Bonjour, je m'appelle Wings, et pour mes vacances je suis allé au Paris avec mon ami Corrode pour jouer à Warhammer.

Hopefully, that has one-shot anyone else out there with deep, seared memories of British school French lessons, and it is also accurate - this weekend, Corrode and I braved the exciting fronteirs of European Warhammer by heading to Paris for the Paris Wargame Expo (PWE). We had a blast, and in the style of our esteemed CEO's Road Through column, I thought I'd write about the trip - both the overall experience, and playing in a massive 40K tournament in a different country. Therefore, please enjoy "What I did on my holidays" by Wings, aged 36 and a bit.

What Is the Paris Wargame Expo?

The PWE is a new convention-sized event hosted by FEQ 40K, which is essentially the French 40K federation. Originally the acronym stood for French ETC Qualifier 40K, because it grew out of the body that managed the French ETC team (the precursor to a WTC team), but now it's a wider body that coordinates event standards across France. We pretty regularly see 100-player plus French events come across the desk in Competitive Innovations, but the PWE is new - an attempt to run a massive event on the scale of the LGT or a US Open, with a large competitive 40K GT, and lots of events for other formats and systems. As we'll get to when we talk about how huge the event was, they have extremely succeeded at doing that.

So how did we end up going? Well, originally, the plan this year had been for Liam and I to fly out to America for at least one big event, but that didn't end up coming together. Shortly after it fell through the PWE was announced, and we made the snap decision to go along. Do you know what's great about going to Paris from the UK? You can go on the train - the Eurostar runs from London straight to the heart of Paris, making a long weekend to play Warhammer extremely easy. No faffing around getting to airports, no worrying about checking baggage - you get to London on some sort of bus or train, you get on the Eurostar, and then you're released into the heart of Paris with very easy transport links to anywhere within the city. The PWE was hosted in a convention centre in Montreuil, which is technically just into the suburbs of Paris, but it really is only just, and it's all still on the main Metro lines, so trivially easy from a travel point of view. This all made it a no brainer, so we purchased our tickets, booked our travel, and last Thursday the time arrived to go on an adventure.

Thursday

Even going on the train, the Thursday was mostly a travel day. Our Eurostar was in the middle of the day, so for me that meant leaving the house at a relatively normal time to get on a bus from grey, rainy Oxford to London. This passed without event, and I got to St. Pancras International in good time, giving me a relaxed window to buy some lunch and check in through security and passport control. I was a tiny bit nervous that I'd end up having to completely unpack my suitcase, as one of my KR cases was in there with some metal Aspect Warriors inside, but either the people manning the scanner knew what a Fire Dragon was or didn't care, and I was sent through to the waiting area without comment. Shortly afterwards Liam was able to join me, and we caught our train without incident.

A few hours later, we were unleashed into Paris Gare du Nord, ready to catch the metro to our hotel. This presented the first minor faff of the trip, because the Paris metro has gone to a mostly app-based payment system. This works extremely well if you have an iPhone, as it integrates seamlessly with Apple Wallet, and I had all that set up from a business trip to Paris earlier in the year. Liam's Android, on the other hand, did not want to be friends with the system at all, and this was an ongoing cause of minor headaches until we paid the princely sum of €2 for a physical plastic card you can use instead. Eventually we were able to board, and made it to our hotel in something like 30 mins - I wasn't kidding about the transport here being extremely easy.

The hotel was...mid. It could definitely have used a bit more maintenance, but ultimately it was relatively good value and was <10 minutes walk from the venue, and those are the key things you need in a Warhammer event hotel. My room also had a pretty neat view.

You can just see the Eiffel tower in the distance.

After a day of travelling we mostly just wanted to get some dinner and then crash out/write articles, so we found a nearby poke restaurant that was extremely good (a consistent theme of pretty much everything we ate), and then called it a day.

Friday

Friday was a mostly clear day we had carved out for doing touristy stuff, with our only fixed agenda item being a meet and greet with the event TOs in the early evening. We had vaguely planned to go see the Louvre, as neither of us had been for many years, and at around 9AM we left our hotel and just started walking into Paris - and basically just ended up doing that all day.



