Vappafaux 2014 round up

I've been trying to put this post together for a few days, but work and being knackered after the weekend have prevent it.  Last Sunday was the Vapnartak convention in York at which I was running my first ever tournament:  Vappafaux.  We'd managed to sell all 30 tickets in about 8 days so there was already a good buzz about the event.  It was a long slog getting ready for the event as we had to build all the tables but we got there in the end.

We were lucky enough to be able to setup the day before so myself and my fellow TO And (@guildmonkee) had to get all the stuff together and head over to York race course where the event was taking place.  At 1pm Saturday we had boards and terrain at 4 different locations across York so a short road trip was required to get everything together prior to heading to the race course.

This is what a 30 player Malifaux tournament looks like when you load it into one car:

After a short unload (I've got a bag truck which I bought which meant we got all the boards to the second floor in one trip), we got everything laid out:

The top three tables are those nearest the camera.  Terrain-wise we had some "feature" tables with properly coherent terrain sets, and for the remainder we put out as much stuff as we could get together between And's terraclips collection and the generic terrain we had from the club.

Here's some of the feature tables:

Badlands Railway station by Sam (@Secondbreky):

  Desert board by me (cheap and looks pretty good):

Nicodem's Graveyard by me (see early posts for kit reviews on the Renedra church and grave stones):

Breachside Farm by me.  During the event, I was lucky enough to meet Walt from Commission Figurines who made the farm kit.

Ruined hamlet from Warlord Games, mine again:

Secret Mining Operation by And (@guildmonkee).  As you can see this board was a significant labour of love and alot of work went into it, but it made for an impressive result:

The Dreamer's bedroom.  This idea was stolen from Mike (@OldManMyke) who used a similar setup at 4M last year.  I partly put this together since it required very little expense or effort on my part ;)

The prize pool looked excellent in the end with excellent donations from all our sponsors:

bendyboards.co.uk
fenrisgames.com
tinyworlds.co.uk
Urban Construct (www.wargameterrain.co.uk)
warbases.co.uk

Eventually we had over £220 worth of prizes to give away, and ever single one was done by a raffle.  The tournament winners and painted prizes got small trophies:

...but every other prize was done by raffle so everyone had a chance at some swag.  There was 15 prizes I think in the end so half of all the players got a prize regardless of where they finished.

Warbases were good enough to cut us some Vappafaux tokens for the event:

We even had cake!

Overall, the event went very well and everyone seemed to have enjoyed it.  I took onboard some things I can improve on for next year and there's always things which are outside your control (the unknown unknowns as Donald Rumsfeld once said) but for my first event I was quite happy.

The full results for the event can be found on the Wyrd forums.