Warhammer 40K – Lately I've been playing a fair bit of 40K. With the new marine book I've rekindled my love for the game. Regardless of GW's pricing and corporate policies the game itself is enjoyable and fun. Sure their are some weird rules and some careless editing that can cause confusion and pain during a game but overall it's just plain fun.
With my 4'x6' board currently dominated by the near future city I've been working on (I swear I will post progress sooner or later) many of my recent games have been played using this board. For as packed full of terrain as it is the games have gone pretty smooth. For the first few we just played the building interiors as impassible terrain and kept the fight in the street. While this worked well it seemed to be missing something.
In my most recent game we decided to delve into the big book and figure out how in tact buildings are supposed to work. In previous editions the rules for buildings were pretty vague and left much to the obligatory house rules. This time around they actually put some thought into the rules and gave pretty solid guidelines on how they will work. Essentially buildings are treated similar to a vehicle in which you can shoot a structure and cause damage to it which in turn effects the units inside. The guidelines base the armor value on the size of the structure and its function which then determine how many models can fit in it, how many fire points and what type of protection it offers.
Since my board is mostly 9"x9" structures that represent a habblock or business district each building is essentially the same as a drop pod. Which you would think means they are pretty filmsy however in practice they are anything but.
We played a three player game with two marine players facing off against a guard army. The set up seemed to favor the marines as the guard player was forced into a corner dominated by a large complex. Essentially three different buildings consisting of multiple stories with bridges. As it turns out the guard player was able to fit most of his army inside the buildings making it very hard to shoot them. Over the course of six turns he stayed holed up in the buiding taking pot shots out the doors. Duting the last turn i was able to score a penetrating hit on the building finally and caused catostrophic damage. This killed off over 50% of the guys in the building and caused those on the roof to tumble to their death. Pretty game changing if this had happened earlier in the game it would have been devastating, this late in the game it didn't do much.
I like the rules for in tact buildings and think they add a lot of flavor to the game. I also like that they have a certain amount of risk/reward built into them. Sure you can take advantage of holing up the whole game but one luckily shot could bring the whole thing down around your ears. I'm tempting to build a force geared to taking out structures to see what kind of impact that will have on the game when using this board.
