With nearly 10 winters under my belt in the greater Shawville area, I’ve learned that having something to keep yourself occupied is key. If you don’t sled, play hockey or ice fish, your options are limited.
In recent years, the Shawville Curling Club is where I live once the snow starts to fly, usually two or three times a week depending on my work schedule.
Which is why it was such a blow when it was announced only a few weeks into the season that the ice plant at the club was out of commission for a while, due to a busted brine pump.
I thought of turning to drink and drugs, though that wouldn’t have been much of a change from what typically goes on at Wednesday night curling, just without my favourite bartender Sonia. Besides, I sit on the club’s board of directors and should probably keep up appearances.
Parnell, a guy I’ve curled with for a few years, hit me up in the weeks following the plant shutdown, asking if I’d like to play in a Warhammer tournament he was organizing as a fundraiser for the club in early January. I’d been exposed to Warhammer through friends growing up, but had never played more than a short demonstration game.
For those not in the know, Warhammer 40,000, or 40K in the common parlance, is a popular sci-fi tabletop strategy game that’s been around since the late ‘80s. The mythical universe features a bleak galactic existence, where humans and aliens are locked in eternal, bloody combat.
“In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war,” goes the only slightly over-the-top tagline of the game. Edgy, in a high-school dork kinda way.
I hope this doesn’t awaken something in me, I am 100 per cent their target demographic.
Unlike me, Parnell, a semi-retired Canadian forces soldier and firefighter with the local department, is probably the last person you would think enjoys rolling dice and playing with action figures in a comic book store-type setting. When I went over to his house for a practice game, his medals and army memorabilia adorned the walls, while huge battalions of plastic orks and monsters he’s painstakingly hand-painted covered most of his hobby room’s surfaces.
He warned me that the “plastic crack” is an addiction on par with narcotics, with an equally damaging impact on your wallet.
What was I getting myself into?
What the hell is Warhammer?
As for the actual gameplay, imagine if the game Risk involved way more dice, enormous armies of miniature spaceships and aliens, as well as several encyclopedias-worth of additional rules, upgrades and special abilities.
In Risk, things are pretty simple, you roll the amount of dice corresponding to the number of pieces you have, and if you roll higher than your opponent you remove a corresponding number of armies.
Bingo, bango, bongo.
In Warhammer, each army (there are more than a dozen to choose from), has numerous unique units, each with its own level of durability and attacking strength. Instead of just rolling to see who gets the higher number, you roll to see if your attack hits, roll a corresponding number of dice to see how many wounds those hits inflict, and then your opponent has an opportunity to roll their dice to see if their armour protects them from harm. Even with this oversimplification, you can see how things can get eye-wateringly complicated very quickly.
Experienced players will know which of their units’ weapons match up well against which unit type (for example, certain guns are good against groups of infantry, some are better against tanks and big monsters). What separates the good players from the rest is knowing how to maximize the synergies and unique abilities their units have, stacking them to get the most out of their dice rolls.
For example, the faction that I chose to play are called the Tyranids, a species which look like a combination of insects and dinosaurs. If you’ve seen the Alien movie series, you’ll get the gist.
According to the lore (there’s an entire Wikipedia devoted to the Warhammer extended universe), the Tyranids are apex predators hellbent on the destruction of all life forms in the galaxy, who tap into a central hive mind that coordinates the actions of their locust-like swarm.
Pretty straightforward M.O., I like it.
As a nod to the collective consciousness that guides the swarm’s actions, Tyranids have an ability called the synapse, essentially where bigger bugs telepathically radiate the will of the hive mind to the smaller bugs nearby, giving them a boost. It’s better for my little velociraptors to have a 5G connection rather than dial-up, so on the table-top, this means that it’s advantageous to keep my smaller units within a certain number of inches from my big dogs.
I forgot to mention the tape measures. Unlike Risk where there are set countries that you can move across one at a time, each unit in Warhammer has its own movement and weapon range. Complicated enough for you yet? We’re not quite done.
Each map you play on has different setups with obstacles for your troops to hide behind and objective markers that determine the outcome of the game. Instead of just trying to wipe your opponent off the board, there are objective cards that get drawn every turn, which give you points for completing tasks.
There’s a reason I chose to study English and not math. Perhaps this was a mistake.
*Cue Rocky training montage music
During the three practice games we had over the month leading up to the tournament, Parnell kept track of much of the calculations, otherwise we would have been there all night. Each game lasted around three hours, though the final one we practiced using a chess clock, to prepare for the tournament rules. I even downloaded an app, New Recruit, to keep track of the stats on the fly.
