The LVO has come and gone! What an awesome event it was. Get ready for tons of pretty pictures and a battlereport!
Reecius from Frontline Gaming here to talk about the LVO!
After several years of developing the idea, and a year of planning, we are now recovering from an absolutely awesome event! It feels good to see all the hard work pay off.
We held the event at Bally’s Casino, right there in the heart of Vegas!
The location and the atmosphere of Vegas made it just such a cool, fun place to be! The hotel itself was very nice, too, and we got a smoking hot deal on the rooms which made it very affordable. That, and flights to Vegas being cheap, and getting around the city relatively easy makes it a great venue for traveling to.
The hall was gorgeous, too!
As you can see, the Gaming Mats we made for the event looked AWESOME! Wow they came out great and everyone was super pleased with them. We sold them off of the tables at the end and there weren’t many to bring home afterwords! We have limited quantities of the mats left for sale at Frontline Gaming for those interested! We will be fully stocked with the complete line in April, including 4×4′ mats and the rest of the designs.
The terrain was excellent, too! We busted our asses to make sure there were at least two line of sight blocking pieces of terrain on each table. We had player after player come up to us and tell us it was the best terrain coverage they’d ever seen at a tournament which was awesome to hear as we really put our backs into making that happen.
The event itself ran extremely smoothly. We had just shy of 500 people walk through the doors of the hall and everyone had a blast! It was such a good combination of fun, socializing, gaming and Vegas that it felt like everyone had a big smile on their face. The other great thing about this venue is that we had a ton of wives and girlfriends in attendance. More than I have ever seen at a tabletop gaming event before. That is going to be great for the growth of this event, I believe, as if you can bring your non-gaming significant other along and they’re having a blast too? You can count on coming back in future years.
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The following is a brief rundown of the results, for complete results, go here.
Warhammer Fantasy
Fantasy went well and was a ton of fun with beautiful terrain and armies. The event was well run, and the players loved the online score-sheet that they could watch update in real time. The big winner was Lee Horn with his Dark Elves, well done, Lee!
Lee gets his name on the awesome shield we made that will bear the name of each winner of the event for years to come! This was also a Masters Qualifying event, so Lee is on to the Fantasy Masters, too.
Big shout to Seth Amsden from Game Kastle Fremont for running this awesome event!
Warmahordes
We had a huge turnout for Warmahordes! Over 80 players, and those guys are nuts! They play from 9am well past 2am…when do they sleep?!
But, big shout out to Ryan “The Betrayer” Chiriboga who took it all after 3 days of gaming, going undefeated with Cryx!
Big thanks to Tyson Koch of Figure Painters and his staff for running a great event.
Warmahordes on one of our Gaming Mats!
Great event and we can’t wait to see how big it gets next year!
Beerhammer!
Beerhammer was a blast! Adam Bienvenue from the Dice Abide Blog ran a great event. It was all about fun, laid back competition and enjoying the spirit of the hobby. Big shout out to Chris Loomis who won it!
40K Doubles
The 40K Doubles event was a great time, too and like Beerhammer, is a lot of fun that is very laid back. Big shout out to JY2 and Chuck Pierce who won it all!
40K Pics
One part of Israel Sanchez’s display board in his best painted winning Tau!
Insanely big Titans, brought by Joe Butt for the Apoc game!
Warhammer 40K Championships
The Warhammer 40K Championships was an absolute blast! We had 222 registered, and 196 show up. Not bad!
The event ran extremely smoothly (as did the entire con!) and was a lot of fun. So many people came up to us and told us how much they enjoyed the Noon start time and only 3 rounds per day max, as it allowed them to sleep in, go out at night and enjoy Vegas, and play relaxed games without having the grueling feeling of so many games of 40K in a day.
We were also told repeatedly how much people enjoyed the high density of terrain! That was music to my ears as we worked insane hours to follow through on our commitment to excellent terrain! There were a few tables that in certain deployments weren’t perfect, but we had awesome terrain in general. Kudos to the team for their hard work!
We also have to send out a huge thanks to Chip from Torrent of Fire who flew out from the East Coast just to help out and what a help he was. We fully endorse Torrent of Fire, it is an awesome system and we loved using it. If you want to use it and plan on running a BAO style event (our tournament format), it is already plugged into ToF, so you can easily use it, too!
You will notice that there were no Tau in the finals! Justin Cook, winner of NOVA with his Ovesastar list got 9th, just missing qualifying, was the highest ranked Tau Player. Alex Gonzalez and Israel Sanchez also went 4-1 with Tau, but none of the made the final cut. I can’t say for certain why, but I like to think the increase in LoS blocking terrain helped a lot in that.
It was a hotly contested event and despite the nerf to the 2+ reroll save we instituted for our event, the finals were still chalk full of deathstar armies. The winner was Alex Fennell with his Seercouncil/Wave Serpent Eldar/Dark Eldar army. Even with a really big decrease in the durability of the Seercouncil he still was able to club other armies over the head with it! That’s not to take anything away from Alex, he’s a top notch player and earned his victory. The point being that I think this is pretty telling evidence just how incredibly over the top some of the deathstar armies in the game are right now. Even with a nerf, they still dominated.
Forge World was yet again, vastly underwhelming and mostly just a lot of fun units. Gareth Hunt did make it to the finals with a FW heavy army but he always takes no holds-barred lists. He won our last event with Screamerstar. I am glad we saw an IG player in the finals, it was a nice change of pace. His run for glory ended though at the hands of Adam Tricola’s Deldar Beatstar who managed to get into Gareth’s castle and win a close game.
The finals was Eric Hoergers Space Marines/Space marines against Alex and while it looked close early game, a decisive assault that resulted in Eirc’s command squad with Khan fleeing from the table was the death knell.
Congratz to Alex!
In all, it was a great event and we had a blast! There’s a million other things to say but this article is already getting long.
Big thanks to all of our awesome staff, our sponsors TableWar, Battle Foam, Mechanical Warhorse, Secret Weapon Miniatures, Greenman Designs, Mr. Dandy, Tectonic Craft Studios, Life After the Cover Save, Games Workshop, and everyone else that helped to make the event so much fun!
See you all next year! Here’s an awesome video of the event by DoktorG!
Reece Robbins, is one of the most respected names in tabletop gaming. He founded Frontline Gaming and the largest Warhammer 40K tournament in the world, the Las Vegas Open. Reece has been playing competitively and covering Warhammer since the 1980s. He has won major events including Adepticon.
