RocketShip Games

I play a fair number of 40k games at low point values—250 to 750 points.  Around 750 the game still behaves fairly normally.  Below that, things can get pretty different.  These are some of my thoughts and notes on small games of Warhammer 40,000.  I’d be thrilled to hear other suggestions and new ideas.

[ Advantages ]

It’s worth first recapping why I’m interested at all in small games when so much attention and emphasis in 40k is seemingly moving toward Apocalypse and ever larger, more sprawling matches.  There are three obvious advantages to playing low point value games:

• Matches play faster, so they can be packed into a shorter period of time.
• Less space is required for matches, making it easier to throw down anywhere.
• Building an army is an expensive and time consuming process, so new players are bound to tend toward smaller games for some time.

A few less obvious reasons small games have really appealed to me include:

• Shorter individual matches means potentially playing out a campaign in a shorter period.  Being able to get in two games in a night can really get things moving, and a whole campaign could possibly be packed into a long day or weekend.
• It’s much easier and cheaper to play around with new armies at low point values.  I play Space Marines but am interested in moving into playing and painting/modeling Tau, Chaos Marines, and IG.  I could get together 750 point or smaller armies of those much more readily than a full blown force and start getting them out on the table without investing too much time or cash.
• Faster games means more games, which permits more strategy experimentation and faster rules learning.  Going through matches faster will permit more chances to try, fail, and improve major game elements like deployment, learning how Deep Striking plays out on the table, etc.
• Smaller armies may be much more readily transported.  I routinely play at lunch or right after work, and usually walk or bike to campus.  Throwing a small army into my backpack is much more appealing than lugging around a full army list.
• Team and multiplayer games are a lot of fun in 40k and often overlooked.  Small armies are great for combining with other players or having a free for all and still fitting the match into a reasonable total points value and resulting timeframe.

[ LunchHammer ]

As an example combining these points, my friend Yeti and I regularly play 250 point “Lunchhammer” games.  Obviously they’re not normal games in any sense, but they’re a lot of fun and meet several objectives and constraints:

• I’ve only started playing 40k relatively recently (last summer), so this was a great way to jump in and start learning some rules right away as I started constructing an army.
• We aim to wrap up a game within an hour, including a lot of shooting the breeze.  Similarly, we play right in Yeti’s office on a small conference table, so there’s not much room.
• We use this as a time to experiment with different units and loadouts, testing what units can handle what units and how they handle in different situations.  It’s also a great chance to practice and get down the mechanics of new units or unfamiliar game features.

For these 250 point games we don’t apply force organization charts or any other restrictions.  Obviously the matches can be pretty unbalanced at times, but it works well for trying out new units mano-a-mano, practicing some rules, and getting in a real quick lunchtime game.

[ Small Point Games ]

I also frequently play 400–750 point games at two local clubs.  Despite all of the advantages noted above for small games, 750 points is right around the lower bounds of what 40k is really designed to handle.  How well these matches work can really depend on the armies involved, play styles, and terrain.

Most obviously, different armies may or may not work as well at low point values.  Arguably, the codexes are balanced around 1500 pts.  As you stray farther and farther from that up or down, some hold up better or worse.  Necrons, for example, don’t scale down well to low points values because their units are expensive and with only a few models on the board they run a significant risk of phasing out.  For many armies, simply adhering to standard force organization charts may be difficult, and for some nearly impossible.

At least as impactful as the points though are the table sizes.  In my gaming circles we frequently run on small tables—Lunchhammer on a ~ 2×2 table, 400 point games on 3×3s, 750 point games on 4×4s, etc.  Those reduced board dimensions change many things, including:

• Falling back changes dramatically, becoming much more lethal since units are inherently so much closer to their own table edges.  This makes low leadership units more risky and reduces the value of special abilities such as the Space Marines’ And They Shall Know No Fear and Combat Tactics.  That’s unfortunate as they pay a notable, built-in cost for those abilities, but they’re not helpful on smaller tables.  Dropping out of combat to shoot & counterattack is great, but not if you fall back off the table in doing so.
• Games tend to drift toward locking down into close combat.  Firepower is still important and with careful maneuvering a shooting army can be kept out of the fray, but if players don’t explicitly work against it, matches will tend toward close combat.  This makes close combat even more decisive and important than it already is, making shooting armies at best harder to play and at worst less effective.  More importantly, this can make for boring games.  If each side only has 3 or 4 units, it can be real easy for all of them to become locked in combat for the remainder of the match.  At that point the players are just rolling dice rather than making decisions and playing a game.

