A New Way to Play 40K
Hello again boys and girls (and of course any Unicorns in attendance), my name is Brent and I have a problem. My problem has a name, Strictly Average, and I’d like you visit and click the button in the upper right. Depending on your perception of me, something good/bad will happen. Either way, you win.
Man, isn’t begging gauche? Or is it in this season? I can’t keep up, so I’ll move on.
A big part of this article is the eye candy, so let’s slowly cruise toward the bottom of this less-wordy-than-normal Tuesday offering.
C’mon! Keep up. Where was I? Oh, yea… so raise your hands if you’ve played and enjoyed Spearhead?
I can’t know for sure (and I’ll ask for feedback at the end), but I’m willing to bet there has been fewer and fewer players as the supplements rolled out.
It begs the question, why? Personally, I think it’s because there’s something in the average gamer that shies away from the ‘official’ ruleset. It’s like all that practice playing Planet Strike doesn’t count, ’cause Lord knows there won’t be a mission at this year’s Wargames Con or Nova Open.
Am I close? Perhaps it’s a subtle revolt against GW… after all, you didn’t really need to expand your collection to play City Fight, but by Apocalypse you were expected to purchase a bunch of expensive toys.
How many of you bought a Titan? Wanted to win that bad, huh? In my area, Apocalypse died the day the Professor plopped his insanely expensive Forge World Titan down on the table and started removing entire units a turn.
And wasn’t Spearhead a pretty obvious push by GW to sell some tanks? Are we that dense?
Turns out… nope. Not really. Some of us are down right cheap, and I imagine there was enough scattered here and there to bring down the enthusiasm of the easily inspired.
What else does each supplement have? Rules. Lots of rules. Man, I’m a graduate student; I honestly don’t care to memorize any more rules, especially for a ‘once in a blue moon’ kinda game.
(If GW is reading this, I loved all of the supplements and fully endorse them. That’s an example of what I’m capable of: send me free loot and I’ll whore my services all over the Internet.)
(Right now I’m doing it for free.)
Man, these pictures are pretty sweet. For those of you who don’t know, they’re from the collection of BSMoove… or Brian to his friend and E-Buddies.
So naturally I call him BSMoove. He hails from A Gentleman’s Ones, a blog so good I made my embarrassing plea for more readers all the way at the top, so as to stay far away from true greatness.
And here’s the rub: all of these pictures were taken from his The Sin of Alacrity Space Hulk… and as I was sitting here trying to write a different article, a thought came over me…
…why not play regular 40K on theme boards?
Sure, the Sin of Alacrity was created for games of Killzone (…more about that soon! …again!) but there’s no reason two armies couldn’t fight through the variable terrain of a Space Hulk like this. I mean, there are long, narrow halls and large, open spaces – the terrain itself dictates the tactics and the armies you’d use!
I think between that and some interesting missions – not a book full, maybe a 3×3 modified from the current standards – and voila! Something new and fun anyone could sit down to with a certain level of comfort.
City Fight was a success, I think, and if there was one major reason it was due to the terrain itself, something lacking in the other supplements.
Okay, are you interested? Here are some work in progress shots of BSMoove making one of the many tables he’s bringing to Adepticon. He’s been nice enough to let me steal borrow them, so let’s take a closer look!
It’s involved, sure, but this is meant to be a heavy duty table for use at the largest Indy in the country. If you’ll look, you’ll see there’s a very modular component to the whole thing. I’m sure it won’t take too much to develop a workable Hulk of your own.
(Or you could buy the Sin of Alacrity itself… turns out it’s for sale!)
Okay folks, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is: I’m going to take a stab at building some modular terrain and try out my idea of a full scale 40K game in a Space Hulk!
Will it work? I can pretty much guarantee you’ll hear about it!
Here are today’s discussion questions:
Which supplements did you play, if any? What are your general opinions of them… and please, if you love them let me know!
(So GW will understand I’m only one opinion!)
Can you think of any other simple ideas to dramatically change the standard game of 40K? Any special terrain types that would allow you to use the standard rules in a new way?
Thoughts? Comments? Hugs and gropings?