I was using a spare army of Parnell’s miniatures, which he had hand-painted himself. When I asked what one of his figurines costs, he looked around to make sure his wife Jocelyn wasn’t within earshot before he relayed the figure.
Yeesh, probably not a good idea on a journalist’s salary.
He pointed out that more budget-conscious players can 3D-print models for pennies on the dollar, though that requires enough know-how to be its own separate hobby, much like painting the models themselves is a sub-set of the broader Warhammer experience – 50 per cent wargame, 50 per cent model train convention, 100 per cent nerd central.
And I mean that in the best way possible.
Through a combination of Parnell’s advice and more than a dozen hours of YouTube strategy guides (who says journalists don’t work hard) I started to feel like I was making progress by the time I got to the third and final practice game the afternoon before the tournament.
Progress meant Parnell didn’t run me over in two turns.
Judgement Day
I arrived at the curling club a little before 8:30 a.m., with a coffee and a slightly sore back from playing the day before. Though I may be outing myself as an out-of-shape office-dweller, it’s actually common advice for first-time Warhammer players to remember to take sitting breaks over the course of the day (or so I read on Reddit). Hunching over a table like a hobgoblin for hours on end is surprisingly hard on the back, as I’d come to learn.
Parnell introduced me as a new player, which brought much goodwill, and then as a reporter, which immediately cancelled it out.
I offered that it would make for a funnier story if they clobbered me in my games, which got a small laugh.
Off to a great start.
Game one: Dany playing Emperor’s Children
“Few beings in the galaxy are as twisted and deranged as the Emperor’s Children. Their sanity blasted by the sick worship of Slaanesh, the Lord of Pleasure, the Emperor’s Children embrace terror and agony as delightful bliss, and wreak the most horrific degradations upon their foes in the name of indulgence and pleasure.” – Wahapedia
My first opponent Dany, seemed to be widely recognized as one of the best players in attendance and said he organizes tournaments out of the Boutique Frères de bataille (FDB) in Gatineau.
His army, the Emperor’s Children, are apparently a fairly new faction, which were painted with a tasteful pink scheme. According to the lore quoted above, they’re war junkies “driven by an obsessive desire to experience the thrill of battle in all its many forms”.
Well, they’re sure to get a kick out of me and my space bugs.
I quickly discovered that running all my units directly up the middle of the battlefield wasn’t a solid strategy, as he took two turns to destroy my entire army while losing only a handful of units. While I was able to chip away slightly at his main damage dealer, a giant snake-demon-prince named Fulgrim, he remained stubbornly alive as he broke the carapaced back of my alien army almost immediately.
Following a series of unlucky rolls, I joked that Parnell had given me trick dice, and the laugh I got was about all I had to feel good about for the moment. We ended up shaking hands quite quickly, with him harvesting a significant number of points in the process. Dany was kind and gave me some pointers, but seemed bored by our matchup and was quickly on the hunt for his next victim, as winners got first dibs on their opponents.
Fair play to him, dude’s got bigger fish to fry.
I also knocked one of Parnell’s aliens on the floor, snapping the delicate model clean off its base. I was relieved to learn that it was 3D-printed and not worth very much, but I wasn’t off to a very auspicious start.
Dany would go on to win the tournament, so in hindsight sitting around for 45 minutes while everyone else finished their games wasn’t so embarrassing. Gave me time to get started on the beers.
Game two: Mike playing Chaos Daemons
“Creatures of primal malevolence, Daemons are birthed from the accumulated sins and passions of the mortal races, and given form and will by the Dark Gods of Chaos. Invested with the cruel malice of their creators, they will not rest until reality itself is torn asunder and every soul in the galaxy devoured.” – Wahapedia
My first game after the hot dog lunch (thanks again Jocelyn) was against Mike, an amiable guy who plays out of Hydra Hobbies in Petawawa.
His army, the Chaos Daemons, was very different from anything I’d played against before, as it consisted of a small number of large, tanky monsters with powerful abilities. The daemons look about as grotesque as they sound, with one morbidly obese ogre that Mike nicknamed Big Chungus standing out as particularly gnarly (see photo).
