Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K: Here’s What Matched Play Needs
Today let’s have little discussion of what the future of 40K Matched Play needs to thrive.
Goatboy here with a little soap box discussion of what I want from the current game I occupy my time with. The idea of what do I actually want from the game? This isn’t me ranting about how the secondaries for Chaos Space Marines are kind bad. This isn’t wanting a Space Goats army to come out. This is a little mental discussion of what I actually want from the future of Matched Play.
Slim Matched Play Down
First I really want the game to get a bit simpler. At the very least let the actual action of trying to win or not lose the game to be easier. The secondaries have been a very weird set of gameable rules that have kinda lead the game into a weird place. Do you build for specific secondaries and ignore your opponent? Is your army all of a sudden bad because it has lackluster secondaries? Is this even a game we want to play instead of just smashing in the middle of the dance floor?
I really feel that we could take some steps back and yes create interactions that are not just about killing. I just think we need to make it simpler or at the very least make all the armies play for the same thing. Like my game versus Necrons where I felt like nothing I could do would stop the slow crush of their points generation. It felt like we were playing different games where he was gold fishing me and I was just a toddler running around pretending to be Spiderman.
Missions Need a Rethink
I really hope 10th brings some changes to this that still keeps the spirit of what they wanted to do – give armies different avenues to winning – but let the game actually be a game instead of just watching your opponents score tick up. I don’t know if this means a full redux of missions and looking for ways to shift it up. I thought maybe shifting scoring from Progressive to end of game from mission to mission and maybe adding some easier to complete mini missions. Just let’s make it easier and something that is less of a game on top of a game that we have now.
It might be time for back-to-basics
Stratagems Are Out of Control
Speaking of making it easier for the love of god we need to control this stratagem thing. I like some of the idea that different rules can fit in different spaces but its become a bit of a nightmare to keep track of. The CSM Strat card box is the size of a Commander deck which is just nuts. Instead of limiting command points why not move to something like 10 basic stratagems and then each army has 2-3. Remove some of those rules and put them back onto the Dataslates as things like Command Abilities or extra stuff you can power with your Command Points.
This feels like something AoS does right and could easily shift up the game a bit. This also gives more power to things like the App that could house all your data slates and give better references to your rules. I just hate how you get started in a game and have to have pretty intensive cheat sheets. Or play an army that just doesn’t care beyond a few chances to reroll and powering up all your characters before the game ends.
The Great Reboot – Maybe?
The chatter is the game is going to get blown up a bit with index books to tide us over. I both like and dislike the reset chatter. We know the index books can usually mean an overall set of game balance but then we have to deal with buying new codexes that might break the game in rough ways. I really don’t know what else to really say as I just got my CSM book and have Chaos Daemons hopefully coming soon but watching the game get rebooted to start over does have me somewhat nervous. It isn’t going to stop me playing. I enjoyed for the most part the last Index 40k back in 8th Edition. I just hope we see a lot of streamlining, clean up, and reworking to make it the best edition we want.
Even them…
Armies Needs To Have a Fighting Chance – EVERY LAST ONE!
I guess what I really want from matched play is too feel that each army is unique, can still match up with a lot of other armies, and give you a chance to win the game. It is the whole idea that my ideals of an army can still somehow work. It shouldn’t work all the time but it needs to at least give me a chance to do something. I never liked to have an army that always wins and would rather have something fun enough to give me cool interactions. There are times the win is in doing something dumb and having it work. Or doing something dumb and it fail spectacularly. The utter failures have a special place in my heart where you have to just laugh at the nonsense.
I have such high hopes. One of these years…
What are you wanting in the upcoming Matched Play update? I really like how GW is actually working on updating the game. I do feel sometimes the recent 9th Edition bandaids get too numerous so it gets harder to keep what’s current and legal in your head. I really enjoy the digital points updates and hope that continues. I do wish the Warhammer App just let you have all the digital rules for armies instead of the weird code system but that is just me thinking of easier ways to quickly find your rules.
Until next time – will see what the Warp lets me talk about.
