40K Skirmish, game 1

Well,

This past Friday I had a few guys over to the SPL (Secret Pirate Lair) for a few games of the 40K skirmish that myself & my buddy Rob ( http://dspaintingblog.blogspot.com/ ) have been toying around with.

Rob posted up these few modifications on his blog (posted below) and pretty much used them as he wrote them.

Turn Sequence - The basic turn sequence is unchanged from the 5th edition rulebook.

Movement Rules - The basic movement rules are per the 5th edition rulebook.

Disregard the unit coherency rules.

Each figure is treated as an independent unit.

Shooting Rules - The basic shooting rules are per the 5th edition rulebook with the following changes.

Sniper Rifles – target must take a Pin test if hit but no wound is rolled.
Wound Chart – If a target takes an unsaved wound roll on the following chart for the wound effect.

1 – No Effect
2 – Go To Ground
3 – Go To Ground
4 – Wound
5 – Wound
6 – Wound

Thrown Frag Grenades – Frag Grenades are Assault-1 STR-3. They are a blast weapon and use the small circle on the end of flamer template. To Hit is as per blast weapons but roll only 1 d6 for the deviation distance. Range is the length of the flamer template.

Assault Rules - The basic assault and close combat rules are per the 5th edition rulebook with the following modifications.

Ignore the rules for Assault grenades.

Figures that have Gone to Ground, or are Pinned, and are assaulted will recover immediately but they will fight with I=1 on that round of combat.

A model may break-off an assault in their next move phase if their opponent has be forced to go to ground in that Assault phase.

Models must charge the model that they shot at in the Shooting phase unless the target was wounded or forced to go to ground. In this case the assaulting model can assault any target model in range.

So with these rules in hand my Jerry ( http://jerry-bigpicture.blogspot.com/ ) brought over a few Tau Fire Warriors and I busted out a few Imperial Stormtroopers. Jerry had taken 10 Fire warriors equipped to the max which came up to about 140 points.

I took 6 Stormtroopers with one equipped with a Melta and 1 sergeant with Bolter & Plasma gun, basically was about 140 points (using the Whitchunter codex).

I set up a 4' x 4' board with a river running through it with a few buildings on either side. We declared that the river was difficult terrain and choose our side & threw down the dice. One thing I will mention now, is that I forgot about the longer range the Tau have on weapons and the higher strength, needless to say Jerry held up in a building closest to the river. With his longer range & higher strength, I was getting hit pretty quick.

The nice thing with the above rules mods, that even though the Tau were hitting me, the extra roll for what happened was a nice feature. I had the melta gunner break across the river and took 10 shots from fire warriors in Rapid fire range and did not go down! Although my luck ran out and Jerry started killing Stormtroopers after that.

By the end of the 4th turn, I had only two Stormtroopers left and one was about to engage in Hand to Hand combat, while the other was taking pop shots from across the river. By this time we called it since I only had 2 models left and Jerry had only lost one Fire Warrior.

So how did it play? Well it played very well! About the only thing I would add is that you really need some sort of objectives to these games. In our test game, Jerry just hunkered down and shot me up as I tried to cross the river. I think the Kill Team story hooks from 4th edition would work really well for this game, since straight up fights are pretty boring.

We discussed the potential of this sort of game and what the intended purpose is for us. For me, I want to be able to use this game to drive larger games, basically to add a storyline to our games instead of playing 40k just in tournament mode. So I can see my Sisters of battle deploying a few Assassins to take out some person or to use this as a scouting mission to gather data. Once again for me, its all about the storyline.

So give it a try, it may breath some new life into your games...

TK