AoS: New Match Play Scoring – Hidden Agendas Arrive
Games Workshop has been tinkering with the Matched Play Scoring to help Tournaments find better tie-breakers. Now they have created 12 Hidden Agendas that can be used for all manner of Age of Sigmar events!
Warhammer: Age of Sigmar has a quickly expanding competitive scene. Lots of players are jumping in and it’s been a fantastic thing to watch develop and grow. However, with growth comes growing pains and one of those issues has been determining scoring in Matched Play. Now, this might not be too much of an issue for smaller tournaments but for the larger ones, tiebreakers can be a big deal! Thankfully, GW has come up some “secondary objective” that will help everyone out.
via Jervis Johnson, Warhammer Community
The following rules for Hidden Agendas are intended to allow you to include these ‘secondary objectives’ in your games of Warhammer Age of Sigmar, without disrupting the delicate balance of the battleplan that you are using. Using them will mean that you have to strive to complete a Hidden Agenda, while at the same time competing to meet the victory conditions of the battleplan you are using.
Download the Hidden Agendas HERE
Using them is straightforward; we have provided a list of 12 different Hidden Agendas, and at the start of the battle, you must secretly pick 1 of them. If you can complete the deed, then you get a Triumph in your next battle, even if you don’t win a mighty victory. This means that the victory conditions from the battleplan you are fighting are unchanged, but win or lose, if you can complete your Hidden Agenda you will get a bonus in your next game. You will find that this gives you a whole new set of tactical decisions to make during the battle, as you do your best to win and complete your Hidden Agenda.
While Tournament Organizers are free to use whatever scoring method they choose, these Hidden Agendas work perfectly with the Major/Minor/Loss conditions you can find in the rules section. The Organizers of Blood & Glory are going to use them in their upcoming tournament and here is what they had to say:
via Ben Curry, Warhammer Community
We have a large Warhammer Age of Sigmar event with upwards of 200 players playing 5 games across 2 days. I could see the need for an extra tiebreaker to separate players who are on equal wins. Hidden Agendas will be a great way of doing that. We are already awarding 30 points for a major victory and 25 points for a minor victory, so an additional 3 points per Hidden Agenda will be up for grabs.
While 3 bonus points per game might not sound like much, over 5 games it can add-up! That’s worth 1/2 a Major Victory – players are going to want to work towards these points. Again, these are supposed to be tiebreaker points but I wouldn’t be shocked if they become a big factor in determining the over-all winner.
Not Just For Matched Play
GW also had a few other suggestions for using these rules in non-matched play games. They could easily be incorporated into Narrative Campaigns. Having alternate ways to award triumphs to your games is a great way to create a more narrative mindset when you’re playing.
If you’re planning on running a Tournament or just a campaign, there is also no reason you can’t come up with your own Hidden Agendas either. These twelve Hidden Agendas are really good base-lines that you can modify for your purposes. You could even make them to be thematic based on the narrative campaign you’re doing. For example take the ‘Centre Ground’ Hidden Agenda:
Why not create a thematic objective marker (or suitable terrain piece) and use that as your thematic base for the agenda. Now, that might tip your hand a bit in a narrative campaign, but it’s more about the spectacle and the challenge than just purely scoring points.
These Hidden Agendas do address a problem for bigger tournaments and provide a solid fix. Plus, they are free and modular! TOs and players can choose to use them and tweak them for the game-play needs they have – that’s a smart fix in my book.
What do you think of these new Hidden Agendas? Would you like to see more ‘Secondary Objectives’ like this from GW?
