The next stop is Geek Retreat Holloway

I live down south of London, so I don't usually trek this far up north. However, last Saturday, I just came back from a bit of travelling and landed at Euston around the afternoon. Since Geek Retreat (GR) Holloway holds their Armouries on Saturdays, I thought "why not".

Last Saturday, I went to GR on Holloway Road for Blitz Armoury!

The Journey

NOTE: If you are reading this before June 2022, the Northern Line is planning closures for some of the major stations, like London Bridge, Borough, and Bank for the first half of 2022. So, please check your route before you travel.

Very straightforward journey. If you get on the Northern Line, the closest tube station to GR Holloway is Archway. You can also take the Overground to Upper Holloway. Once you get off, whether at Archway or Upper Holloway, its just a straight walk down the road to GR, no turns.‌‌

It's a street road, so it's very busy and well lit. ‌‌

There are also plenty of eats around if you need to grab something before you get to the store. GR themselves also serve food and drinks, if you prefer to support the store.

The Store

After a 10 minute walk from Archway, I arrived at my destination.

The store has that very classic 'game store' feel to it, something I haven't felt since I was little. And, what a coincidence, it so happened that the store was hosting a birthday party for a group of young DnD players‌‌ that night as well!

Was of course a bit noisy, but very wholesome.‌‌

The back of the store is the play area for TCG and TTG. The front area stocks lots of TCG accessories like dice, sleeves, playmats and binders. A classic game store.‌‌

It also serves food! I sadly did not have any. But, rumour is that the burger is quite decent so will be keen to try some next time.

The Event

I continued to rock a sub-optimal Ice Oldhim Blitz deck (my ability to construct is sub-optimal, not Ice Oldhim, he's awesome, change my mind).

I did add 2 particular cards to Oldhim's repertoire, Endless Winter and Rampart of the Ram's Head.

Endless Winter is a strong control card in my opinion. Whether or not it's fused, it still threatens the defending player to give up their next turn. If fused, that's pretty much a done deal as whether the opponent blocks or not, the opponent will have a disadvantage on their next turn. Without fusing, the opponent have more room to wiggle. But, I don't think it's an easy decision to make either. They could lose most of their hand blocking. Or, if they take the hit, they may be unable to play their hand effectively unless they don't plan to activate any abilities. I feel like a single strong defence reaction, like red Staunch Response or Turn Timber, or a play-style that doesn't activate abilities would pretty much not worry about this attack though.

Rampart of the Ram's Head is a really good card which I have yet to fully utilise in my plays. Because every resource pitched gives it +1 defence for the entire turn, it's very useful against heroes who break the chain early and start another combat chain because the +1 stacks up. So, I can pitch a blue and for 3 combat chains have increasingly bigger defence, in addition to normal defending. I still find it difficult to judge when to use it versus just outright defending with a card. Sometimes I feel like I need to defend 2 or 3 on that first attack and just instinctively defend with a card. Also, I played against some Lexi Ice decks that night that just didn't break the chain at all.

We played 3 rounds of Blitz. There was an odd number of players, so I called before the games even started that I would get a bye (because I always do). I did get a bye (lol). So, I played 2 games. Both games were against Ice Lexi, played by Shahmir Samee and Jamie Faulkner. If I recall correctly, they were quite similar decks. With my inexperience, I did lose both games. I feel like what pretty much did me in was Three of a Kind.

This card gave my opponents a lot of resources to load and fire arrows with. With Voltaire, Strike Twice giving go again, it means I needed to defend hard. One would think it would be easy with Oldhim, and it probably should have been. But, as I said, I am rather inexperienced in deck-building still. I definitely should add cards like Sink Below, will let you know how I find it.

Side Note

I did want to talk about events at GR Holloway in general. GR Holloway does hold weekly events for FaB, like that Saturday was Blitz Armoury. However, communication of these events to the London FaB play groups has been described by the FaB UK Discord community as patchy and inconsistent.

I do agree that I don't hear about the events at GR Holloway as often as more active scenes like R0 or Bad Moon. But, I expected that there was more to this.

Upon arrival at GR, I was met by several people from the GR Holloway team. They were very friendly folks and my first impression was that they are genuinely passionate about the game, and want a vibrant FaB scene at their stores.

After speaking to them for a bit, I found my earlier expectations to be satisfied. Because GR also run events for other games like Yugioh, Magic, and even DnD, they tend to do all their communication for FaB within their own Discord server, as they do for those other games. It's easier for them to keep track of their events that way. On top of that, they also have to run their physical store, which from what I saw was extremely busy on their side. I can understand that it could then become difficult to jump on another server (FaB UK Discord) to advertise their events every week and try and gain traction.

However, I think what was clear from our conversation was that the GR team do welcome FaB players with open arms and do want to hold events for FaB. Maybe all they need is 'someone' who happens to be on Discord a lot and able to copy and paste some event details from their FaB channel to Fab UK Discord.

Now, given that I do perhaps fit the bill of that 'someone', and GR did just acquire a branch in Camberwell, which is nearer to where I live, I offered to help them a bit on the communication side of things for FaB. So, hopefully, I will do a good enough job for GR Camberwell and Holloway to become the vibrant and active FaB stores that they're meant to be.