BOLTERCON 2022 – We survived!

After an absolute whirlwind of a weekend, BOLTERCON 2022 has come to a close. Incredible sportsmanship, hobby, and camaraderie on display for 4 solid days. Before we get into the meat of the recap, please know none of this happens without our community of players and our fearless staff! Dope truly sharpens dope.

We’re going to have a lengthy post here, leaning on our new blog to bring the word of dopeness to the people. Things will be changing around here and in the clubhouse, so hang on because we’re fueled by overhype and cannot be stopped.

BOLTERCON is more like a feat of strength than a gaming event.

Alright, on to the meat of it. We are going to cover 40k Doubles , 40k Invitational GT, Painting Competition, and Sunday RTTs for AoS and 40k. We’ll finish up with some general conclusions and put a big bow on BOLTERCON 2022!

BOLTERCON generally speaking

From the past two years of running the Invitational during a pandemic, we have learned some things. At the top of the list is location, location, location. After some challenges in 2021, the staff of Centre Park of West Chester really came through for us this year. We’re in it for the long haul as BOLTERCON grows and could not be more pleased with how things went.

If you’re interested, take some time to look through our BOLTERCON site, HYPE VIDEO (THANK YOU LANCE), and player packet. The devil really is in the details! Getting this all sorted is a ton of work, and we’re always looking for feedback. Every year will be bigger, better, and doper.

Now, onward for event-specific recaps!

Warhammer 40k Doubles

This is a special event for those of us in the Bolters at Dawn OG circle. What got the initial spark going was Adepticon’s 40k Long War Doubles event. With the tagline of “bringing the hobby back” it’s not hard to get infused with hype. Why not bring that energy to our people? What Albert set out to do was bring our own Bolters at Dawn flavor and spin on the Long War event, really incentivizing teams to create narratively cohesive armies that are painted to the highest standards. For a first shot at it, things went really well!

Without going into too much detail, we had a bit of trouble getting Best Coast Pairings to include the hobby and sportsmanship scores in the final tally. You can see the BCP event details, but the final results were a hand tally. The Invitational was 15 minutes late while we sorted all that out, so thank you to all the players for your patience. On to the placings!

Team	Players	Battle Points	Sportsmanship	Hobby	Total
Pandorax	Jacob / Jesse	205	415	190	810
Seal Team Thicc	Gabe / Christian	227	300	135	662
Team Pressure	Chris / DJ	199	325	100	624
Mister Fister	Mike / Adam	140	325	125	590
Khorne Flakes	Dave / Charles	156	235	175	531
Oh Lawd They Comin’	Kelvin / Kris	153	245	100	498
Rock the Faith	Eric / Josh	135	200	140	475
Brent’s Braintrust	Brent / Austin	125	255	0	380

And without further ceremony, here are our award winners:

1st Place Overall – Pandorax ( Jacob / Jesse )
Hobby Heroes (best hobby) – Pandorax ( Jacob / Jesse )
Purity Seal (best sportsmanship & theme) – Pandorax ( Jacob / Jesse )

A clean sweep for Draigo and his merry band of Catachan tanks! Glorious experience all around. We could tell that everyone was really enjoying their time in the doubles crucible and getting to know their opponents. It was a welcome warmup for the looming 32 person Warhammer 40k Invitational GT.

Warhammer 40k Invitational GT

Yeah so we did a GT! Well not only did we do a GT, but we did it our way: beautiful terrain and tables, thoughtful terrain cards printed out, a player packet no one read, and a mission slate that strove for balance in each round. Hats off to the Bolters at Dawn Staff and our community members who pitched in because without your motivated help, we couldn’t do things this dope.

Speaking of dope, after wearing a crown and cape for two days our very own Chris Kentrup has taken home his third Invitational trophy! His well-piloted list of space elf magic dominated the competition. Here’s the rest of the top 13, those with 3-2 or better records:

Place	Player	Record
1	Chris Kentrup	100 / 89 / 99 / 97 / 100
2	David Stein	91 / 78 / 86 / 90 / 77
3	Garrett Nadicksbernd	99 / 61 / 73 / 90 / 96
4	Joseph Blackett	24 / 75 / 85 / 99 / 90
5	John Gemrich	0 / 85 / 97 / 88 / 78
6	Christian Chadwell	84 / 66 / 82 / 80 / 29
7	James Kos	95 / 97 / 55 / 87 / 92
8	Devon Hanavan	86 / 98 / 88 / 53 / 62
9	Gavin Peacock	63 / 89 / 88 / 89 / 58
10	Chiloh Edwards	85 / 59 / 75 / 78 / 85
11	Adam Blum	86 / 30 / 54 / 83 / 75
12	Jesse Brown	73 / 80 / 80 / 29 / 63
13	Jacob Simmons	42 / 76 / 86 / 71 / 38

Everyone went hard, played tight, and mostly finished their games (unless you were playing Albert). We had some awards to give out to recognize outstanding play and sportsmanship (and Boogerbowl). Prizes galore for these players:

1st Place Overall – Chris Kentrup
2nd Place Overall – David Stein
3rd Place Overall – Garrett Nadicksbernd
Boogerbowl III Champion (winner of lowest final round pairing) – Bryan Bauer
Purity Seal (best sportsmanship) – Michael Klebau

Personally, I can’t say enough about how much fun the event was. The pictures help but you have to hear some of these stories! Check out all the details on pairings, lists, etc over at the BCP event page.

Painting Competition

We do our hobby competitions a little different around these parts. Your entries into the Painting Competition must be from your Invitational list! This adds some real spice to the competition as people balance their desire to crush their foes before them on the tabletop versus hearing the lamentations of the competition when taking home an award as decided by Kenny Boucher from Next Level Painting. We have two awards – one for Best Painted Army and one for Best Painted Single Model. Without further ado, our winners:

Best Painted Army – James Mulvaney
Best Painted Single Model – Jesse Brown

I won’t go into more detail than our esteemed hobby mentor, who you can watch talk about it on video. Huge thank you to Lance for coming out to the event and taking all the dope pictures!

Next year, make sure to get your spot in the event(s) that allow entry to the Painting Competition. This year is was just the Invitational, but in 2023 who really knows… ? Be sure to check out all the pics we sent for judging. Even if you don’t win you at a minimum get a few professional photos of your army!

Sunday RTTs for AoS and 40k

As if things weren’t already off the rails enough from the previous two days, we had a couple of attendees feeling not so great on Sunday morning. Not your usual “dehydration” in this case, so out of an abundance of caution we ended up closing up early. Our AoS RTT didn’t even get a full game in, so we will be coordinating with the players how to re-rack the event so people can get their dope prizes! The 40k players did get a single game off, so congratulations to Charles Veith for a victory and for Peter Hattemeyer for runner up!

Conclusions

One shoutout we absolutely must do is to Will aka Hodgepodge for winning the Raffle Army – 2700+ points of painted Necrons by our own Paint Team Six (plus Albert)!

We have a big THANK YOU shoutout to give our generous sponsors for prize support. Our fledgling BOLTERCON event isn’t widely known and these companies went out of their way to give us help. So go buy some stuff from them to support them for supporting us:

I’ve been picking away at this article for over a week. There’s too much to cover in one place, too many stories that need told, too much hype to contain in such a simple medium as this blog post. What we are going to do is gather up all the photos and make them available for the public to enjoy. Why? Because it was a fabulous experience with an incredible amount of effort on display. Rev those hype engines and check it all out!

PS: We did a grand finale for our 40k crusade – Echoes from the Void. That update will come later, but you can sneak peek some pics…