GW has their own thoughts on tournament play, and they wrote them all down for the first Old World event held at Warhammer World. Let’s take a look!
On April 20th Warhammer World hosted the first Matched Play Event for Warhammer: The Old World. The packet published for the event was a grueling, slog of a read at 11 pages, approximately 10 more than the average event packet. But that’s just the kind of attention to detail you should expect from the parent company hosting the first official event for their newest game system! If I can get my hands on the appropriate data I might take a look at the army lists that placed in that event, but the purpose of this article is to take a quick look at the comp and setup for what an official event, hosted by GW, looks like for The Old World.
The first two things to leap out of the packet are the army sizes at 1,500 points, and table sizes, at 44″x60″. For those who like having their math done for them, 44″x60″ is 3 and 2/3 feet by 5. These two sizes are a significant departure from the 4’x6′ and 2,000 points preached by Warhammer Fantasy for decades. While this is not the standard that many players might be expecting, they are well within the normal confines of the rulebook, which suggests a minimum table size of 44″x60″ for games between 1K and 2K points.
When creating an army list, players were allowed to use any list from Ravening Hordes, Forces of Fantasy or an Army of Infamy from any of the Arcane Journals. Named characters from the journals as well as mercenaries were allowed, but allies were not, and neither were Legends army lists. In terms of actually composition rules, a strict limit of “0-3 [was] applied to any units that [were] not otherwise restricted…” The packet goes on the explain that a unit like Empire Free Companies are now limited to 3 maximum entries, but interestingly my reading of this rule is that it doesn’t affect things with a limit, regardless of whether or not the limit is higher than 3. Meaning that it does nothing to prevent Gyrocopter spam, to my mind, but perhaps the originators and namesake of the English language are more facile in its use than I.
Lastly, there are some relaxed painting requirements and some very strict modeling requirements, all very much standard practice for an official GW event. While this style of packet may not be the baseline intended by GW going forward, it is interesting to see where they went initially. 1,500 points is a very interesting way to start, and it’s not the last time we will see it in this series of articles. Likewise, the smaller boards change how the games will play. I wonder to what extent, if at all, that was a choice of necessity, perhaps due to space concerns. 44″x60″ is minimum suggestion, after all.
Tomorrow we will look at comp rules for Frontline Gaming’s own Bay Area Open Old World tournament, as well as a conversation I had with the TO. Stay tuned, and let me know in the comments if this kind of content is interesting to you. Until tomorrow, happy hobbying!
And remember, Frontline Gaming sells gaming products at a discount, every day in their webcart!
