Tournament Scoring: The NOVA Method Explained

(Article two in a series on tournament scoring.)

When Mike Brandt ran the NOVA Open tournament last year, he created a revolution in the tournament community. A number of novel concepts were introduced into tournament strategy and scoring:

• Two major winners - Best General and Renaissance Man (33% each of battle, painting and sports)
• 3 simple missions that are not too hard to draw; but...
• All three missions are played every game, with one being primary another secondary and the last tertiary. If you tie the primary mission, the you determine win or loss from the secondary mission and so on.
• Victory points are used instead of kill points, and to resolve ties.
• Once a winner is determined, nothing else matters when determining the overall. There is a battle points score, but it is only used for future pairing offs and determining the Renaissance man.
• Within each bracket of winners, best is paired off with worst. Traditional Swiss format pairs off in a less extreme manner, in an effort to give players "better games". 

A Twist of the Fireknife

The Tau crisis suit "Fireknife" configuration consists of a missile pod, plasma gun and multi-tracker. For those of you who don't know your Tau (shame on you!) this translates in Imperial to a 36" range autocannon, and a S6 plasma gun that doesn't get hot - which can both be fired in the same shooting phase. It's a flexible configuration that delivers effective firepower against light armour, heavy infantry and monstrous creatures. Most competitive lists I see these days take 3 x 2 or 3 x 3 Fireknife suits (depending on points level) to fill up the Elite slots.

Review: Back 2 Base-ix Flight Stands

Anyone who owns a model based atop a Games Workshop flying stand knows that they suck. When that little plastic pin snaps off it not only leaves you with a useless flying stand, it also blocks the damn pinhole so that you need to drill it out before another stand will work. And these bloody things break all the time!

Did you know that you no longer need to suffer needlessly from this ailment? There is a product that will solve all your problems... Back 2 Base-ix flying stands are the answer my friend. These little babies use laser-cut transparent acrylic and magnets to deliver a basing solution that really works. I am in the process of converting my Tau army over, and am loving the results. It really is a different world, free of stress and frustration :)

Tournament Report: Battle Bunker Crash

I've just got back from a four round, 1500 point tournament - a long and intense day, as each game was 1 hour 50 minutes. I had a great time playing against four challenging opponents and learnt a few new things about Tau in the process. For a first time tournament it was very well run, I had no complaints. Well done Josh and Matt, I want to thank you for an enjoyable day.

The crash was a bit different to other tournaments in Melbourne. Firstly there were no soft scores to determine the winner - there was however a painting score that went towards a separate prize. So I could be a dickhead without having to worry about sports scores, yay! Even more innovatively, we all got to vote on the missions we wanted from a selection of 10 in the days before the tournament. So Boone could complain about the missions, and I didn't hear any complaints.

Happy Birthday to Me!

An advantage of having kids is that my wife is used to making birthday cakes to order. This was inspired by a bolter cake someone photographed on wargamerau. Bon appetite!

On another note, sorry to both of my loyal readers about the lack of content in the last couple of weeks. I actually have five or so posts in various stages, but keep jumping around from one to the other without finishing anything.

Also a chunk of my free time is being taken up preparing my army for the Battle Bunker Crash this weekend. I had to get on the internet to source a piranha and two broadsides, and I managed to hook myself up through wargamerau. Thank god, now all I have to do is paint the above. I'm reeeaaally looking forward to seeing how they perform on the battlefield.