Objectives are another potential issue quickly apparent to anyone constructing a small army list.  With so few units, it can be very hard to effectively hold objectives, even if mostly troop units are chosen.

There is also a large rock-paper-scissors element to very low point value games.  With so few units and models, it is easy to wind up in a situation where a player simply can’t realistically fight an opposing unit.  Vehicles with high armor are the primary candidates for this problem.

[ Suggestions ]

To combat these issues, a number of rules modifications have been employed within my gaming circles, including the following:

• The most basic change is altering the Force Organization chart and imposing additional unit restrictions.  A good place to start are the standard 4th Edition Combat Patrol Rules: 400 points; no more than 2 wounds; no better than a 2+ save; 1 troop unit required; no total armor above 34.  It may also be useful to further restrict the non-troop unit types to at most two selections each.
• Place a larger collection of terrain than usual, including many areas of difficult terrain.  That will slow down movement a bit and reduce the tendency to quickly move into close combats for the remainder of the game.
• By the same token, cut down heavily on deployment zone dimensions.  Starting armies harder against their side of the table will increase the space between them, delaying the close combat lock down and providing more room to shooting armies to maneuver and get their shots in.  On a 3×4 table it may make sense to have the deployment zone be only 6 inches deep, or possibly less.
• Similarly, it may be worthwhile to reorient the board.  On a standard 6×4 table, players usually deploy on the long edges.  For matches on smaller boards, such as a 3×4, it may be better for players to deploy along the short edge to retain somewhat more distance between the players and provide more time for maneuver.
• To blunt the impact of falling back somewhat, it may be helpful to fall back toward the point on the deployment table edge at the center of the table, rather than the closest point on the table edge.  That will give flanking units somewhat more time to fall back before they are eliminated.
• More drastically, it may be worthwhile to reduce falling back to 1d6 or 1d6+1d3.  That’s a large change, but may be appropriate for small tables.  Particularly for units such as Space Marines which will definitely or are likely to recover from falling back, this restores an important part of their abilities, one which their point values include.
• Infiltrating and outflanking may be overpowered and need to be addressed.  For infiltrating, minimum range distances may need to be reduced in order to permit any sort of effective deployment, but at the same time balanced to not provide an immediate assault.  Outflanking may also need to be adjusted in some way as it can have huge impact on the game.  Similarly, reserves in general may not work as well in low point value games as the sudden appearance of a fresh unit has a much larger effect than it does in games with many more units.
• Additionally, and frequently overlooked, rules for objectives must be altered for the mission types based on them.  Given the reduced table dimensions and lower numbers of units, it probably makes sense to lessen the number of objectives placed.  With standard numbers of objectives and very few units on the table there will be much less contention over them.  They may also simply be difficult to place far enough apart.
• Finally, given the low number of units, it may make sense to change the rules for holding objectives.  Under the standard rules, players are forced to dedicate one or more of their very few units to simply camping on top of and holding objectives.  We commonly play that players hold the objectives they place by default until they are contested.  This frees the player the be more aggressive in their play, provided they can keep the enemy away from their objectives.  It may also make sense for objectives to be held by the last player to control it, completely freeing units to take objectives and then move on.  Similarly, more emphasis could be placed back on elite and other unit types by permitting them to hold objectives.  This might be balanced somewhat with 5th Edition’s emphasis on troops by requiring non-troops to be above 50% strength to hold an objective.

[ Conclusion ]

All in all, 40k isn’t quite designed for battles of small armies in small spaces.  However, it still holds up fairly well and can produce exciting, tense, strategic games.  The few issues that may crop up can typically be addressed through some of the minor tweaks discussed above combined with some common sense and good sporting play.

Please feel free to leave comments on any suggestions, ideas, and observations!  I’d love to continue developing and improving small points matches for all of the reasons at the top of this post.

Thx!