Hello Everyone,
At my local club we are wrapping up our first major crusade campaign, and what better way to do it then with an apocalypse game! We had six players altogether, 2 guard, 1 ork, 1 ork/eldar hybrid, 1 Space Marine, and 1 Tau player. Half the players had been playing in the crusade campaign.
Mission
For this game the mission revolved around a central objective and four auxiliary objectives. The story was that this was a vital communication tower, with the player who controls the objective at the end of the game getting to decide the story outcome.
In the game, this key objective was placed in a 24″x24″ square in the middle table (the Tower). A unique wrinkle of this mission was that players could only send in a number of units into the tower that matched the number of objectives they controlled at the start of the turn. There were some other exceptions, for the defenders they could each select a unit that participated in the whole crusade campaign and deploy it and an HQ in the tower at the start of the game. For the attackers, they could pick a unit and an HQ that fit the same criteria and deepstrike it into the tower (to avoid screening they were allowed to deepstrike within 1″ but they would not count as charging. In order to control this objective we used a special formula which prioritized units based on the following formula: 1. Crusade Warlords, 2. Units in the Crusade 3. Army Warlords, 4. Units with Ob. Sec., 5: All other units.
Another facet of this mission was that there would be Space Marine reinforcements that would help whichever side controlled the most objectives (though they themselves could not control these objectives).
For the first turn vehicles, warlords and monsters weren’t removed until the end of the round and all were treated as being on their top brackets for that turn (if they were killed) to make sure people got to use their toys. Furthermore, after the first turn players moved as a team but then picked 2 players from each team to shoot and alternated until everyone fired. We used the same process for assaults.
Pictures:
Before we get to the breakdown here are some photos from the event. We were also joined by Cadian Sgt Steel. He was kind enough to share many of the pictures he took for this event, and has a great video breaking down the mission and game!
Thoughts
Phew one of the things that I was really proud of for this game was we started deploying at 10:00 AM and finished before 9:00 PM while getting 4 turns in. Alternating shooting and fight phases speeds up the game immensely and people from each other’s teams can help roll dice or get a break from the action. Furthermore the mission worked really well. Players quickly saw how important it was to control objectives which made them play tactically. The player who won did a good job of swooping in at the last minute but had to take a big risk because his opponents were playing the mission quite well. People had a good time and the story wrapped up in a fun way that sets up the next campaign.
I felt the Space Marine reinforcements were a bit of a flop. They became a big win-more mechanic and I actively held back so as not to completely upend the scales. The game was always on a razor-thin margin which was great but I felt that I couldn’t provide quite the buff I had promised.
Overall I think it went really well. The Tau pulled out the final victory by sending his Crusade Warlord onto the objective on the final turn. He needed to survive going toe-to-toe with Guilliman and narrowly survived with only a single wound! Most importantly, people had a good time, some epic stories played out and we got a climactic conclusion to our campaign. I have attached the mission rules if anyone would like to use them in their own events!
And remember, Frontline Gaming sells gaming products at a discount, every day in their webcart!
