Warhammer 40k at BOLTERCON 2025

We put in the work and the results speak for themselves! BOLTERCON was bigger than ever this year, kicking off on November 13th and not even slowing down once until November 16th came to a close. A packed hall at the Holiday Inn West Chester, a supportive hotel staff & bartenders, and a schedule full of game systems means we’re exhausted… but also looking forward to MORE HYPE in 2026!

Today, I’d like to give a recap of our Warhammer 40,000 events – the 38 player Grand Tournament and the 8 team Doubles events!

Warhammer 40k GT

Believe it or not, we can learn from our experiences and stick to our ever-present enterprise-grade continuous improvement plans! This year, we went with a 5 round tournament spanning Friday and Saturday to give people an opportunity to ramp into the grind and finish strong on Saturday. Another change from last year, and arguably more impactful, was to strictly enforce our hobby and WYSIWYG requirements up-front by requiring photos of armies as part of list approval. If you’re not familiar with those requirements, please take a gander at the Player Packet for all the details (because I won’t be going into them here).

A big boon to the 40k GT was that 20 of the 24 tables had been play tested in our 40k RTT series in the clubhouse! While I personally find the oops-all-ruins approach of competitive 10th edition 40k unsatisfying, I also understand that this is what people expect from a GT. We got blessed by Crockett and Travis from FoldForge with a sponsored table of said competitive terrain that I did honestly find extremely satisfying as you can see below:

Enough about what we set out to do, let’s move on to what actually got did. We had a smattering of layouts (GW layouts 1, 2, and 8) to keep our competitors on their toes, and the missions / deployments can be found over in the Best Coast Pairings event . Without further ado, the placings:

Place	Player	Faction	Record
1	Adam Brule	Necrons	95 / 100 / 100 / 94 / 67
2	Mathew Miller	Adeptus Mechanicus	100 / 96 / 68 / 89 / 93
3	Juice Sexton	Space Marines	95 / 82 / 94 / 98 / 51
4	Joshua Salzman	Black Templars	71 / 84 / 63 / 99 / 88
5	Joe Cottrell	Necrons	99 / 100 / 88 / 26 / 64
5	Carson Cady	Space Marines	54 / 58 / 84 / 42 / 73

Congrats to Adam B. for not only crushing the RTT series with three different Necron dynasties, he brought the heat to the GT and won the whole thing! From the games that my co-judge Jacob (our Deacon of Official Rules and Keywords) and I witnessed, we were quite impressed with the armies and their play. Our meta tends to be a little off the beaten path (for reasons), and Goonhammer did a shoutout in their recap article Competitive Innovations in 10th: Quoth the Raven “Rapid Ingress” pt.1 , so head on over there and see their reasonable takes.

Placing well competitively in the GT is only part of what we at Bolters at Dawn want to award & recognize achievement for. In fact, of the seven awards for the 40k GT, only three are for placing.

Probably the most sought after award is Best Sportsman, which is selected by vote of the players during the GT. As with any competition, people are put into direct conflict with one another. How a player conducts themselves in these conflicts, wins and losses and draws, speaks to their character – which to our club is the pinnacle over any win/loss record on the tabletop. This year, I am very proud to say we had multiple players tie for & a large pool of players getting votes! The voting slips asked for a brief description of a favorite moment, which ended up being the tiebreaker.

I can’t share them all (LMAO) but I can share some:

Congratulations to Jose T. for taking home Best Sportsman amongst this absolutely stacked field! He’ll join the hallowed halls of previous winners and definitely won’t go toxic and bring 30 Wulfen with Thunder Hammers next year. For sure.

Another award of EXTREME PRESTIGE is the winner of the bottom table on the last round, also known as The Booger Bowl. Joe S. was able to eek out a win against our previous winner Brad A. aka Battle Brad aka The Warmaster and take home the trophy for the sixth (6!) annual Booger Bowl that only had a minor misspelling (to be remedied ASAP)!

