Hello, Dear Reader, and welcome back to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2025. Last week I finished up my painting for the 2025 Goonhammer Open, painting an army of Space Wolves for my friend SD47 to use in the event. I am happy to say I finished those just in time on Thursday in time to take them to the event, at which point they were handed off to a grateful SD47. So mission accomplished there.
This week I don’t have much in the way of games or hobby progress. Instead I’m going to talk about the Goonhammer Open Narrative a bit, and about Paint Judging for the various tournaments at the event.
The GHO Narrative
We ran a Teams event this year for the GHO narrative, splitting players into six teams of five players each, set on three alliances – Imperial, Chaos, and Xenos, roughly. Every round each team was sent to a different war zone, each with three tables. And on arrival, our players had to allocate their players to those tables, usually in a 2v2, 2v2, and 1v1 pattern. This freeform allocation let us go a little bit crazier this year with the tables, and we usually create tables that advantage different armies or require units like AIRCRAFT and Flyers.
I’m really proud of the tables we set up for this one. The stand-outs were the spires – that vertical table with the clouds that represents fighting on the tops of buildings – the orbital platform table again, and the Harridan table, where players fought on the back of a massive flying Harridan. I was also a fan of the Spaceport, just because I thought it looked cool, and the sewers had their charms as well.
For a lot of these, the set pieces came first – figuring out cool things to do on a table, and then working backward from that to get story and mission beats that would work for them. I think we probably got a little too crazy here when we were doing the flyer tables – in the future I think we’d probably focus on having only two per round instead of three and limiting how often players had to be on them – as cool as they were, Greg ended up having to play on them three rounds in a row thanks to having a lot of flyers in his T’au army.
Overall, it was a fun time and the feedback we received was that this year’s event was the best one yet. I think doing smaller teams played a big part of that, as it made pairings easy and let players pick their allies. We also had a better mix of team/doubles and singles games this time around. As much as I loved doing Spec Ops last year, it was a lot more work and didn’t always pay off as much as we’d hoped, so it was good to have something focused on more general player skill levels.
Paint Judging
I’ve done paint judging before but this year I ended up as the paint judge for the Narrative, the Kill Team GT, the 40k GT, and helping with Underworlds. Paint Judging is something that can be daunting but there are a few tricks I tell people when they ask me how to do judging.
Cull the Field
The first is to Whittle down your real contestants. In any given event, most of the entrants you’re going to look at are just not good enough to realistically compete for the prize. Start by making a shortlist of the real contenders so you can save time.
Find Errors and Sloppy Models
The next thing I tend to do is a second cull pass, this time focusing on things that I wouldn’t expect to see on top models – gaps and mold lines, unfinished models, models where the painter hasn’t dotted the eyes, and other things that might otherwise let me pull an army out of contention. Depending on the event, it may be the case that you just end up having these on all of the contender armies, in which case, I move on to the next step.
Focus on Technique
Next I start looking at different techniques on the models – crisp, clean colors, consistent coats of paint with smooth blends, freehand, OSL, and other effects that mark a higher level of difficulty. Here I’m looking less for one specific thing and more for a combination of things, showing off a painter’s skill and accomplishments with multiple techniques.
Best/Worst Models
I’ll also look at the best and worst models in an army. Here I’m looking at the stand-outs; how good are the army’s best models, and then also how good/bad are their worst models? A lot of times you’ll have an army with armies painted over several years, and that can mean inconsistent paint quality. This can help separate different armies in contention.
Trust Your Eyes
The last thing I’ll suggest is that you trust your eyes. Rubrics can be helpful, especially if you have to provide a numeric score, but they shouldn’t be the final determinant in your best painted winner – the best painted winner should be the army that has a plausible case for being the most aesthetically pleasing/best painted army, not the one that checks the most boxes. I’ve always been of the mind that it should be possible for your best painted winner to bring models assembled stock off the shelf and painted to an incredible standard – awarding points for conversions, display boards, and different colors of flock is just missing the point and turns best painted competitions into more of a shitty box-checking game than a real competition to paint an army.
Most of the time you end up doing this you’ll have multiple armies that can conceivably be the best painted and it’ll come down to making some difficult choices about who did a slightly better job with this model vs. that or their eyes. And at some point it’ll still come down to personal preference, but that has always been the game.
Judging the 40k GT was a bit tougher because while I didn’t think there were any 10/10 armies there, there were definitely multiple 8/10 armies and we had prizes up for grabs for best painted and best overall. As fate would have it, both players in contention for Best Overall played each other in the final round, and the third contender lost his final round game, making it easy to award the two other players Best Overall and Best Painted, respectively.
Giving Feedback
Finally, be prepared to give feedback to painters on what they could do to improve. This is something players will ask you for and you have to be ready to talk about it. Most players who will ask you need to focus on the basics – painting in the lines, learning to use shades and washes, edge highlighting. The intermediate and better painters usually have a better idea of what’s missing form their models and where they can improve. That said, you need to be prepared with this feedback whether you’re doing a rubric or more obtuse, value-based judging.
Next Time: Death Guard Testing
It’s time to finally get back into testing for Tacoma, and my plan is to get in a game or two with Death Guard before next week’s article goes out, if only to shake off the rust. And I’m going to finally sit down with those Bloat-drones and get them painted.
See you next Thursday.
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