The weather, you see, was absolutely glorious. It has been stereotypically awful in the UK for the last few weeks, but on Friday in Paris the sun was shining, and it was the incredibly pleasant temperature you only get when it's fantastic weather, but still also October in a temperate climate. Paris is also beautiful, and we were going past various cool landmarks and saw the awesome artwork they currently have on their city hall.



We got to the Louvre around 11:30, and discovered that we were idiot tourists and that getting in without a pre-booking on a random October Friday was going to mean standing in a queue for a long time. Having already walked about 8KM, we didn't particularly fancy that, so headed on the metro to try and see the Catacombs instead.

The queue is, sadly, hiding on the far side.

This proved to be an even more ridiculous thing to do without a booking (it was sold out through to Wednesday) but it was so nice being outside we didn't really care (though we will be doing a lot more forward planning if this repeats next year). We walked onwards past the Pantheon and got some lunch, and eventually ended up chilling in some nice seating next to a pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg.



Some vaguely threatening clouds finally appeared at around 4:30PM (as you can see from the pictures above, taken as we were leaving), so we headed onto a pub, then to the Paris Wargame Cafe for a meet & greet with the TOs. This was great, as we got to chat to both the 40K organisers and some of the TOs for non-40K games, and it's clear that AoS and Kill Team both have some strong momentum as well.

We also discovered our favourite fact about the French 40K scene, which is that it's unthinkable to run an event without lunch included, or people just won't come. It has to be a good lunch too, or there will be Complaints. Given Lunch was, in fact, included in our tickets, this seemed promising. We were also regaled with dangerously tempting tales about a 100-player GT happening next year in Bordeaux, and that one we could go to on a boat, never mind the train. Much to consider. After a couple hours, and feeling pretty excited about the event based on what we'd heard, we headed to a nearby collection of Indian restaurants, picked one to get a curry, and then headed back to our hotel. Would we regret that we ended up walking >14KM the day before a GT? A bit, yeah, but it was a lovely day and fully worth it. Also, we mentioned the nice weather to some of the locals, and discovered that Paris had mostly also been grey and miserable, it was just really nice for Friday specifically, so huge thanks to whoever on the TO team hooked up the weather machine.

Saturday

The Event

After a good night's sleep, we grabbed all our stuff and headed along the short walk to Paris Montreuil Expo, where the event was being hosted. We arrived to the reassuring sight of hundreds of players carrying army cases, and were fairly swiftly checked into the venue and handed our swag bags, containing both some GW kits and extra accessories. Given the total cost of the ticket was €95 including croissants and lunch on both days, this was a fairly cool extra bonus. The event was also massive as promised. We were playing in the 40K singles, which was 400 players, and there were also:

• 100 tables of 40K doubles (so another 400 players).
• A 72-player 40K Narrative.
• 150 AoS players across singles and doubles.
• Kill Team and Blood Bowl tournaments up in a mezzanine space - everything else was in a single massive hall.

All-told, we reckon somewhere between 1100-1200 players were participating, which is obviously a fantastic number of people having fun! There were also some vendors and the GW travelling shop, which is a bigger deal when it's outside the UK because you can't just head up to Nottingham to pick up GW exclusives.

After getting our bearings, we headed to our tables. This is probably the spot to discuss the ways in which playing 40K in France differed from what we were used to in the UK. As the fact that there is essentially a 40K federation suggests, things are extremely organised, and there were some features that were novel to us:

