40K Op-ed: Welcome to the Steel Cage Match
Some days I feel like we’re all trapped in a steel cage with the most broken armies in the world. It doesn’t have to be like this.
Do you all remember “The Gladiator”? For those of you who aren’t familiar it was a long extinct format for a tournament at Adepticon. The Gladiator was a no holds barred event that allowd anything you could get current legal rules for. In an era where named characters needed opponent’s permission, and Forge World was frowned upon in “normal” games – the Gladiator was a Mad Max event of absolute insanity. You would see whatever mad scientist inventions folks came up with.
- Macharius messing with your army…
- Titans gunning down the helpless…
- Super heavy flyer circuses…
- Enslavers and other White Dwarf odd-balls…
- Thunderhawk Transports dropping all kinds of dirty tricks…
Gladiator army from long, long ago…
It was great fun… IF you were into that type of thing, and knew what you were headed into. But really, it was a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. It was a theatre of pain, a steel cage match for those looking for a broken bottle bar fight of a 40K challenge.
Welcome to the Steel Cage Match – Late 8th Edition
But slowly but surely the march of 8th edition has brought us all into the Steel Cage Match. We are all playing in the Gladiator, every time we head down to a local store.
8th has broken down all the barriers, and let every model in. Yes the game has open, narrative, and matched play, but in my experience that means (trainee, carefully managed home games, and everything else). Realistically if you head out to a store looking for a game – the steel cage armies are there, lurking.
Now busted armies aren’t anything new to the game. There has been netlisting going on for as long as there have been forums and groups to post lists on, but somehow it seems different these last couple of years.
Where I first learned to netlist!
The speed and precision of the lists being busted is occurring faster. The dissimination of how to use these lists get into the bloodstream of the community overnight. Perhaps most surprising is the speed at which these busted showhorses actually arrive on tables. Ten years back, theoretical lists would come and go. But the chances of someone actually throwing down the cash to buy, build, and paint them up meant that your chances of actually encountering one in real life was tiny.
But not anymore. Now you will see the most busted lists actually showing up on tables in weeks. They wont be the prettiest, and often stretch the limits of “tabletop standard”, but they show up. When their reign is over, you will see them flushed down the memory hole on eBay like a flash (PS, its’a GREAT time to pick up an Iron Hands army).
Where are We Going?
And that’s what I hope to see changed in future editions. Is the real goal of the game for us all to be trapped in the prison with Rorschach? I hope not. While I firmly believe that people should be able to game any way they want – the majority of people will stick to the general categories defined by GW. So I would like to see some “Matched Play Options” put out there in a future rulebook, to let players have a set of common language to dial their games up or down.
Categories that would let players easily choose to play with options like:
- Titanic Units
- Named Characters
- White Dwarf Rules
- Forge World Units
- Etc…
Again, I’m not saying any of this would be enforcable, but a common set of terms would see the game played at various levels of unit inclusion instead of going straight from “Narrative Play” to “NOT THE CHAIR!” like we have right now. Because like I said – the Steel Cage is nice to visit, but I think a lot of players don’t want to live there.
~What do you think is most contributing to the escalation of the Steel Cage mentality in recent years?
