Game On ... Relic Knights & 7th Edition 40K

Game Night – This week the stars aligned and four guys from my gaming group were all free on Sunday to play some games. With everyone busy with their families and various summer obligations its been hard to get together to play some mulitplayer games.

We started off the evening with a quick teaching game of Relic Knights. Everyone caught on to the core concepts really quickly and seemed to enjoy the game. for this game we used the starter boxes of Black Diamond, Noh Empire, Doctrine and for the Speed Circuit: (2) Belles, Marie Claude and Ryn.

The game scales really well to multiple players since the objectives are unique to each player. I also think that the card mechanic is done better than it is in Malifaux, particularly in mulitplayer. Anytime you're attacked or burn through cards you draw up to five during the clean-up step. This means you don't get those situations where a player runs out of cards in hand and gets ganged up on by everyone else because they don't have a had to defend with. 

We opted to just play to 5 VP to speed up the game and just get everyone to understand the core mechanics. Because of how fast this game plays and how well it scales, I think it may see plenty of rotation on Thursday nights.

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We then set-up to play a 2vs2 game of Warhammer 40K seventh edition. For this game each player brought 1500 points and was randomly assigned a partner. We set up a fairly sparse desert board with a few LOS blocking pieces in the center of the table and some smaller areas of cover scattered around the perimeter. My space marines were partnered up with a Chaos Space Marine force and we fought against two tank heavy guard forces.

The game was fun and honestly the changes to the rules didn't seem to impact the speed of play. Of course no one had a psyker so we ignored that phase completely which may have been the reason we didn't see that drug out into the mess I've read about online. The changes to the vehicle tables and D weapon tables were really nice, one of out players has a landraider that hasn't made it past the first turn in the last 15 or so games we've played actually got to use it and make an impact on the game. It did die around turn 3 or 4 but that was due to losing hull points and not a random Lascannon shot.

Having everything be able to score objectives was nice because most everything on the field was moving to try and capture them. Unlike the previous edition where your goal was to kill troops as fast as possible so your opponent couldn't score. No one opted to build an Unbound list so we all had the benefit of Objective Secured on our troops which also made for a more tactical game.

My first impression from my first game of seventh edition is pretty positive, they did a nice job tweaking the rules slightly to eliminate some of the more annoying aspects of sixth. The changes however are minor enough in practice to draw out the game or over complicate it. I may however need to build a different list to see if the psyker phase is worth caring about or not.