1. Rather than using a fixed terrain layout for each mission, the FEQ has a set of 8 maps based off the GW layouts (adapted to use WTC terrain pieces, same as we do for UK GHOs), which you can see here. Each map has some moving pieces that allow it to be adapted for playing any deployment map, and when you get to your table, there's a note and QR code telling you which of the FEQ maps to use. That means you can't pre-plan to quite the same degree as on (e.g.) UKTC, and need to be able to adapt to what you encounter for each specific game. I really liked this - the maps are generally good, with the adaptations generally sanding off the rougher edges that some of the GW ones have, and I've never fully loved the extent to which some maps become "solved" in less dynamic environments.
2. Clocks are mandatory on every table, and the judges were very actively checking that everyone had their set up correctly and started at the right time. I don't tend to play on a clock by default, so this was a bit more of a culture shock, but the fact everyone was just completely used to it softened the blow. Revolutionary Boon thought very much operational in France.
3. Judges were numerous, knowledgeable and active - they felt like much more of a presence than at the average UK event. This was great - I'm very much in the camp that more active judging would be good for the game, and like with the clocks the fact that this was the norm removed some of the occasional weird stigma around getting a judge involved you get at some events. A couple of times the language barrier made it easier to grab a judge rather then try and unpick a rules nuance, and in both cases there was no sense that this was a confrontational or unusual thing - that's what the judges are there for.
4. Getting by mostly in English was mostly fine - I know I just said there were a couple of language barrier things, but it was literally just two rules queries the whole weekend. I do speak a little bit of French, but my opponents did most of the work in bridging the language divide, so a big thank you to them for that!

I'll say up front that this all added up to a very positive experience - I am very keen to play more 40K in France, and we are actively scheming on ways to do so.

All that out the way - time to grab some croissants and play some Warhammer. First, of course - what was I playing?

My List

Asurmen. Credit: Wings



I was coming into this event off the LGT, where I traditionally rack up my worst performance of the year and have to then pick up the pieces of my fragile ego. This year's 2-3 performance was roughly on par for that, with me both making some bad list choices, and making some of the tactical biggest screw-ups I've done for months.

This was an opportunity to reclaim some dignity, and being on GW-style maps rather than UKTC let me refresh my build. The original sin of what went wrong at LGT was convincing myself onto single Serpent Aspect Host with the Avatar, because you can't easily hide two Serpents on the maps. Didn't work with no practice - I was too used to double Serpent builds, and the Avatar was a dud. For UKTC, my future plan is Serpent/Falcon as a happy medium, but on these maps the second Serpent was feasible, giving staging for Jain Zar and making Asurmen appealing. Asurmen is really strong on GW areas, and my thinking was that having WTC ruins on these to hide his boat behind would make him even better. The rest of the list is the good stuff from my previous attempt, all of which I was very comfortable playing with. Let's find out if it worked.

Round 1 - Take and Hold - Search and Destroy

The Opposition - Emilien - Aeldari (Seer Council)

The Game

No easing into it then - straight out of the gate with an Aeldari mirror. At least it's against a detachment I've played myself, so I had a pretty good feel for what needed to happen going into it. Also, I locked in my brain immediately on remembering that the floor is lava 9" around their Psykers, because I've killed a whole squad of Ynnari Spiders with the Vaul's Wrath Stratagem before, and it felt pretty brutal, so avoiding that seemed smart.

My best unit for the matchup was Asurmen in the Serpent. Seer Council can be quite uphill for other Aeldari because of all their tricks, but he only really has Fuegan that can open a Serpent, so if I'm reasonably cautious with the Asurmen Serpent, I can use that to gradually grind him out of the game. I also put my Lhykhis in Deep Strike because I've found that Aeldari mirrors can often turn on whose manages to dunk the others, so I'd rather be able to Rapid Ingress mine.



I set up so that if I got the first turn I could push him relatively hard with Scouting Shroud Runners on the bottom flank, and that's what ended up happening - I went first. He had some Rangers on the objective that high rolled their reactive move to dodge the Shrouds, but I was able to set up to kill them with Asurmen instead at no great cost to me. That forced him to go quite hard with a teleport play from Maugan Ra to get me out of the ruing again, and while that worked, Jain Zar was able to get into Maugan and pick him up in response, while Asurmen kept taxing resources on that flank.

Elsewhere on the board we'd been skirmishing with one another and dealing plenty of damage, but because he didn't have the reach to come in and get my Jain Zar out from where she was now lurking, I eventually had a window to push out with her and roll up some of his critical remaining resources, and the combination of that and Asurmen's chip damage eventually left him with only a few models on the board and a win for me.

