NOVA 40k Trios Team Tournament---September 1, Arlington, VA

Registration for this year's [url=http://www.novaopen.com/]NOVA Open tabletop wargaming convention[/url] goes live tomorrow, Feb 1, 8pm! I'd like to call out attention to the new and hopefully improved 40k Trios Team Tournament. As usual the 40k Trios will be on opening day, Thursday, September 1st, so it's a great event to do in addition to the NOVA 40k GT or Narrative, or any of the other excellent NOVA activities.

Trios is a mix of doubles and individual play. You register in teams of three. Each round, your team is paired up with another team against whom you collectively play one doubles game (1000pts each) and one individual game (1850pts). So the event guarantees you two games side-by-side with two different friends, and one game where you bring out your whole army. One of the interesting things about it as a player is that making that shift highlights who has a really good command of their list and who doesn't. Especially if you wind up playing the individual game in the final round, after playing with a small force all day, you all of a sudden need to be able to well utilize all the elements of a much larger list. Conversely, in the smaller games you need to shift gears to complement your partner's play rather than relying on all your own usual toys.

The NOVA 40k Trios is intended as a casual, lighthearted tournament. Our missions are rigorous and competition ready. However, there's a heavy emphasis on intangibles and thematic teams: 40% of the total points are for sportsmanship, theme, and appearance. Note that there's a very detailed, objective breakdown of those, e.g., what exactly "theme" means. Those rubrics are already available in the [url=http://bit.ly/1m7df0J]event primer[/url].

Updates for the 2016 40k Trios from previous years include:

* 1850 point standalone battles, to better fit time constraints;
* Army structures in line with 7th edition 40k;
* Horus Heresy Age of Darkness armies permitted;
* Superheavies and gargantuans are permitted, but with mission penalties;
* Optional Quick Reaction Force detachment;
* Doubles gameplay, e.g., the psychic phase, clarified and streamlined;
* Revised scoring components, with explicit metrics;
* Personal Warlord Achievements;
* Whole new missions.

There's a lot of thought, debate, and testing behind the new army rules, missions, and the event overall, so I could talk about it at length. But for now, if you're interested at all, you should check out the event primer for [url=http://bit.ly/1m7df0J]all the details[/url]. If you have already read the event primer since they went live on New Year's, you should take another look as there have been updates. They don't change the overall event much but are significant in army building and gameplay. The updates are all enumerated in the change log at the top of the primer.

We would be happy to field questions and appreciate comments, and don't forget to [url=http://www.novaopen.com/]register tomorrow[/url]!

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ttS2IMRSEX...ova%2Blogo.png