A Tale of 5 Gamers

Over the last few weeks I've been putting together my first event based on Games Workshop's "War Diary - A Tale of Four Gamers" series that they have ran off and on in White Dwarf over the years. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the idea behind "A Tale of Four Painters" is a very simple one. Four friends get together and over the course of a few months build and paint a new army to a set points level. I've decided to take a stab at this, but modify it a little. Starting this Thursday, the 17th of November, myself and four others at our FLGS will begin our own three and a half month journey called, "A Tale of 5 Gamers". Here's how it will work.

We're each starting with a 1250 point army in any condition, from new in box to mostly completed. This 1250 point army will form our "Core Army", and we'll be building on it as the event continues. Then, every two weeks, I will be challenging the five of us to add up to 250 points worth of models for your army. In addition to that, I will also be giving out two extra challenges and one insane challenge for everyone to try and complete if they feel up to it. Every other week, players can earn up to 6 points for completing those initial 250 points of models and up to an additional 2 points for the extra challenges. They can only get those additional 2 points if they’ve completed their required 250 points first! Then if they’re crazy enough, they can try to earn 2 more points by completing an Insane challenge. These Insane Challenges we be tough, but they’ll have a better looking army in the end! I will be posting all of this up in more detail as we go through the weeks.

I got the idea to do this while looking for motivation to finish my own armies. As I looked around the FLGS, I noticed that almost all of the regular guys had really nice looking unfinished armies! It felt like we all had the same thing happen to us. We would get started painting and building this great looking army, and slowly but surely all of us would have something or another come up and nothing ever got finished. So, I thought this might be a good way to keep people motivated and get some awesome looking armies on the tables.

As I said above, I'm going to document all of this on the blog. Hopefully on Thursday I can get everyone together at the FLGS and get some before pictures of thier armies. Then, every two weeks, I'll do another army photo to show off what they've done. I'm also going to include their army lists along the way. The event is timed so that by the time we are done, each of the participants will have a fully painted and based 2500 point army with a display board. I wanted to include the display board because right after this is over it will be time for the best tournament in the south-eastern United States, the Battle for Stones River! Since painting scores are included in the tournament, some of these guys will have a huge head start on the competition.

I want to encourage the rest of you to participate in this as well. I'll post up all the details for what we will be doing over the next few months so that those of you reading this can follow along with us. If you do decide to do this, or better yet get a group of guys to do this, let me know! I'll even post up your work here or give a link to your own blog if you have one. Look for another post by mid-week for the first round details and challenges!