The Result

Win - 95-66

A positive start there, off on the right foot. It was now supposed to be time for lunch, and this is where the only real snag for the event occurred - the bakery preparing the packed lunches had a fault in one of its ovens, so they were slow appearing, delaying the event a bit (and eventually needing the staff to go round distributing them mid-game once they showed up). Additional croissants were distributed to tide us over, and I will say that when the lunches did arrive, the sandwich was one of the best I'd had all year (and on Sunday everything went completely smoothly, so it genuinely did seem to be a nightmare "worst possible thing to happen on the first day of your new convention" situation on the Saturday).

Round 2 - Supply Drop - Hammer and Anvil

The Opposition - Jocelyn - Orks (War Horde)

The Game

High on victory from game one, this game I went into fairly confident. His list, on paper, looked like something I could handle, as there aren't infinite units in it, and all of it will die when poked.

This did not play out as I'd hoped.

I went first and things started off relatively decently with me taking out some of his scoring pieces at low cost, while disrupting his ability to push on the bottom flank with a charge into some Trukks from my Scorpions. That advantage flipped when I made a bit of a throw and let him slingshot a warboss from a Breaka Boyz unit into my Shroud Runners while charging a Serpent, picking them up essentially for free. What quickly became apparent as things progressed was that I didn't have enough ways to force damage into him on the flanks through the terrain, so he could stage and tax me for stuff very effectively. Still, as he progressed to the Waaagh I thought I was set up OK to lose some stuff in the middle then counterattack, but I was relying on my Banshees warding off a flank. He spotted this, and made the strong play of just sacrificing a unit to clear them with the Fight on Death.

Pictures taken shortly before disaster

That plus other things going wrong (most notably Mozrog one-shotting the Dragon Serpent) meant I was suddenly wildly on the back foot, needing a very big turn to come back, and I didn't get it. I completely whiffed an attempt to kill a Beast Snagga unit, and died badly from there.

I think in hindsight trying to play the flanks was a mistake, given the terrain - bizarre though it is for Aeldari, I should have demanded a fight on the middle objective earlier, and tried to make that go my way. I also needed to be more cautious with my Fire Dragon bus until Mozrog was down, as nothing else in my list really kills him. Very strong play from my opponent here meant there wasn't room for that kind of tactical error.

The Result

Loss- 36-73

The hubris to nemesis pipeline claims me once more. Time to try and recover on game 3.

Round 3 - Linchpin - Tipping Point

The Opposition - Chassaigne - Aeldari (Aeldari)

The Game

Welp, if you play Aeldari, you're not allowed to complain when you hit Aeldari mirrors.

This time my opponent has big Hawk units, but it's still another game where the Asurmen bus is a gigantic asset for me, though the Hawks are equivalently horrendous. I need to try and find a way to shut them down without ever giving them a window to kill two or three of my units in a single turn.

To some extent, this game is one of those that cascaded entirely from one early luck spike - in my favour. I had Lhykhis in Deep Strike again, I went second, and we started off by using Spiders to clear units out of each other's "safe" ruin, expecting to lose them, all fine and standard. However, we also both had units holding the objectives on the far side of the other ruins, which would be harder to reach - except that I just pointed my Tempest Launcher at his five Rangers in that spot, and wiped the entire unit. That immediately denied him Primary, and left him suddenly bereft on that flank, where I had stuff staged to pressure it.

Given I had second turn and the Asurmen boat, that left me very much in the driving seat, as he suddenly had to invest much more in the way of "real" resources to even try and score points outside his deployment zone. He also couldn't really stop me staging the Asurmen/Banshee Serpent in a position that let me launch some big plays, and I was able to set up favourable ways of taking out Maugan's Falcon and passengers, and push Jain Zar into his Hawks, doing major damage to one unit with her (plus some of my Hawks) shooting, and charging the other.

