Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K: Beware These Games Within the Game
Goatboy here with a list of tricky little games to watch out for when you are at the 40K tabletop.
With any hobby that is trying to break into the streaming, competitive, and serious market place you will always have the growing pains of the games played outside the battlefield. These would be things that while not technically against the rules they do brush up against them. Now some of them can be innocent enough while other times it can feel like you just got outplayed without knowing the rules. I have gone over a few of these but thought – let’s do a refresh since the latest one I am kind of on the fence about.
Angle Shooting
I know the latest player handbook/play update from FLG and other events talks about “Angle Shooting” (asking permission to do something that isn’t allowed, or saying a rule is true when it’s not) and it’s something to always look out for. Intent can be a weapon used on both sides of the table with Intent being used to give permission on something that wouldn’t normally be viable. I talked about this before and thankfully it has died down a bit as a lot of judges/players are looking out for it. So will use this soapbox discussion to just remind you that yes we should always play with intent but only utilizing intent within the rules available to the game. Trying to break or utilize permission to allow you to break the rules is against the intent of being a decent player to throw down against.
Pre-Measuring
Another thing that always frustrates me is that this is a game of pre measurements. The missions clearly state the distance between armies so players can utilize math without having to go into the measurement side of things. Pieces move x amount of inches so figuring out how far a charge is shouldn’t have to break out a tape measure on the first turn. It’s always something to think about with these armies that have pre-game moves, regular moves, and then an assault phase.
I remember back in the day of the dreaded Eldar Inches where you couldn’t pre-measure anything. You would utilize tricks like measuring your full range of weapons to see if you could hit someone and then taking that info to gauge everything else. It is also the reason why mats for events should be the exact same so we have a distinct box to figure out if your evil plastic warriors can do cartwheels into your opponent’s line.
Watch The Clock
Another thing we see from time to time is people weaponizing the clock. As you start to get into more competitive events with bigger fields having a Chess Clock might be useful. I know I rarely don’t finish a game – but there are times we could face someone that takes a heck of a lot longer to get their turn going than yourself. I also see a lot of players getting nervous when playing under a clock and start to second guess themselves especially when going up against a seasoned pro.
The biggest thing you need to remember in all of this is that it is just a game, don’t second guess yourself, and it is ok to fail. The whole point of this game is someone is going to fail during the mission at hand. The way the points are set up and the missions are built it is pretty dang hard to tie. Instead of hemming and hawing about what to shoot – just go get started and if you mess up so what. Trust me losing because you ran out of time and your opponent can 15 their way to a primary victory is a much worse loss than just failing at playing your army.
Submarining
The last thing we have seen pop up is the whole – submarining effect. This is one of those issues that I think isn’t nearly as devastating as some players seem to think. Sure you could try and force matchups in your favor towards the end but you end up risking getting paired and just losing and being out of the top 8. A lot of the time now the top 8 is not filled with undefeated but instead has a few losing armies that proceeded to smash face after getting kicked out. You threaten a loss and a drop because your points were not nearly high enough.
We also see this happen with armies designed to not play the primary too well and instead go for the throat. An all assault army isn’t going to step back and hold backfield objectives so they won’t be designed to hit that sweet spot of 80+ games as they rampage across the tabletop. I think the solutions we have seen showing up seem good with the idea that matchups are going to be randomized amongst undefeated and then some kind of cut to a top winner playing bottom winner in a seeding round. I think NOVA and the GW events will be doing this and FLG will be trying something else. I am sure there will be some other systems too – but we all know this is something they want to resolve by making submarining not enticing.
“Talking It Out”
Finally there is some weird discussion about games not actually ending and getting talked out thru the last few turns. There are times where there isn’t a lot an opponent can do so playing out the slow grind of killing everything isn’t always exciting for the player. There are also times when time runs out by turn 2 so they talk out turns 3-5 to try and get points finished out.
I think if time ends and you are only on turn 2 – your points are only for turn 2. If you have time to play your turns out and there really isn’t a point to play them out (very little models, no interaction, soul crushing defeat) then you can talk that time out to give everyone some time to pack up, get a drink, and sob quietly in their hands. It’s a grey area in games and while other competitive games (Magic) etc have draws and other methods to get into the top 8 – 40k just isn’t there yet.
What other grey areas are there to the Competitive scene? The intent of what you are doing and your dice rolls seems to be the most important one as that is the building blocks of our competitive scene.
Are there some other thorny issues I missed that we should talk about?
