The Tale of Four Gamers - Challenge 1

As I stated before, the release of Warhammer Fantasy's 8th edition and the "Tale of Four Gamers" feature on www.games-workshop.com prompted the Legion of Doomed Husbands to issue their own army building challenge.  Unfortunately for us, none of us really have time to build and paint an entire battalion in a month like the GW guys did, so we settled for a little smaller gauntlet being thrown.

Before I get into the challenge, I thought I would lay out the philosophy behind the competition.  All of us had a lot of interested in the Fantasy game and wanted to get started on an army.  I think we all also had in the back of our minds the memory of starting our 40K armies and how it was easy to get burned out on trying to build an army as fast as you can.  Consequently, our Tale of Four Gamers contest is based around three main goals:

1. Build a functioning Warhammer Fantasy army- obviously we all want to play the game so the object should be to make that a possibility
2. Spread out the cost of buying a new army- we all have families in various stages of growth and we are all fairly conscious of where our hard-earned dollars are going.  By expanding our armies in stages, we keep the month-to-month costs lower.
3. Keep the drudgery of building and painting the army to a minimum- painting one or two boxes at a time keeps you from staring at a mountain of plastic and wondering how you will ever get it done.

With those goals in mind, we started out our competition slowly.  Here is our challenge for month 1:

1. Competitors will have until Saturday, September 4 to completely assemble and paint 2 character models from their chosen Warhammer Fantasy army range.  For the purposes of the competition, "character model" refers to any single Lord or Hero choice, or a Champion and Standard Bearer model from any Core, Special, or Rare unit.

2.  Models should be photographed and photos sent to me for distribution (and also to post here on the blog)

3. This competition is worth 40 points total, 20 points per model.  75% of a model's total possible points will be awarded for completion, including basing (always a speed bump for me!), and the remaining 25% will be awarded based on quality of paint job as determined by the other 3 competitors.

 With the rules laid down, we each chose our armies and characters and got to work.  The lineup is as follows:

Brandon- Empire army of Averland- General of the Empire and Captain of the Empire with Battle Standard
Cam- Skaven Clan Mors army- Warlord Queek Headtaker and Warlock Engineer
Justin- Warriors of Chaos army of Nurgle- Chaos Knights Champion and Standard Bearer
Chris- High Elf army of High Elfiness- High Elf Prince and High Elf Noble with Battle Standard

The deadline is almost on us and we have all been working hard to get our models knocked out.  I'll be posting some individual competitor updates with WIP pictures soon.

Brandon