Somehow there remained a tiny window of where it looked like he had a route to come back, as Jain Zar's unit hit an all time melee low roll that only killed four Hawks, but the dice remained on my side other than that blip. The Hawk grenades and other cleanup shooting into Jain Zar was mediocre, letting her do more damage on the way down - and while he was busy with that, Rapid Ingress Lhkyhis on the other flank was able to jump and kill her opposing doppelganger, putting the game out of reach for him while our Fuegans had a climactic clash in the mid-board.

The Result

Win - 84-48

Aeldari mirrors - simple. Orks - impossible. Apparently. Anyway, By this point it was reasonably deep into the evening, and after finding Liam we agreed we were both too shattered to do anything serious about dinner, so just grabbed some food from a supermarket and went to bed.

Sunday

After not a massive amount of sleep, it was back to the venue for day 2, still aiming for a solid record.

Round 4 - Terraform - Sweeping Engagement

The Opposition - Fricker - Death Guard (Tallyband Summoners)

The Game

An encouraging start to the morning, as this one looked like a very favourable matchup. Tallyband is cool and I think under-explored, but for Aeldari it's basically Death Guard with less of the stuff I hate, and more good targets for Fuegan. He's also super low on drops once I start killing stuff, so I can end up just having too many threats for him to handle.

This played out pretty much as you'd expect based on that - he deployed fairly hard on the left, and I went second. On turn one came forward with his Rhino to stage and do some objectives, while pestering my Rangers with a Beast of Nurgle. He positioned the transport to hide the passengers if they got shot out, but I made the calculation that if I dealt with those now, he could basically never pressure my right flank. It would mean letting one Drone shoot my Fuegan Serpent, but it would definitely be able to hide from the rest even with 2" from a Battle Focus, so I gauged that the risk of getting one-shot was low enough to make it worth doing a power play. With that in mind, the Fire Dragons set up to shoot the Rhino, and Lkhyhis jumped to herd the disembarks in to a place I could deal with them. From there, things went pretty much perfectly - both Plague Marine units got killed down to just the Plaguecasters, one in combat with Lhkyhis and the other with some Corsairs.

On his turn he couldn't really fall back with either of these, as Battle Focus would either let the Corsairs massively disrupt his Deep Strike plans, or Lhykhis get out of danger completely. He instead tried to deal with them with a charge, but failed a 6" with Rotigus, and the Plaguebearers didn't do masses. His last big hope was Rotigus tanking a Fuegen counterattack, and he had a good go, rolling well on invulns against the squad, but then the Phoenix Lord decked him for the full 12 damage and finished the job, while my Shroud Runners flipped his home objective largely unopposed.

Fuegan and co work toward their final victim.

My opponent used some clever Contagion slingshotting to get some Deathshrouds into my Wave Serpent for one more big Secondary turn, but had to consolidate into Jain Zar to try and deny me Primary, at which point she and her squad decked the whole unit due to some truly atrocious saves on his part. That was kind of it given I was also dancing around on a flank objective and his home without much opposition, and Fuegen eventually got round to dealing with the Great Unclean One as well.

The Result

Win- 98-54

Positive record secured, which counts as breaking the post-LGT curse. Now to see if I could make it a 4-1.

Round 5 - Hidden Supplies - Crucible of Battle

The Opposition - Vincent - T'au (Retaliation Cadre)

The Game

For me, seeing a T'au list without Riptides is always a relief, because although I do think the heavy Crisis build is better into some parts of the metagame, the potential to just bounce off a Riptide gives Aeldari serious challenges. Without that, this is a game of trying to chip away his assets while reliably scoring 10 and the map here was very favourable for this.

I went fairly heavy with my Scouts and Infiltrators on the top flank, and he put most of his Crisis units in reserve, which gave me a window to put him on the back foot. I went first and my Scorpions and Shroud Runners duly managed this, clearing a lot of the cheap stuff on his top flank, and dancing away from immediate reprisals with Battle Focus. This let me lock in my comfortable 10s, and start planning how to handle the rest of his army. Unsurprisingly, the answer on turn 2 was Lhykhis with no Overwatch heading up to murder and de-fang his Ignition unit, but I kept the pedal off the gas a bit on that turn otherwise (keeping Fuegan's boat well out of trouble), especially as I could keep building a resource advantage with Asurmen also murdering something he'd had to poke out to Spot with. I also forced him to use his Ingress to stop my Corsairs charging and flipping an objective off a Ghostkeel, rather than anything more proactive. He did make a very good play in turn to stop my Primary denial plans - I was set up to Ingress some Spiders and sweep to flip his home on my three, but he used his own Deep Strikers followed by a Fire and Fade to ward that off.

