Did the Special Character thing work at Blog Wars?

Well from the feedback I've been getting it appears that it did. End of post. Good job. See you next week....

Seriously though, aside from it mainly being open to bloggers and their friends, what set Blog Wars apart from a lot of the other tournaments was that I required everyone to field a special character. Now initially there were a lot of groans and moans and "my codex has crap special characters" etc. Then we had "I'll just drop this unit and throw in a token SC to keep him happy". However, once people started to think about how including a certain character would affect their army they began to see that it wasn't that simple. You know I'm a big fan of SCs and I think that they add a different dimension to games. There are certainly better ones than others but for the most part they all have their uses. It comes down to how you use them. Take the winning army, Andy's Dark Eldar, led by Baron Sathonyx. If Andy had just thrown in a 5 man Hellion gang and attached the Baron then he'd have had a fair amount of success but Andy actually put some thought into his army and it really paid off.

By including a massive gang of Hellions (20 of them) but also including wracks and an haemonculus Andy was able to use the Baron to full effect. Not only did that make a massive troops unit that would be difficult to deal with (and must be dealt with because it's scoring) but also the pain tokens from the wracks/haemo meant it would be an even harder task. Now don't get me wrong, Andy's list was definitely a tournament army thanks to the good old classic of MSU but at the same time it had character. I'm sure Andy will agree that it's a by no means perfect list but it proved itself on the day.

In my own list, which was significantly less successful, I had Ragnar and his unit as a centrepoint for all my battles. He was always in the middle of the field smashing face as he does best. Any opponent that knows about him will naturally want to stop him before he steamrolls their army. This means that my lone wolves, rhinos and speeder got a little overlooked. It's just a shame my rolling didn't let me use this to full effect.

Blog Wars 2: Battle of the Bloggers will definitely feature the same mandatory SC rule because I thought it worked and it seems like most of you did too. I quite like the xbox-style achievements for things like SC vs SC scraps etc but I think the difficulty here is that again I'd like to play so monitoring the scoring of the achievements would be difficult. It's all fine until a couple of people who know each other play and all of a sudden they seem to earn a lot of achievements in that particular game. 

Anyway, I'm going to keep that as the only condition of entry as I don't want it to get too complicated. Hopefully before the next one people will have had more time to play test and figure out which special character suits their play style best. I've already got plans....