Warhammer 40K: Chapter Approved 2019 – 3 New Ways To Play Preview
Chapter Approved 2019 has 3 new ways to play 40k if you are looking for a very different experience. Check these out!
One of the great things about 40k is that the core of the system is designed in such a way that you can try different things with the ruleset by changing things up before you play. Maybe you put additional restrictions on the army composition. Perhaps you change up the missions or points. Or maybe you create your own types of overlapping game interactions. In Chapter Approved 2019, Games Workshop has 3 more things you can try that will lead to a very different play experience from your typical game of Matched Play.
Game Type 1 – Army Draft
“Here’s an idea sure to shake up your next game – Chapter Approved 2019 includes an Army Generator, a system where you can randomly generate forces in moments. Why not have everyone in your club pool their models, then randomly generate a Power Level 60 army for each?”
This one sounds both amazing and terrifying at the same time. The idea that your Gaming Group has to pool their models and essentially draft units from that pool to build a 60 power level army sounds nuts! You could end up with a hodgepodge of units that should never go together or you could end up with a completely insane combo machine. Let’s back up for a moment though and talk about drafting if you’re unfamiliar.
Create a Draft
There are lots of ways to create a Draft – and no, we’re not talking about a preliminary version of a document here. The idea of a draft is that each player will choose 1 unit from the pool at a time. There are typically several rounds in a draft and you can do a snake draft or auction drafts. Snake drafts are were you determine the drafting order of the players – let’s say 1-8. On the first round, player 1 goes first all the way down to player 8, but on round two, player 2 chooses first and player 1 chooses last. On round 3, player 3 chooses first and you go back around to player 2, continuing “down the snake” each round.
Auction drafts are a lot more complex. I’m not even going to attempt to get into how to do that. For a primer on that, you can read this article from nbcsports.com explaining it.
However you decide to draft your armies, each player is going to end up with something very different and it may or maynot be 100% viable. But that’s kind of the point. This mode will really stretch your ability to work with what you have vs your pre-prepared ultimate list. This will also allow for experimentation and will probably break some of the core list-building restrictions, but again, that’s also kind of the point. It’s going to be interesting to see if GW made any caveats concerning transports and unit restrictions, too…
Game Type 2 – Parallel Battles
“With this year’s Chapter Approved, you’ll be able to recreate this kind of multi-level carnage on the tabletop with new rules for parallel battles.”
So this is something that I’ve personally setup and run before and I’m sure many of you have too. In fact, the “Death From Above” scenario sounds like the exact same setup I ran for a parallel battle game before. In the scenario “vast armies clash as Kill Teams attempt to seize control of an orbital weapons platform – alongside two others” and I’m guessing that if one of the Kill Team claims the orbital weapons platform they get to rain some death on the “main” fight.
These types of linked or parallel games are a lot of fun to setup and run with groups. As GW points out, there will be a number of suggested battles that anyone in your gaming group can get involved with regardless of the size of their collection. It makes your smaller Kill Team Games matter as they contribute to the carnage on the battlefield. I’m very curious to take a look at all these different scenarios.
Game Mode 3 – Juggernaut
“These missions are ideal for forces of different sizes and offer a fresh new way to play. Each has its own Stratagems and an alternative scoring system that rates them on a scale of 1-5 stars.”
This is another game mode that is really all about bragging rights. GW even suggests a leaderboard for your club to track how players perform on these missions. They sound like they will be asymmetrical point-based games and might have some pretty tough objectives, too. This mode will be appealing to players who are really looking to challenge themselves – and possibly the members of their gaming groups! Think you can win that mission? What if you play down 500 points or more? Who knows what challenges GW has cooked up!
Get ready for a whole bunch of new modes coming soon from Games Workshop!
Which mode would you want to take a crack at?
