The BAO 2013 is Nearly Upon Us!

Thanks to Goatboy for designing our logo!

Hey everyone, we’re just super excited for the BAO this year and wanted to give the last minute shout out to everyone about the event!

This is gearing up to be a great year for the Bay Area Open! We have blown past our previous attendance figures and the feedback from the community has been just awesome.

We have sold 147 tickets for the Warhammer 40K Championships! We’ve got players flying in from all over the country to have a great day playing 40K. With an entire army, tons of prizes and the oh so cool Belt of Russ on the line for the champ, this will be a super fun event. And by the way, the Belt is nearing completion and it looks BOSS! Imagine a WWF belt with wolf tails, and fur trim, plus a custom, laser-cut metal plaque. It will be a truly unique first place prize. Each player that wins the belt will have their name added to it!

I’ve had a lot of folks saying they like our system and asking to borrow it for their events. Consider it open source, if anyone wants a system they can borrow to use for their own local area, have at it and feel free to change it. We only ask that you tell people where you got it so that they can use it too, if they choose. Any feedback is appreciated, and we often make adjustments based on what we hear from those who use the system. It is the result of a LOT of play-testing and player feedback, so the more of us that work on it, the better it will become.

Warhammer Fantasy has really grown, and we are very proud to say we have sold 45 tickets so far! Nearly a 50% increase in attendance over last year. I want to give a big shout out to the guys at Leadership2 for helping us to promote the event and supporting us, as well as the SCGWL group. You guys rock! We’re already planning something awesome for Fantasy like the Belt of Russ for next year, we’re thinking maybe a Slayer Sword style trophy, with winner’s names etched onto it? We’re open to suggestions to shoot if you have any!

Our very popular “Best Of” award has been moved to encompass Fantasy, too! What this means is that if you end the event with the best record for your particular army, you get a prize. So, you may not win the whole thing, but maybe you are the best Tau or Wood Elf player. We find it keeps things fun and it encourages a wide variety of armies.

The 40K Narrative event looks to be just as much fun as last year, with Big Jim from Deepstrike Radio running it again. We have room for more here, so grab those tickets if this sounds appealing! Last year we heard nothing but cheers and laughter from that end of the hall.

The 40K Team Tournament is shaping up to be a blast. This is a very “beer and pretzels” type of event, and we give prizes for most team spirit, best costumes, etc. The costumes people are telling us they are coming in sound outrageous, too! It will be a ton of fun to watch this, I am sure.

I wanted to publicly issue my regrets to the Warmahordes players this year, too. We had to drop the event this go around (of course with a full refund to all the players) as we sold so many tickets in total for the BAO, that we ran out of floor space in the hall (all 7,000sqft of it) and had a growing waiting list for 40K. We gave a big push at the end to at least break even on the event, but we couldn’t wait any longer as it would affect people’s travel plans. As we were facing a situation of losing money by going forward with Warmahordes at our current level of tickets sold (3 weeks out from the event) we had to make the choice to drop the event and let in more 40K players. We really regret this happening as having Warmahordes there is so much fun and they’ve been with us from the firs tyear, but we make no money on these events, and they take so much time and effort and money to run, we really do it because we love it. We just couldn’t choose to take a loss. However, we take responsibility for the lack of promotional effort, and are already making plans to do it better next year.

In all we are really looking forward to this year’s BAO. To watch it grow has been extremely rewarding, and the almost unanimously positive feedback we get from our attendees every year gives us a great deal of professional pride in running an efficient, fun event which is what this hobby is all about to us. We are community first, 100% and we feel that that shows in the events we work so hard to run.

Lastly, I wanted to touch on the first draft BAO tournament FAQ that was recently put out. A group of TO’s got together to write up a tournament FAQ for our respective events (Adepticon, WargamesCon, Feast of Blades, the BAO). I presented it as an Indie Tournament FAQ on Frontline Gaming which some folks took to meaning that it was intended to be a universal tournament FAQ that everyone would be expected to use. I just want to put that to bed. I personally would love to see more uniformity between events as I think it facilitates the ease of going from one event to another, but that is 100% my goal, not the stated or implied goal of the FAQ council and in fact, some of the TO’s on the council have openly stated they don’t want to see that happen. We all came together to fill a common need, not impose anything on the community. If anyone chooses to use the FAQ we worked (very long and hard) to create, they are free to do so, but it is a choice.

Some folks got their feathers ruffled about who was or was not included on the council (so strange to have overreactions on the internet, right?!) and I can state emphatically that there was no insult intended towards anyone by including or not including them. It was purely a pragmatic decision. We all want to see tournaments and gaming events succeed and grow as it benefits us all (and gives us all fun events to go to!) so hopefully folks can see that and we can all work together to achieve our mutual ends and continue to have fun with this very not-serious hobby of ours.

See you all at the BAO!