Well, it’s that time of year again: National Heroscape Day was yesterday, and we played our annual tournament for the SoCal league. This year we managed 8 participants, but I brought 6 of them, so it’s not as impressive as it sounds. (And, honestly, it doesn’t even sound that impressive.) In case you don’t know what I’m on about:
- what is Heroscape
- what is C3V (part of the larger group called “VC”)
- NHSD 2012 (including a bit about what is NHSD)
- NHSD 2013
- NHSD 2014
And a reference that may only make sense if you actually play the game:
- forum thread for our tourney, the SoCal Slaughter (I’m Xotli on that forum)
This year the Smaller Animal reluctantly agreed to play solo, since otherwise we would have had only 7. He really wanted to play with me as a team though. I hope next year he feels comfortable enough to go solo as well. My eldest brought his 3 inseperable pals (now officially referred to as the Skype Squad, for the thing that they stay up all night doing), so that made 6 out of the 8 total participants, which is my personal record for highest percentage of tournament entrants provided. So my feeling last year that I was “almost single-handedly keeping the game alive in our area” has only intensified this year. But I’m going to keep drumming up more people, not fewer. So if it one day ends up being just me and my friends and relations, I’m okay with that. Plus we can just have it at my house and I won’t have to drive anywhere.
For the second year in a row, the younger brother beat the older, and consequently finished ahead of him in the tourney. We brought one complete newbie, and she managed to come in 3rd, due to an unusual set of circumstances. As per my usual showing, I came in right around dead center (in this case, 5th of 8). But we don’t go for the tourney placement. We go to have a good time, and I think we achieved that.
After the tourney, there was an aftergame of ‘Scape very similar to the one last year: my eldest once again took the elf wizard pod, and his friend once again played her backup army, which she hadn’t gotten a chance to try out. Then we sat around bullshitting for a while, ate some pizza, then launched directly into a marathon game of Zombie Munchkin. We only played to 6 levels (a normal game is to 10, but we learned a long time ago to scale back from that). Still, we went back and forth for quite a while, with nearly everyone hovering at 5th level for at least a brief period, until finally the demonspawn’s other friend pulled out a victory which no one could stop.
As always, we must thank our gracious host, and his apartment complex’s community rec room, which is the perfect space for us to spread out, play games, eat two meals, and just have cool chats. I hope we can achieve a better turn out next year, because our number can’t go down much more than this before there just isn’t much point in carrying on. But we also talked quite seriously about getting together again before next year’s NHSD. Of course, we did that last year as well, and see how far that got us. But somehow I feel like this year will be different. Hope springs eternal and all that. But the kids at least are excited enough to make it happen. So hopefully it does.