Professional sports teams review old game tape for hours in order to improve their own skills and abilities as well as to learn their upcoming opponents’ play style.  These are athletes that are at the top of their game and studying game footage helps to keep them there.  What exactly are they looking for?  Well you can’t control what your opponent will do but you can investigate what they’ve done in the past and possibly learn strategic tendencies and tactics and from that info, you can learn how to counter it.  You can also study your own gameplay and determine what you can improve on.  So if you’re looking to get to the top of the Warmachine/Hordes competitive scene, why wouldn’t you review old games?

 

Enter the NFL(GS) Game Tape (Notable Friendly Local Game Store).  Alright, admittedly competitive Warmachine is not a professional sport but it is a competitive tournament environment where knowing the play styles of the major competitors and the typical models you’ll encounter across the table is essential to success.  More important is learning how to improve the strategies or positioning of models a typical player can make during a game.  Can you learn to recognize that your plan to out-attrition your opponent will fail and you should switch to assassination mode? Maybe reviewing the game a few times can help! As such, following in the footsteps of Matti K from endgamegaming.net, I have taken it upon myself to record a “game of the week” for the local players at our local gaming store, Heroes World.  Several of the players here will be going to Templecon to test their skills against the field and while only one of our local players has aspirations at seriously competing for the Warmachine Masters crown, I felt it would be good to let a variety of players assess their own games to see where improvements can be made.

After recording only 2 games (with a third uploading as I type this), feedback has been nothing but positive.  All the players involved have reviewed their games and stated that there’s several things they picked up on after review that they could have done better.  In addition, players are now coming to me and requesting that their next game be recorded.

So what do you need to get started if you want to be the next Spielberg of your local gaming store?  Not much, actually.  I recently bought a Sony HDR-CX220 video camera from BestBuy for around $280.00 to film my wedding.  Admittedly, the battery it comes with only lasts for a little over an hour so I had to shell out another $50 to an online store to buy a beefier battery that would last at least for a 2 hour game.  Other than that a tripod is handy if you don’t want to hold the camera for the entirety of the game.  And that’s it!

I’m not sure where this will go in the future or even if it will progress beyond just recording one game a week.  But the local players seem interested for now and feedback is all positive.  We’ll reassess everyone’s game a few months from now and see if we’ve truly learned to improve our play from this but for the time being, I’m having fun doing it and I hope my simple endeavour will inspire other stores to do the same.  We all benefit from being stronger players!

 

All my videos are uploaded to YouTube and a new one is added weekly.  Subscribe to Magoo Shoots on YouTube and if you’re in Southern Ontario, don’t forget to visit Heroes World and stop by on Thursday nights for Warmachine night.

 

– MS