This week we’ve been jumping into Faction Focus articles on Warhammer Community, showing you how your armies are going to play in the new edition of Warhammer 40,000.
But it’s all well and good finding out that heavy laser destroyers are now Strength 16, or that the Swarmlord is REALLY scary in combat. What every general needs to know is how best to deploy these terrifying assets to assure victory in the field, and make sure you’re not outmanoeuvred by a particularly cunning grot.
Last Friday we revealed the workings of the new Chapter Approved deck included in the Leviathan box set, which lets you generate your own games with cards for Deployment, Missions, Gambits, and more. This week we’re looking at some of the nuances of this awesome new system, the design decisions behind it, and how it makes Warhammer 40,000 a better game for all players.
Missions and Objectives
First up, the Missions. Missions in Warhammer 40,000’s 9th edition were the most successful and balanced ever. They were used worldwide by the tournament community and casual gamers alike, which meant that whenever you picked up a game of Warhammer 40,000, you knew what rules you were going to play with. Excellent news!
After a while, however, they could become a bit samey – and with fixed objectives for each game, it became possible to tailor your army to effectively score points before ever setting up a model. Not only that, each new Codex brought faction-specific secondary objectives that created a bias of haves and have-nots. A Dark Angels player could load up on hardy units, knowing they would sit on an objective all game and fulfil a secondary, in a way that an Ork player could not. This inevitably made it more challenging to balance.
The introduction of the Tempest of War cards helped shake up the types of missions being played, and added more variety. But it also created two types of game – leaving some people who preferred Tempest games, and others who preferred the more fixed “Grand Tournament” style.
In the new edition of Warhammer 40,000, we think we’ve struck the perfect balance, taking the best bits from both systems and giving people the chance to play the game the way they want to – even if their opponent prefers a different style for themselves.
Primary Missions
There are nine different Primary Missions in the deck. Some resemble tried and true objectives from the current edition of the game, while others are radically different. Coupled with five different Deployment maps and 12 different Mission Rules, this creates a wider variety of exciting game options right off the bat.
You can score up to 50 Victory points per game from your Primary Mission – more than any other single source of VP – making it the key to triumph no matter what other cards you draw.
Secondary Missions
In every game, you and your opponent both have identical decks of 16 different Secondary Missions. All of these can be played as “Tactical” Missions – meaning you’ll use the whole deck and draw two Secondary Missions at random. These must be then replaced with new randomly-drawn cards as they’re completed throughout the battle.
Alternatively, seven of these Secondary Missions can also be played as “Fixed” Missions – meaning you’ll select two specific cards and stick with them the entire game. Fixed Missions are perfect for armies who prefer to pursue their own battleplan, while Tactical Missions are more random – and therefore riskier – but will reward flexible armies that can adapt to the tides of war.
Importantly, the decision to play with Tactical Missions or Fixed Missions is entirely up to you, and made after generating your Primary Mission, Deployment, and Mission Rule. Your opponent may choose the same, or the opposite, and you can change your approach from game to game. We've been very careful to scale the Victory points on offer to make both styles appealing – you may simply prefer one specific style over the other, or you can make your decision based on your opponent's army, the way the Primary Mission interacts with your matchup, and your own tendencies as a planner or a gambler.
Regardless of whether they’re using Tactical Missions or Fixed Missions, players can score a maximum of 40 Victory points from Secondary Missions. Fixed Missions players can only score 20 Victory points from each of their two individual Secondary Missions, so they can’t afford to neglect either.
Meanwhile, players using Tactical Missions will discard each card the moment they achieve that Secondary Mission, and only replace discarded cards in their next Command phase – meaning you can’t cycle through your whole deck and hit 40VP in one extremely lucky turn. There are other ways to discard unfavourable Secondary Missions, but they’re limited and have their own cost – if you can, it’s better to play the hand you’re dealt…
You don’t have to spend a Command point to ditch a tricky Secondary Mission, however – at the end of each of your turns, you can discard one or more Secondary Missions and gain a Command point. You’ll be giving up on the chance to score that Secondary Mission, and won’t draw a replacement until your next Command phase, but you won’t be stuck with cards you can’t or don’t want to score.
Gambits
Gambits are another new addition to the game – at a glance, they may look like nothing more than a wild way to score a bunch of extra Victory points on the roll of a dice. Looks, however, can be deceiving…
Gambits have been designed with both competitive and casual play in mind to offer players a challenging do-or-die Hail Mary. At the end of the third battle round, players can totally abandon their Primary Mission, and instead select one of two randomly drawn Gambits.
In the current edition of the game, it isn't uncommon for a game to be very close and hotly contested – but due to the nature of progressively scored Victory points, for one player to be mathematically out of reach only halfway through. This can be quite disheartening – whether you’re a competitive player facing a foregone result, or a casual player rolling out a futile struggle after days or weeks of getting hyped for your upcoming game. Gambits are designed to solve these problems – without creating a situation where a totally outplayed army gets lucky just by rolling a 12.
If you complete battle round 3 – a little over halfway through – and find that the game is very close but just out of reach on the Primary Mission, you can telegraph to your opponent that you're going to abandon the Primary Mission and aim for a long shot. Of course, this will give them the opportunity to stop you from achieving your Gambit – and they’ll have two whole rounds to prevent the completion of your risky new gameplan.
Should you succeed in your Gambit, you’ll score 30 Victory points – but crucially, this reward is still limited by that standard cap of 50VP per game from the Primary Mission. If your opponent is running away with the game – and keeps running, since they can still score the Primary Mission perfectly well for the next two rounds – then a desperate Gambit won't let you win all on its own. Even then, however, it can offer an exhilarating sidequest to pursue as a narratively fulfilling way to finish out a lost battle.
EXAMPLE: Stu and Mike are playing a game. At the end of battle round 3, Mike has scored 15 Victory points for the Primary mission, while Stu is dominating the objectives on the battlefield and has scored 30VP. Knowing that he is unlikely to push Stu off all of the objectives, Mike decides to go with a Gambit. This will give him a slim chance of hitting 45VP for his Primary – but Stu can still score away on objectives, and has two full rounds to thwart Mike’s gamble. If the game was closer, Mike might decide he’s better off pursuing the original mission as it is more reliable.
(WarCom would like to clarify that the in-game events in this example are for explanatory purposes only, and Stu has never been this far ahead of Mike in a real game…)
It’s worth noting that you can’t build your army to intentionally Gambit – if you wanted to, for some reason – since you randomly discard one of the three Gambits in the deck before making your choice. Build your army around achieving the Orbital Strike Coordinates Gambit, and you’ll be in trouble when you draw Emergency Evacuation and Delaying Tactics.
By the maths, the Gambit is a competitively balanced, tournament-intended, narratively suspenseful mechanic intended to keep very close games exciting to the end.
GT Packs
For tournament organisers, there will be a digital and routinely updated GT pack from Day 1 of the new edition. This will include suggested combinations of Deployments, Primary Missions, and Mission Rules for typical tournament play, using the Leviathan card decks to pre-generate these shared parts of the game so all players at the event are playing the same mission.
This pack will also include an organisers' commentary, tuned to provide new event organisers with some good starter tips, without any overly prescriptive elements that might infringe on the well-established best practices of the amazing global community of TOs.
