a four-hour video of MTV After Hours from 1999 and it’s the perfect mood.

Saturday

It’s day 2 and we’re back at it. We did a new matrix the night before based on this morning’s match-up. We’re 1-1 but we have a great score so we’ve been paired up into team GitHammer. They’re another solid team and there are some tough matchups for our crew.

Round 3: vs. GitHammer

This was another round where I thought our pairings were solid, but the games didn’t pan out how we’d hoped. My pairing was into Tyranids, where I was facing down another Subterranean Assault list.

vs. Michael Georges’ Tyranids

Michael’s running Subterranean Assault, but with more shooting – two Tyrannofexes and an Exocrine – plus two Haruspexes. The good news is he doesn’t have any upgraded Raveners.

Michael's List - Click to Expand

I’ve played against Subterranean Assault before so I know what they can do. I need to screen with Poxwalkers and stop him from coming across early, and pick off key targets. The Biovore is target #1, since it can screen me out of key locations and stop me from moving wherever I want to go.

On that note, it’s worth pointing out that Michael’s Nids were lovely, and had a very striking brown paint scheme. Probably the nicest painted army I played against all weekend.

The Mission: Scorched Earth + Crucible of Battle

Michael puts a ton into reserves – both Haruspexes, the Hive Guard, and the Trygon Prime. I win the roll-off and kill the Biovore turn 1, but get low rolls so I can’t take out his only Raveners unit – if I’d gotten some better shot counts and killed those, this one would have been over before it started. As-is, Michael holds back a bit to avoid taking shots from my vehicles, and instead opts to feed me his army piecemeal. I drop down early into his Tyrannofexes with a unit of Deathshroud and chase them back, killing both as he tries to come back and get them with his Swarmlord.

Michael had sour luck early, failing some key charges, but made up for it late with some wild last-minute saves on his Norn Emissary to keep it on the table. Despite having only two units left – the Emissary and the Raveners – Michael was able to pull out a big final turn (drawing Locus and Assassination after all my characters had died) to stop this from being an absolute blowout with a 24-point final turn. If I kill that Norn Emissary I score an extra 3 for Marked for Death on the final turn, plus I deny him 10 primary. Nothing you can do about it, though.

Result: 89-76, Win

That’s a shame because if I could have made that work we’d have had four more points and tied the round. I pulled a 12-8 and Scott got a 19-1, but Kelling, Wallace, Goatboy, and Campbell all had double-digit losses that round that could have been more even matchups. So we once again lost by 4, going 71-89.

That’s a tough one but we’re in good spirits. I house a massive plate of nachos for lunch and we prepped for the following round, into Xenos Petting Zoo Nevada.

Round 4: vs. XPZ Nevada

The Nevada branch of the massive team, I suppose. I once again felt like our pairings here were fine but we struggled to execute. Goatboy’s matchup into Dark Angels is the worst here – his particular brand of World Eaters don’t want to fight Deathwing Knights, but he has 3 damage guns on his Forgefiends to work with, so I hoped he could score some points.

vs. Kent Cramer’s Necrons

Kent’s a swell guy and we square off with me as second defender, picking layout GW 2. That’s an easy one for me with some lovely long firing lanes.

Kent's List - Click to Expand

Starshatter’s free for me, especially when it runs this many Wraiths. Here’s the secret: When you put Wraiths on 5+ to hit, they can’t do a goddamn thing. The Doomsday Arks are my only real threat, and I can put them on -1 to hit. The Silent King no longer having ignore modifiers makes this a much easier matchup for me, and I’m confident I can kill the DDAs early.

The Mission: Hidden Supplies + Hammer and Anvil

My first turn targets are now the Heavy Lokust Destroyer on Kent’s home objective, the DDA in the open, and his wraiths. His army doesn’t have a ton of range so I need to be aggressive and bet big turn 1. I push forward and blow up one DDA and kill 5/6 Wraiths in his unit, plus I put 6 damage on the other DDA and kill his destroyer. Kent rolls some pretty poor saves here but I’m throwing a lot of heat his way and he got a little lucky that I didn’t wipe all the wraiths. I try a Hail Mary, charging his remaining wraith with my four surviving Poxwalkers, but can’t kill it. Unfortunately for him, he can’t kill four Poxwalkers with a Cryptek, a Wraith, and two goobers, either.

