Tenā koutou te whānau! The 2019-2020 New Zealand SWM Season has begun.

This is hopefully going to be a return to the bigger seasons of times gone by. Last season we had an influx of new younger players and we are currently sitting on 32 people with current NZ rankings (official games in the last 12 months) so the next year should be a blast. We're already planning a number of tournaments, including resurrecting some older ones (Hey-ho Vassal...!) and creating some new ones, and are looking forward to rolling some d20s and having some fuuuuuun!

The season officially kicked off with the return of HaweraCon! Its been a few years since this puppy has flown and that was due to the Hawera crew pulling the pin on the Minis game. But thanks to the tireless efforts of Richard "Rattlehead" Allen (creator of the Minicron and Skirmish Tracker), he has brought about a subtle reemergence of the game via what we are calling our Integrated Tournaments. The Hawera crew - driven by a huge fascination with Magic Cards and Destiny - have moved into very different games - so much so that they've actually been doing HaweraCon this whole time with those aforementioned games and no Minis. Richie, however, through his own HamilCon earlier this year, has brought back the SWM game by allowing players to choose between the three games when they match up against each other. While a number of the newer Hawera players have never played Minis before, a bunch of the older ones don't mind the extended options. We also needed to be able to play SWM in the 30 minute timeframe that Magic and Destiny run in, so we opted to play 100pt minis and adjust the timeframe to the half-hour.

This all means that SWM was back at HaweraCon for the first time since 2015. Of the 14 players at the tournament, 9 of them choose to play minis at the some point, and over the 5 rounds of play, there was 7 SWM games played over the tournament. Minis didn't feature in the top 4 (although Bevan - one of the guys that did play minis - made the Top 4) so it is not possible to pick a HaweraCon SWM champ, but it is possible to use these games as the launch point for our next year. Here is the 7 games from the Saturday:

Paul (Republic) beat Kezza (Separatist) 99-0 [3-0 on Spynet HQ]
Bevan (Republic) beat Kezza (Separatist) 99-11 [3-0 on Jabba's Palace]
Alan (New Republic) beat Dave (Yuuzhan Vong) 99-72 [3-1 on Cantina]
Rich (New Republic) beat Kezza (Separatist) 99-13 [3-0 on Spynet HQ]
Paul (Republic) beat Alan (New Republic) 100-27 [3-0 on Cantina]
Bevan (Sith) beat Daman (Imperial) 101-65 [3-1 on Jabba's Palace]
Kahu (Fringe) beat Billy (Mandalorian) 100-54 [3-1 on Royal Militia Headquarters]

...and here are the 100pt Squads:
Paul (Republic) CinDralig/SerraKeto/R2/Wolfpack
Kezza (Separatist) DookuHero/Riff/Whorm/Ugx2
Bevan (Republic) Bane/Sheev/SithOrdnance
Alan (New Republic) LukeGH/KolFS/RodianAss
Dave Miller (Yuuzhan Vong) "Thug Life" Nom/NautolanBSV/RodianAss/KlatBSTx5
Rich (New Republic) JainaJM/HOSFel/Ganner/BB8
Dr. Daman (Imperial) VaderLothal/Kylo/2xRodianAss
Kahu (Fringe) Hondo/3xWeequay/DefelPirate
Billy (Mandalorian) Cassus/2xMandoScout

Both Paul and Bevan finished 2-0, but Bevan made the Top 4 in the tournament... so maybe he is our HaweraCon champ?! We'll work it out eventually, but this is but a blast that we were able to get SWM back to Hawera. Some other highlights were that, thanks to Bev's two wins (with a squad I made for him that he no idea how to run...!), he was able to singlehandedly take the 62-62 record between the Hutt Region and the Hawera Region to 64-62, and that Bevan, Kahu, Dave, and Alan all played there first official SWM games since about four years ago!

Anyhoo - I'll catch you up on the rest of the Save11 games for the remainder of 2019 as soon as.

Ka kite ano! Mauri ora, mauri mate!