As I mentioned, the Iron Fist League ran Rapid Fire again at Games Day. We were pretty hard to miss: smack dab in the middle of the convention floor, across from the store.
Setup
Setup on Friday went down quite smoothly: completely done in about three and a half hours. I attribute this to Doug McN’s somewhat psychotic organization of terrain: he showed up with a truck full of terrain, all broken out by theme and table: two 4×4 tables per drawer.
After that, it was off to the Wharf Rat Oliver’s Pratt Street Alehouse with the IFL and WNPG guys to wait out traffic before heading home
Turnout
I’m still waiting on the result spreadsheets but I can speak, roughly, about how active it was. Last year was insanely successful. This year, we were still successful but less so.
Last year: there were no open gaming tables; while that was a mistake on GW’s part, we certainly profited from it… if you wanted to game at last year’s Games Day, you had to do it through Rapid Fire. This year, they had open gaming and, it seemed to me, there were more club tables offering it as well.
Also, we had more tables than we did last year… plus, they put the 40K and Fantasy tables next to each other, which was great since it let us shift tables to the system that needed it most (40K).
So, turnout wasn’t as out of control as it was last year but most of our tables were occupied, and everyone seemed to be having a good time.
For 40K, we had about 2/3rd’s the players. Fantasy, surprisingly, was nearly dead. It was much more active last year; we had barely more than ten players.
Prizes
I’d been concerned that we’d forgotten to talk to Game Vault, who’d very generously given us prize support last year, about prize support this year.
I had no need for concern, though, as Games Workshop hurled stuff at us to give away:
- Warhammer 40K Battle Points: Killa Kans & Deff Dread
- Warhammer 40K Longest Winning Streak: Chaos Predator
- Warhammer Battle Points: Beastman Battalion
- Warhammer Longest Winning Streak: Warhammer 8th Gamer’s Edition (minus the book)
They also gave us, literally, an entire box of blisters to give away. So, we did: anyone who won three games in a row got a blister. At one point, we had a guy waiting kind of an unreasonably long time for a game of Fantasy: we gave him a couple of blisters as a thanks-for-your-patience.