On his turn, Kent pushes forward, kills a Blight-Hauler, and flails a bit. Then I’m off to the races. I pick up the other DDA, push him back into his Deployment Zone, and drop the Deathshrouds. I don’t need his home objective, so I have them scrap with the Wraiths. They won’t kill them right away – too many wounds – but they also can’t really be hurt by the Wraiths, either, who hit on 5+ and wound on 5+.

I pick up the Silent King on turn 3 and Kent has had enough. His dice aren’t great and I’m just pouring on shitloads of ranged damage and he knows he can’t retaliate effectively. We work through the rest of scoring and call it.

Result: 93-55, Win

That’s a 17-3 for me and while I probably should have gone harder on Kent for points/denial to squeeze them out, I wouldn’t have felt good about it. That’s a bit of a shame since we ended up only tying this round, 84-76, and needed 2 more points for a victory. That said, we really needed those points out of Norman or Goatboy, who scored 3 between them. Norman just had an abysmal game in the mirror and Goatboy couldn’t get much done into Dark Angels. So this round is a tie, putting us at 1-2-1 after the first four rounds. Not where we want to be, but not awful.

Friday Dinner: Motherfucking Taco Night

Taco night! Or fajitas, more accurately. I picked up some marinated flank steak on sale at Smith’s, then marinated up a couple of chicken breasts to go with it (lime + olive oil + chile powder + paprika + cumin + salt + pepper). We sauteed some onions and peppers, cooked up a can of refried beans, and toasted some tortillas (corn and flour) for the gang. We set it all up buffet style for the crew to eat with some sour cream and a store cup of pico. Protip: You can combine the sour cream with a little lime juice, salt, and pepper to more or less turn it into crema.

On top of that, I made guac. My guac recipe is pretty simple – this time around I did five avocados, which I bought on Thursday and left in a paper bag to ripen. By Saturday they were properly ripe and soft. So five of those, two tomatoes on the vine, small diced, about half a head of garlic, half an onion (small diced), some cilantro, salt, pepper, and lime juice. When I’ve got my full kitchen I also add a bit of cumin and a splash of olive oil, and I’ll cover it with grated cotija cheese. Mash it all up with a potato masher and serve.

Team dinners are by far my favorite part of these trips. There are just such immaculate vibes to doing a big family style sit-down and eat with the crew that you don’t get on standard GTs. At one point on Thursday Norman looked at me and said “damn it’s a shame we have to play Warhammer this weekend,” and I was hard-pressed to disagree. There’s something really cool about this kind of summer camp style hangout.

That said, the downside of a teams event is that you only hang out with the team. When I go to GTs, I usually mix it up and hang out with a different group on different nights. Team Sanctum was also at the event, and I’m close friends with several of those guys, like Erik, Steven Salazar, Chris, and David Justice and would have gladly hung out with them as well… but they had their own place in the hills and did their own thing. Ah well.

We do pairings again and chill. We’re tired but in good spirits after day two.

Sunday

The final day and there’s a big problem looming over us: Scott can only play the fifth round, then he has to book it to the airport for a flight back to the east coast. That means we have a fill-in player in round 6. Scott has been, up to this point, our best player, pulling down something like 76 points in four rounds. Replacing him is a nightmare.

Round 5: vs. Hobby Goblins

The Hobby Goblins have a few people from the east coast who our team already knows, which is always cool. They’re were a very chill group to play against – some of my favorite matchups. We start pairings and Scott is nowhere to be found – he’s off in the restroom so we start pairing to save him time. Originally we had him into Orks but he says he doesn’t have time for that and makes me put him into Space Wolves. It’s an interesting dreadnought-heavy Wolves list but Scott makes short work of it and takes off. I’m into Orks instead.

vs. Chris Rettinger’s Orks

Chris was great, and his list had a number of scary components for a vehicle-heavy build like mine. In particular those Beastbosses will put in some scary work if I let them close in, so I need to stop that from happening early. I don’t want to go first here – I want to bait Chris out and then punish him – but if I do, then I can press forward a bit with my Poxwalkers.

