Tournament Tips For The Filthy Casual

 Good day, battle brothers! I've been bumping into first-time tournament goers a fair bit, which made remember how nervous I was when I attended my first tournament. Heck, I've been doing it regularly for years now, and I still get the jitters going to a tournament. So, I thought people might be interested in the little measures I take to make tournaments a little easier on myself, removing small stressors so I can concentrate on playing well and having a good time. Maybe some of these little measures I take will be helpful to you.

The first thing I like to do is get as much squared away the night before as I possibly can. What this usually looks like is packing my car in advance. I put my army and my gaming bag with my codexes, dice, and assorted gaming paraphernalia in the car the night before so I don't have to worry about those things in the morning. That way, I have that much less to worry about that morning.

Another simple thing one can do to lessen incidental stress on tournament days is to bring your lunch with you. Tournaments typically have an hour break between the first and second rounds. If there's an eatery right next door, then great. If not, then one has to find someplace to get food, order, eat, and get back within that hour. That's doable, but it is a little more stress to deal with. I avoid it by making a sandwich the night before and eating on site. That way I know I'm going to have plenty of time to eat and I'm not going to be late for the start of the second round.  It's also a good idea to bring plenty of water and some snacks - particularly the water. You're going to be talking a lot, so you're going to get thirsty. 

To make my life easier during the tournament, I do a number of things with dice, all of which are illustrated by the photo here. First, bottom center of the photo you can see my main gaming dice. There are exactly 20 of them, 10 blue, and 10 white. They are a different size and/or different color than all the other dice I use, so I can't mistake any of my other dice as belonging to this batch. I did this so I can confidently pick up the number of dice I need for any given roll quickly. I don't very often have the need to roll more than 20 dice at any given time, and for those occasions I have the bigger container of dice upper center of the photo. When I need more dice for a roll, I pull them from there.

Next to my supplemental dice bin are a couple of smaller containers with dice in them. These are pre-counted buckets of dice for specific units - one for my Hellblasters, the other for my Devastator Squads. That way, when I use those units, I just have to pick up the bucket, tell my opponent which dice are for which weapons, and roll away. Those dice are also the only dice of those colors I have out, so again it would be really hard to mistakenly roll too many dice. From experience, having more than a couple pre-counted dice buckets causes its own headaches, but having 2-3 will save you a bit of time.

Then there are game aids. The last little container of dice holds the D10s I use for wound counters and the dice I use for various in-game conditions. I have the good fortune to have some Battlefleet Gothic special order dice, that have various symbols on them instead of pips or numbers. The symbols were for BFG in game effects, but they are applicable to 40K in game effects like advancing, falling back, battle shock, marking an Oath target, and even performing an action. Very handy if you happen to have them, can find them at a flea market, or make your own with a 3D printer. Also, the clipboard visible in the corner has both my detachment strats and the universal ones so I can reference them quickly. And, of course, I have the datacards, which make it easier to quickly reference unit stats and abilities. 

I'd like to  mention of pennies as an invaluable game aid. I keep some pennies in my big dice container for marking out deployment zones. The nice things about pennies is they're easy to carry, you can leave them on the table and play over them, and if you forget them on the table you're not really out much. I've also found they're handy for marking out where a particular piece of terrain or unit is if I have to remove it from the table for some reason. For instance, in Game 4 of the CaptainCon GT, I was obliged to pick up one of my Razorbacks so I could put down an objective mat, so I marked its position with pennies and then put it back afterwards.

I'd like to make a special mention of the Tabletop Battles app. Goonhammer has produced a very good app for players to keep track of their scores during the course of a game. There's a bit of a learning curve to using it, but once you master it, it is much easier to keep track of score during the course of the game with it than doing it manually. It can even be linked to the Best Coast Pairing app so when you finalize your score, it automatically gets entered into BCP for you. It's well worth the time to download and master.

Another little convenience that makes tournament play a little easier is a carrying tray. I learned pretty quick I don't want to put my army in it's carrying case between every game. Having a carrying tray makes it easier to transfer your minis to and from the table as needed. You can group them by unit, which saves time hunting for particular minis. That way, you're only taking them out of their carrying case when you arrive and only going back in when you're packing up to leave. 

This is a bit of a tangent, but if you have any ambition towards winning prizes for painting, then it helps to have a display board, which can double as your carrying tray. Most painting rubrics include points for having a display board, and it doesn't have to be very elaborate to get you those points. Mine is made out of a picture frame I picked up at Michaels with some balsa wood screwed to the bottom and then surfaced as appropriate. It's not fancy, but I have won 3rd place for painting at local RTTs more than once, and having a display board helped with that.

Finally, if you're going to attend tournaments with any kind of frequency, or even just attend regular gaming days at the local gaming store, I can't recommend getting one of these folding rolling carts highly enough. I store everything I'm going to use during the day on the cart and use it to transport my army and all my gear from table to table over the course of the day. The top shelf of it can serve as your carrying tray, and then your books, game aids, carrying cases and so on can go on the lower shelves. They cost about $100 from Amazon, and it's money I'm glad I spent. 

That's what I've got. As you've seen, this isn't so much advice on how to win tournaments as it is on how to enjoy them more, I think all of it is good advice, but if you take only 1 thing away from it, let it be bringing your own lunch. If you take 2 things away from it, make it bringing your own lunch and getting the cart. But most importantly, enjoy the experience of attending tournaments, because if nothing else it's an opportunity to get in a bunch of games, and that, more than anything else, is the point.