Off the hop, he threw me entirely for a loop, as much of the Tyranid battle plan revolves around using a game mechanic called battle shock, a kind of morale test. My alien hivemind is able to psychically terrorize most of my weaker opponents you see, and if they don’t roll well, they lose their ability to capture objectives and receive buffs. As Mike explained, the daemons have their own psychic aura that mostly cancels this out, and even allows them to heal if they pass the test, which is quite effective with big monsters.
Needless to say, I had no idea how to respond.
Though I did a lot better in this game, lasting well into the third turn, it was mainly due to Mike’s terrible luck with the dice more than any major improvements in my gameplan.
I blundered some moves and only remembered about a powerful ability I had access to a turn too late, costing me my most valuable unit. Mike was a good sport and let me bend the rules when I forgot some things, but not enough to make much of a difference.
Gotta learn somehow.
I had a good time, and got some more mileage out of my joke about the trick dice, though with diminished returns.
Mike was able to keep me off the primary objectives with minimal effort, so while the game went on a little longer and I was able to throw more dice, the score was pretty similar to the previous game.
Game three: Nicolas playing Sisters of Battle
“The Adepta Sororitas, also known as the Sisters of Battle, are an elite sisterhood of warriors raised from infancy to believe unquestioningly in the supreme power of the Emperor of Mankind … Their fanatical devotion and unwavering purity are a bulwark against corruption, heresy and alien attack, and once battle has been joined they will stop at nothing until their enemies are utterly crushed.” – Wahapedia
The third game kicked off around 4 p.m., and I was paired up with Nicolas, a friendly francophone who plays out of Gatineau. He seemed a little frustrated with how the day had gone, and said we would have a “relaxing, teaching game”, which was fine by me at that point.
He bought me a beer, which was also appreciated.
During the setup phase, Nicolas gently questioned the logic of some of my choices, and showed me how to set up my units behind cover so they didn’t get immediately blown to smithereens. This is trickier than it sounds, and required the use of a laser pointer to ensure all the edges of my pieces were safely tucked away out of sight (see photo).
His (very well-painted) soldiers were glass cannons, able to deal significant amounts of damage, but not withstand much themselves. This resulted in Nicolas keeping a good chunk of his army off the board in reserve, and acting very cagy with what he did have in play.
With his coaching, I got off to a much better start than all my previous games, scoring well on my secondary objectives.
After letting me build my confidence, Nicolas left me to my own devices after the first turn, saying “like a toddler, I’m going to let you try and walk on your own.”
Quite the vote of confidence that he thinks I’m walking already.
We played until the time limit ran out, and then talked out the last moves that we didn’t get to play to determine the score. When our game ended, Nicolas’ big guns had chewed up most of my stuff, though I wasn’t completely dead in the water, which seemed like a win after a full day devoted to getting my ass kicked.
The final score was marginally closer than the previous games, largely thanks to the advice I got in the set-up phase. Stretching out from the Quazimodo-esque hunch I had unconsciously adopted to oversee the battlefield, my back and knees felt the full brunt of day’s wargaming.
You gotta hit the gym, bud.
Warhammered, or the real legions of chaos were the friends we made along the way
Parnell had certainly invested considerable time and effort in his paint jobs, especially compared to some of the horror shows I’ve seen online, but a few of the armies on display at the tournament were especially stunning.
During the downtime between games, I chatted with some of the other players about the hobby. While clearly a highly-competitive bunch, they all seemed genuinely invested in ensuring I had a good time at my first tournament, sharing how much they got knocked around when they started playing competitively. There’s quite an active competitive scene in the Valley by the sounds of things. Honestly, though the demographics skewed far younger and more testosterone-heavy than the crowd I curl with, the low-key, friendly vibe of the tournament was not at all out of place at the club I’d spent so much time in over the years.
And with beers still under six bucks and a bartender like Sonia, what’s not to like?
For real though, please reach out if you want to learn to curl once the ice is back later this winter, I run the beginner league: 613-805-7891.
The winners of the “Gork and Mork Invite” as this tournament was known were Dany Daigle in first, Jonathan Savoie in second, and Samuel Duchesne in third. Best painted went to Drew Foley.
In total, the day raised a little over $800 for the club (hell yeah, Parnell), and many of the players seemed amenable to returning, as Shawville, the centre of the universe, sits equidistant to the most of the players present. I’ll be there if they come back, with some better ideas about how to harvest my opponent’s biomass for the greater good of the swarm.
Though I’m not sure I’ll stick with the Warhammer once I’m able to curl again, I see now there was a different path I could have taken in high school had I walked into a hobby store instead of a paintball pro-shop.
Maybe there’s still time.