Chris' List - Click to Expand

Like I said, those Beastbosses are nasty, and I need to keep them off my vehicles. The Kill Rig is also a big threat I want to dispose of, and I need to worry about Kommandos. Splitting Kommandos is huge – it gives him four units I can’t overwatch, and two of those have bomb squigs. Those let him do movement phase mortals, potentially clearing out my poxwalker screens so he can move through.

The Mission: Take and Hold + Hammer and Anvil

I win the roll-off, and that means I have to be a bit more aggressive. I push up with the Poxwalkers to block his movement and kill one of the battlewagons, then I use the Mortaros to wipe his grots off his home point, forcing him to hold it with something else. I’m not super aggressive about holding points right now but my plan is to just hold two right now and keep Chris to 1.

On his turn Chris pushes up but can’t crack my Poxwalker screen, forcing him to charge them instead of moving further up the table. This buys me another turn to set up and I drop his Kill Rig, but that leaves a Trukk and a Battlewagon to go. I bounce off the Trukk – I went with -1 to hit this mission instead of -1 to saves, and that made my damage output a little worse than I’d like. I also started with my Lord of Virulence attached to a unit of Deathshroud. That was a “what if I go second” move and probably not the right one but it worked out OK in my last game, giving me a better early response to pressure when I needed it, plus twin-linked flamers on that unit is very good.

Chris starts making headway on his second turn, pushing into my vehicles and my backfield. I’m able to keep a PBC alive but Chris starts spiking his saves and attacks into me, getting off some key kills and staying alive past when he should. My Deathshroud drop in and kill his Beastboss on Squigosaur (big help), but later bounce off his Battlewagon and have to spend two rounds fighting it.

I was never in danger of losing this game but Chris makes some smart plays late and gets some good rolls that really help him on primary, scoring him 10 on round 4 and keeping me to only 5. That turns what could have been a 14-6 into an 11-9. Fortunately it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme as we win 112-48.

Result: 63-53

That was a hell of a match and I had a great time playing it. While I don’t think it was ever out of control, there were certainly some touch-and-go moments in there and the Beastbosses put in some real work against my PBCs. The Kill Rig was also an inspired choice and if Chris had done a better job holding his home objective I’d have been in real trouble – late in the game he moved his Trukk up to fight my vehicles and he should have sent it back home and put his Kommandos inside it to ensure he’d keep scoring it.

Round 6: vs. Denver 40k Fight Club

We’re 2-2-1 now and looking to go positive in the final round. We grab lunch at the food truck out front – they do some banger Korean BBQ bowls – and hastily try and mash out a matrix for the last team. We have a replacement for Scott this round from the locals – meet Michael of team GitHammer, who is on Orks.

Michael is an incredibly chill dude and a joy to have around. I was happy to have him join us, even if replacing Scott was more or less impossible. It meant we could at least give everyone on the other team a game.

This was the only round I didn’t get a photo of pairings and also when I felt we flubbed it. But without Scott that was kind of going to happen. If Scott was around we’d have put him out first defender and me out second, and I think had a great chance to flip this one. As it was, we essentially flopped 40 points and made this one untenable, but most of the team ate shit so it’s not like Scott was the only factor.

vs. Andy Shellenbarger’s Imperial Knights

I was first Defender, and happily took Imperial Knights. Andy had previously gone into Death Guard (but not Hammer), and felt confident about the matchup. I took layout 2 as I liked the long sight lines it gave.

Andy's list - Click to Expand

Andy’s on Spearhead-at-Arms and I notice right away that his big knights only have one gun each. With thermal spears limited to 18″ range that means I can more or less shoot him with impunity. It’s very hard to hide on GW layout 2 with Tipping Point deployment and he doesn’t put anything into reserves, meaning that regardless of who goes first I can score big on my first turn.

The Mission: Linchpin + Tipping Point

I won the roll off and all things considered, I actually had a pretty bad first turn. I dropped the big red knight to 6 wounds and the front armiger in the lower left to 1, but didn’t kill anything. Then Andy went and killed two of my units – a blight-hauler and a bloat-drone – to complete his oath, taking him to 4 CP. Not a great start, but I could pile on damage on turn 2 and that’s what I did.

