Tanksgiving Report Part 1: The Forces Assemble

As I reminded everyone on Nov. 25, GW US hosted a massive national "Tanksgiving" event last weekend. Well, Tanksgiving may be over but the happy memories and photographs of some of the 40K carnage remain. As requested last week by some of our BoLS readers, I did take photos of the event at my local Battle Bunker, which I will share with you as a series of two posts. Why do I have to split this report into multiple postings? That's because the Apocalypse sized model collections and action required too many photos for this war correspondent to cram them all into one post!

Before I begin with the photos, let me first say thanks to Games Workshop and my local Battle Bunker staff. The Black Friday 3-day weekend celebration was tremendous fun. Events were well-run, raffles and prizes were plentiful, and the atmosphere was pure fun all three days. Thanks again for the awesome fun and outstanding customer service.

Now, onto the first series of photos from Tanksgiving, which began at 2:00 PM on Saturday, Nov. 27. A couple of us began placing our models out early, which generated some fun and excitement from other customers as they observed the massive length of tables filling up with equally massive numbers of models all morning and early afternoon. I personally brought ten models to the game, all of which were super-heavy except for my Land Raider Terminus. My Chaos Baneblade, Chaos Stormlord and Chaos Stormblade conversions are yet to be painted, but I couldn't resist fielding that many large models in one game so they assembled next to my already painted large model Imperial forces and Chaos Brass Scorpions. The person with the most models in the game had eighteen. Our forces are pictured below.


The friend who brought the eighteen models included his Land Raider Ares variant and his work-in-progress Marneus Calgar Land Raider. The latter is based on an article that appeared in White Dwarf a while back, but he's added his own flourishes like the eagle doors on the front.



After we put out our twenty-eight models, other forces began to arrive and assemble for battle.










With the mighty forces of nearly every army in the Warhammer 40,000 universe arrayed for battle, we knew the conflict would be long and exciting. Since GW stores were running the game as simultaneously as possible, stores could launch strikes at the game tables of other stores via telephone. There were also some surprise entrants into the battle supplied by the evil genius of our Battle Bunker staff. Look to these pages here at BoLS soon for my follow-up report on highlights of the battle and some photos of a few staff-built store models the likes of which you may never have seen before.