40K: Chapter Approved Takes Shots At ‘Fixing’ Matched Play
Chapter Approved has 6 new Eternal War missions that take aim at Matched Play – with alternate scoring, objective changes and one other special rule to change things up for the better!
Matched Play in 40k right now feels somewhat limited. The missions have been out in the wild for over a year now and you’ve been playing them all this time, you know exactly what we are talking about. For TOs, staleness is never good and most tournaments rarely (if ever) use “straight out of the book” missions. If they aren’t using the ITC format, they probably are using custom missions and scoring, too. There’s nothing wrong with that but I think GW has taken notice that the players are trying to “fix” matched play – and now they are attempting to do something about it.
Chapter Approved introduces 6 Eternal War missions and 6 Maelstrom of War missions, many of these are variations on a similar theme and just about all of them have a special rule that I think will really help shake things up. For today, we’re just going to focus on one example mission – Vital Intelligence.
Vital Intel Scoring Example
The basics are pretty much the same. It’s designed to be used with Battle Forged armies at an agreed points limit. Deployment is standard as are the rules for first player and such. It’s also a scenario that uses 5 Objective Markers placed in very specific spots. The objective are also numbered 1-5.
Below you can see the victory conditions – they aren’t exactly earth shattering by themselves. But play close attention to HOW you score.
Yes – that’s right folks, you score points at the end of each round and those points are cumulative! That’s kind of a big deal for Matched play. In fact, many of the missions have this type of cumulative scoring. The scenarios change and how you score does as well, but the concept is spread through these missions. Oh, and there is one more twist:
No Sudden Death
Each of these missions also has the new “Acceptable Casualties” and that means that there is no SUDDEN DEATH for these missions. Just think about that for a moment…
If you get tabled you don’t immediately lose. That means if you can play to the objectives you might just pull a victory from the jaws of defeat. This really does change up the game and it also impacts everything from how you build lists to how you use them in on the tabletop.
Think about it, if an army typically just ignores the objectives and focuses on killing their opponent, they can still lose! All those Alpha-strike lists and give up an entire round of scoring (due to deepstriking only being an option turn 2 onwards) have to make-up a lot of ground suddenly. A 5 point lead right off the bat is a big hill to climb and your opponent is still scoring while you’re attempting to wipe them out.
Tough, elite armies that can stick on objectives and just keep scoring are going to have an advantage and those pesky (and frankly boring to play against) gunline armies will have to actually MOVE to score points. I’m all for anything that forces the game to become more dynamic and engaging vs just sitting back and rolling dice. Those are games that I just don’t really want to play – but hey, that’s just like my opinion, man.
Don’t get me wrong, Gunline armies can still win – it’s just going to force them to go out and claim objectives. And for those tough, elite armies it’s still an uphill fight, too – you have to survive long enough to score still! That’s what I like in missions. Both armies have chance to win and even if they are very different, they can play to their strengths and try to pull ahead. There is a challenge that isn’t insurmountable and it’s definately not “Easy-mode” either.
So go check out the missions section in the new Chapter Approved 2018 – you might just be surprised!
Now we just have to get people to use them…
