Warhammer 40K: Putting Your Opponents in 40K Jail
There’s a new army strategy growing out there in 10th edition Warhammer 40K. Are you ready to put your opponent in 40K Jail?
Goatboy here with some 40k thoughts for this week. Codex: Chaos Space Marines just came out, other codexes are coming, and we are all super excited to see new changes to the game coming in. It is an exciting time to be a 40k fanatic and getting out there, playing in events.
Today, I want to talk about a not-so-new method of army playing that looks to tie your opponent down and just run the score up early enough to win the game in the end. We call it 40K “Army Name” Jail and there are a ton of different versions to it. But they all work the same way.
Welcome to 40K Jail
My Houston friend Garrett was at the GW Dallas event this past weekend, and he brought his “Space Wolf Jail” army to the tabletop. He went 7-1, won on stream versus my other buddy from Houston, Rob from Goonhammer, and just wrecked people all the way to a great record. He did all of this while driving his way on the way to Dallas throuth the crazy storm that hit most of Texas and Houston that weekend. His army was a lot of Space Wolf nonsense that moved fast, took a while to chew through, and locked you down into 40K jail.
Putting Someone in 40K Jail
It’s pretty simple to look at – you have events starting to have more terrain on the tabletop. This lets fast-moving assault armies have a better chance of getting there deep into the board. They don’t always wreck the opponent enough but they do a good job of just keeping you in your deployment zone/table half. It is a pretty simple thought process to playing.
While it isn’t a high-level, super sophisticated type of 40K strategy, it does do a good job of forcing your opponent to quickly make decisions. Once the fast-moving army has moved up very quickly and put their opponents “in jail”, their choices are limited. If they don’t put enough damage into something and allow their own army to break out and score, all of a sudden, they are down on the bottom end of the Primary as your opponent has “run the score” all the way up.
Of course, this normally means the fat moving player can run up the Secondary too, as a ton of it is just get to the center, get to your opponent’s zone, or just be all over the table. Looking at some of the other winning armies out there, you see Orks are building “40K Jail” lists as well, with multiple versions of this style of play depending on the detachment you run. Bully Ork Jail looks to hold the middle of the table from their opponent and just score that way while the Green Horde is forcing their enemy to sit on their side of the board.
40K Jail Breaking
Heck, the winning list from Dallas GT was a Swarm army from Nids fighting against a Bully Ork Jail as well. This Jail style of play is here to stay in 40K 10th edition. While it won’t always win the game, it is something you have to think about when facing it. I think it means most lists need to either have stuff that can get across the table through rules and tricks or have things that can quickly bust out of a 40K jail predicament. Direct damage-dealing is always a good key to removing threats and also just having a bigger knife with better damage output than the Jail army.
Heck, I got out of Bully Ork Jail once by just having tough Greater Daemons that jailed his Meganob Orks, and the rest of the army was able to get around, remove his backfield, and wreck things. Which is what we should all think about in armies. Just being Dynamic in how we can deploy, move, and do damage.
So are you prepared to be put in 40K Jail, and figure out how to jail break out of it?