Two criminals skulk after battle focusing away from their crimes - unfortunately their squad is still visible on the other side of the wall and this does not work out well for them.

Still, turn 3 was where the big play came in - I'd already looked at the board and figured I needed to be a bit more aggressive to stop him just racking up 10s as well with final turn advantage, and I drew Tempting Target/Storm, so it was go time. He didn't have any big Overwatch threats on the top flank, letting Jain Zar could full boost that way to engage the Starscythes on his home, while Asurmen could go on a No Overwatch jaunt down the mid board to murder some chaff, unsticky an objective, and score my secondaries. The combination of these was enough to permanently put him on the back foot, and also gave me a window to bring Fuegan's bus up, as he couldn't afford to divert threats to it. That was also helped by my invulns being very good this game - I spiked 5s on my Shroud Runners a few times so his attempts to reduce my resources just weren't working.

Asurmen makes a big play (there's a barely visible Corsair touching the objective in the ruin, so only the Crisis suits need to die to flip the point, and Dark Reapers off to the left with a line on them).

Asurmen and Jain Zar paid for their crimes pretty swiftly, but the damage was done - I'd 0ed him on Primary for a turn, and he'd had to use a lot of stuff to clear his home, so Fuegan was able to clear enough of what was on the mid-board for him on my turn 4 that I could 0 him again, which basically put the game out of reach. My saves also continued hot, and on his turn 4 crack back my Wave Serpent limped on to die at the exact moment where he'd had to commit Farsight's unit with the one remaining flamer suit, so the Dragons got to get out on an objective nice and safe, and keep me on a 10 for my final turn despite him using his tools well to flip one of my other mid-field objectives. I picked up most of his remaining units that weren't deep in his own deployment on my 5, and that was that.

The Result

Win - 86-50

Final Result

4-1 - 65th Place

Very happy with that - and also very happy with the list, which I don't think I'd change at all for another attempt. Every piece did its part, and Asurmen was 1000% the right call for the terrain - he was consistently the man of the match.

Post-Tournament

With only two rounds we finished at a civilised time, and headed into Paris to find large burgers, which is what we were both craving. We succeeded at this, with the trend of all food in Paris being very good (and also good value) continuing. We then headed back to the hotel, where I frantically jotted down the game notes that have become this very article prior to them exiting my brain.

Monday

For our final morning in Paris, Liam very intrepidly went out on a run, while I simply found a bakery to have some coffee and an incredible pain au chocolat.



I then got packed, did some shopping for snacks to take to the office, and we headed back to the station. Our train was just after lunch, and it turns out if you turn left out of Gare du Nord you immediately find lots of nice Indian restaurants, so we grabbed another nice meal, then headed to check in. This was slightly chaotic, as it turns out that bag scanning and security processes are one of the few things London does better than Paris, but we got sorted, and worked on website stuff for a bit in the waiting area.



We were briefly entertained by a bird that seemed determined to join us, but tragically left them behind, as our mighty steed beckoned.

The red ones on the left are part of the Eurostar fleet.

This brought the weekend to an end, as within a few hours we were deposited back in the UK, and split up to find our way back to our respective cities.

Final Thoughts

This ruled - and we will 100% be returning next year if this becomes a recurring event. Congratulations to the organisers on putting on a smashing convention, and thanks to them for the nice conversations on the Friday night, plus all of my opponents for five great games of 40K, and putting up with unexpectedly having to conduct one mostly in English. I can conclusively say that the answer to "should you go play some 40K in France" is a firm yes if it's doable for you!

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