Everything went well on turn 2 and Andy’s saves were rancid – I lost another drone to Overwatch but I killed the 1-wound Helverin, dropped the red knight to 1 wound, and then dropped a unit of Deathshrouds with the Lord of Contagion behind Andy’s home. They flamered his Callidus Assassin to death, then charged his big blue knight and destroyed it. The other unit charged and killed a Warglaive.

Then on Andy’s turn I killed his red knight in Overwatch and that was pretty much it. We went a bit longer but this one was over and after round 3 we talked it out.

Result: 90-22, Win

That was a solid 20-0 for me but we got crushed that round – Michael was thrown onto a Death Guard grenade and couldn’t do much against its flamers, Norman got bodied by knights, Goatboy was crushed in the mirror, and so was Kelling. Wallace, Shane, and Campbell all managed close games but those three big losses were rough. We lost the round 55-105.

And so we finished 2-3-1. Not what we wanted, but we played some good teams and, up until that last round, did well enough on pairings to give ourselves a chance in every round. I’m happy with the finish, and I had a great time at the event generally – and I think the rest of the team did too. We have to make two trips back with Scott’s rental car gone, and I head back and start making dinner.

Sunday Night Dinner: Chicken, Sausage, and Leftovers

The primary plan was to cook sausage (beef smoked and beef kielbasa) and BBQ chicken breasts on the grill, with the secondary plan of cooking everything else we’d bought so we could minimize food waste. I cooked up the other half of our potatoes to make garlic mashed potatoes again, and the original plan called for corn on the cob but the corn looked a bit rough on the ends so we cut it off the cob and sauteed it in butter instead. We had some yellow rice I’d forgotten to make on taco night in the mix, and I cut up the romaine hearts and tomatoes I’d bought for sandwiches and used them to make a salad, adding some sliced baby carrots and cheddar cheese. We didn’t have any dressing, but I had a bottle of Dijon mustard around so I combined that with the leftover maple syrup we had and a bit of olive oil to make a honey mustard that was pretty damn tasty.

We also had some leftover kaiser rolls I’d purchased for sandwiches that I tossed into the oven and toasted, then served with honey butter I’d purchased for breakfast (goes well on English muffins). In retrospect I should have cut this up and made croutons for the salad. Still, the meal was more than a success and the chicken turned out wonderfully.

The big story that night was the Cowboys-Packers game. I’m a Cowboys fan, Boon’s a Packers fan. And he’d been waiting all week for the game, hoping to rub it in my face when the Packers won. Tragically for him, the Cowboys once again defied everyone’s expectations and all notions of good taste, forcing the game to overtime and a 40-40 tie. Everyone leaves dissatisfied. Well, except me – I’m vaguely amused they didn’t lose badly and also tickled to have watched a new Scorigami result (a uniquely new NFL score). Plus, that throw to Jalen Tolbert in OT was fucking ridiculous.

Boon gives Campbell a ride to the airport. We stay up as late as we can, fighting against the inevitable end of a trip we’re all still enjoying too much to let go of. Wallace may have been a stand-in for Chase, but I’m amazed at how well he meshes with our team. Just a perfect match to our energy and vibes. That guy rules and is a value add all-around, both as a team player in 40k and in terms of what he brings to our conversations.

We also decide it’s time to make use of the hot tub. Me, Wallace, Norman, and Goatboy hop in and lemme tell you: Bringing a swimsuit was the correct move. Hot tub beers was absolutely what I needed after that weekend of games. Exactly what my back and legs needed, though I’ll admit I was completely drained after we got out – hot tubs have a tendency to do that.

And that was it. The next morning Wallace, Norman and I headed over to Salt Lake City airport in an Uber, got breakfast, talked some more – some about the games, some about business – and then slowly peeled off as we had to take our respective flights. Ironically I met up with David Justice from Sanctum on my flight back, and we had a good chat about how his team did and whether it would be feasible to run a teams event in Houston next year. We’d been looking forward to Rise of Empire in December, but that has apparently become a singles event, so now I have little interest in attending. Ah well.

Next Time: So Much Painting

That does it for this week’s update but now the real work starts on the hobby side. I have about six weeks before the WCW and I need to paint these goddamn Emperor’s Children. There’s a ton of work to do here and I’m not at all looking forward to it. I also don’t think EC are very good right now, and so I’m struggling with that challenge as well… and debating just running Night Lords or Black Legion again.

See you next week.

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