Howl-etical ThoughtsTournament Etiquette: Part Two - What to Bring

Welcome to a special guest edition of Heretical Thoughts. Heretic has kindly allowed me to take over his column for the week and continue the discussion about Tournament Etiquette. In this week’s edition we’ll cover what you should bring along and FAQs.

What to Bring

First of all bring your army. I’ve never been at an event where someone forgot to bring their army but I’m sure it’s happened somewhere. That being said, we always bring extra armies and extra lists with us just in case someone does forget their army, doesn’t have enough points to play at the designated point total, or we have an odd number of players and need a ringer.
Now we’ll go over some of the less obvious articles you may want to bring with you to a tournament. You should always have dice, templates, a tape measure, a scatter die, a Warhammer 40K rulebook, and your codex. There are a couple of reasons why these items are important to have. First and foremost having all of these will allow you to focus on your games and enjoy the tournament. The event will be far more enjoyable if you don’t have to worry about where you’re going to get the scatter die for your teleporting terminators or who’s large blast template can you borrow for your battle cannon. The second reason to bring these items along is it makes the event run smoother. Sharing a tape measure with your opponent or looking for another player with the same army so that you can look something up in their codex takes time away from your game and can be distracting to all of those involved.
I’ve forgotten one or two of these things myself in the past. We all do it occasionally. The purpose of this articles is to help remind everyone of what you should have with you at a tournament. All of that being said, we often bring extra dice, templates, rulebooks, codices, FAQs, and anything else that we can think of.

FAQs

Don’t forget to check your armies FAQ. Games Workshop FAQS can be found here: Errata and FAQ Articles. Sometimes the changes are minor and won’t really affect you that much but sometimes Games Workshop makes major corrections like changing the effects of a Dark Angels storm shield to match the normal codex Space Marines storm shields.
The army books for Warhammer Fantasy Battle have been heavily modified with FAQS and it would be almost impossible to play WFB 8th Edition without consulting the FAQs. The recent changes made to all of the Space Marine Codices, Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook, along with the inclusion of the Night Spinner rules in for the Eldar in White Dwarf indicate that Games Workshop is willing to make major corrections/additions to the game rules without releasing a new book.

Howl-etical Thought for the Week:

"It takes a vast amount of self-control to be this dangerous"