As mentioned and hinted at for months, I finally got around to playing a game of 40k with some friends. I was invited to partake in a large Apocalypse game and I was definitely interested in trying it out and what better way to try a wargame than to get thrown into a giant scale game. I’ve played mostly Warhammer Fantasy over the years, and only once before dabbled into warhammer 40k, and by dabbled, I mean I bought a Dark Eldar army and played a few games and that was the extent of it. This was a bit of a different experience, and I could have borrowed miniatures to play in this game, but I felt somewhat compelled to at least bring a small faction with me to this game. I lucked out on barter town and was able to pull together a 2000 point army in less than a month before this game was to take place. Now, at the time, my 2000 point Imperial guard army seemed like a good size….until it was tossed into the mix of 53,000 points of other armies that people had brought with them to throw down.
This game was on a scale I had not seen or ever been a part of, with the exception of some of the large scale games that GW put on at gencon years ago. It truly was a massive game. The pictures don’t do the scale of it any justice as only about 40-50% of each sides force was ever on the table at once, due to both massive casualties and sheer volume of miniatures. The board was 3 separate 8ftx4ft boards places into the shape of an “I” which made for some interesting combats, one side of the “I” was empty and the other completely jammed up with armor and Tyranid beasts, and then there was my lonely patch of useless humans.
This game took place with 6 players per team, Good versus Bad, or Imperium versus non-Imperium (idk what it’s called to be honest…) and ran 4 full turns over the course of about 11 hours. In the end, evil prevailed, but not before my human horde was able to take out a few Chaos baddies, making my stay on the board totally worth it (aka, I wasn’t useless). I have to admit that this was a ton of fun, and I’ve been enjoying painting non-fantasy miniatures as a result. I like painting Necromunda figures, but you only need about 15 at the most, so those go pretty quick. I’ve managed to paint up and dip (post coming in the near future) 20 (2×10 man squads) infantry.
One of the best parts of the game, and someone I’ve copied and used in other games, was secret objectives for each player. Now, each team was competing over a set of objective points that were scored at the end of the game to help determine the victor, but the true fun lies in the hidden score that everyone knew was there, but couldn’t put a total value on until the end of the game. These were the secret objectives, that were relatively simple for some and insanely hard for others. Mine were super simple and I failed all of them. One goal was to kill 15 guys with regular lasguns, I managed to kill 13 or so. Another objective was to get to the radar station on my side of the table, in fact it was the closest and easiest target….I couldn’t make it there…. And the last objective for me was to use 4 unique orders, I was able to use 3. Moral of the story, I didn’t really help the team very much on the secret objectives, but they were great to have as an aside to the rest of the game happening.
Honestly, I can’t wait to play another game with these guys, I’ve only honestly played the one game with them and nothing else, I’m planning to play a few more games this year, possibly at conventions. But really, I’m going to avoid tourneys and the like, they just aren’t my thing. But casually, this game is a blast to play, especially when there are no rules mongering individuals involved.