And last, but certainly not least, we have The Golden Bolter awards to Best Painted Army and Best Painted Single Model. This competition is judged remotely by Kenny Boucher of Next Level Painting and The Long War podcast. I won’t delve too deeply into the details, but we get photos of all the entrants and ship them off to Kenny in his secret hobby lair. He ruminates on the entries and then prepares his judgement via video.

This year we upgraded our photo booth game and really played around with exposures, focus, and luminosity. You’ll see a bunch of pictures as we were trying to capture all the essence of each entry. Added bonus, people used the photo booth throughout the weekend to get army pics that were not entrants! You can see all the photos in the Google Drive share as well as watch Kenny’s video explaining his picks for winners.

Kenny said it all, so here are the winners! We happy to congratulate Christian E. for the Best Painted Army:

And congratulations to Ryan T. for Best Painted Single Model:

And with all that, we’ve made it through the 40k GT awards at BOLTERCON 2025. But wait, did you know there was even more 40k being played on Sunday? If not, then be surprised. If so, then as you were. Either way, read on!

Warhammer 40k Doubles

Whenever we talk about the old lore of Bolters at Dawn, inevitably 40k Doubles comes up. We are founded in the fires of bringing the hobby back one tandem duo at a time. Since those early days we have expanded, but 40k Doubles is where our heart belongs. The primary goal of the event is to bring teams together for lore reasons to play games that embody the narrative. Along the way, we have judging for hobby, theme, and sportsmanship – but the idea is that two 40k GT players don’t just slap their lists together to play doubles.

We had eight (8!) teams fired up and ready to go Sunday morning, with some fresh off the five games of 40k they just played in the GT the previous two days. This is what BOLTERCON aims to offer: non-stop gaming in your system(s) of choice where the hype will carry you through. And hype we had in spades. You can see the teams over on Best Coast Pairings and how the battle points played out. However, battle points are only a third of the score.

Team	Total	Hobby+Theme	Sportsmanship	Battle Points
The Walking Dead	1326	356	750	220
Oops All Swords	1117	204	675	238
Eternal Toaster of the Black Raged Mind	1062	224	675	163
Khorne Flakes (Knight Included)	968	252	529	187
BarrNone	905	220	600	85
Team Alpha	731	130	417	184
Ravens in the Angels Shadows	611	204	317	90
Shadows of the Warp	529	120	133	276

You can see our judges rubric for scoring the hobby+theme below, as well as our player-scored sportsmanship rubric (averaged over games played for final score).

Congratulations to The Walking Dead combo of Grant S. and Chris G. for taking a commanding lead with the narrative list that coincidentally had a cohesive hobby theme. And on top of that, really played some great games as well.

Our second place finishers Oops All Swords (Josh S. and David V.) really did only use swords every game, which was hilarious to watch. Also our narrative infiltrators of BarrNone (Bryan B. and Brent B.) infiltrated their army every single game regardless the tactical outcome. The Best Generals of Chad G. and Caleb M. brought the heat with their elf mind-controlled bug list Shadows of the Warp in-game, which was oppressive to say the least! I can give many more kudos out there for teams embracing the narrative aspects of this event, but I am running quite long in this allegedly QUICK RECAP of our Warhammer 40k events at BOLTERCON.

Looking Forward to 2026

So many many thanks to all the 40k players in our GT and Doubles events for making the trip from near and far! We had a blast hosting and hope you all found it worthwhile to join in our annual tradition of BOLTERCON. As mentioned in his judging video, we’re very much looking forward to hosting Kenny in 2026 to not only judge in the flesh but play in our 40k GT (and other events??). Make sure to let him know you’re looking forward to it too!

If you’re not up to speed with Bolters at Dawn, please check out the latest in our primary method of communication with our community and club in Discord. There are dedicated BOLTERCON channels full of stories and pictures, amongst a plethora (smorgasbord) of other places to rage alongside our esteemed club members, officers, and staff. Also, we ping users who opt-in when this very blog gets new posts, of which they will be flowing all year long. Now that’s a value proposition if I have ever heard one.

Did you know BOLTERCON 2026 is less than a year away? See you soon.