Dark Eldar - Proxies Painted - Boarding Actions

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Warhammer 40,000 - I’ve been playing with the same group of guys for 20+ years it’s really amazing when you think about it that we still get together once a week to play with miniatures until late in the evening. I imagine most groups have a guy that loves to play but just doesn’t have the time, skill or what have you to get an army together and keeps bringing the same(ish) force he’s been using for 20+ years. It’s still mostly gray plastic or metal, probably missing some parts and every game starts with explaining what is standing in for what this week. It’s just a thing with an expensive time consuming hobby like this.

Well last year (probably right around the time I stopped posting regularly on this Blog) my wife and kids got me a 3D printer. I had been reluctant to get one because it seems like a time consuming hobby that would eat into my already limited time. Well I was right about the time eating but it opened up a whole new world of getting crazy idea for an army or project and quickly cranking things out for a really reasonable cost.

After years of playing against a headless gray army of mismashed Dark Eldar I was inspired to help my friend out. We were playing boarding actions at the time and it seemed pretty reasonable to crank out a 500 point force in a weekend. I dug around and found some reasonable proxy models for a Dark Eldar force and started printing.

After the printing and assembling was done I sorted out a simple three color scheme that would be easy for him to replicate if he wanted to continue with the force. I primed them dark grey and did a heavy dry brush of pallid flesh which gave me a nice base to use contrast paint and metallics to get them battle ready.

At the next game night he was very happy to have a nicely painted force for our boarding action campaign.

Prepping for 10th - Word Bearers

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Warhammer - 40,000 - Word Bearers are a pretty cool force, way back in 3rd edition I had a force that I loved playing being able to summon daemons mid-game was really fun. Since then they’ve had a bit of an up and down in regards to their rules feeling like the story describes them. Between 3rd and the 8th edition codexes many rules variations were attempted but nothing was really inspiring. The current 9th edition book finally really captures the feel of each of the traitor legions and the crusade rules let you take that to the next level. It’s really a shame that Games Workshop finally nailed a good Chaos Space Marine book and is invalidating it this summer with the release of 10th edition. Hopefully some of that flavor can come through in the new edition because what has been released as far as how the game works looks promising. I personally have really enjoyed 9th edition mostly because the narrative crusade rules don’t really suffer from the ups and downs of the rapid rules changes that attempted to balance out the matched play tournament scene.

Anyway this Word Bearers force was created as a crusade force with a focus on playing boarding actions. It has been converted from the Horus Heresy line and has a really unique look. All the crusade advancements have been focused on making them more daemonic and it’s really flavorful. Also being on the receiving end of some pretty nasty loses it is also very good.

Arks of Omen - Boarding Actions

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Warhammer 40,000 - Boarding Actions are really fun small scale games that take most of the rules bloat out of Warhammer 40,000. Rules as written you have to use a very specific set of terrain with fixed layouts and your force is extremely limited in what you can take.

Our group has been playing Crusade for a little over a year now and were excited to incorporate Boarding Actions into our weekly games. Of course because there was not a specific supplement printed to address Boarding Actions and Crusade we had to make things up on the fly.

What we decided was to allow any of our existing units from the crusade roster with their upgrades so long as they were “legal” in boarding actions. Using the Crusade Points give your opponents extra CP to start has been pretty good in balancing the forces. We also set the game limit at 25PL with a +/- of 2PL to allow for some flexibility with the roster so you can easily pivot between boarding actions and normal games each week.

Since many of our games are 3-4 players I set up the table with two decks. The decks are connected by ladders and stairs that function using the “Open Hatch” Action. With the ladders the action results in you “Embarking” on the ladder and you can disembark at the end of your next movement phase. So far it has worked really well keeping everyone involved in the fight.

The other change we made is that instead of buying a new terrain set we’re using the Deadbolt’s Derelict from Death Ray Designs. As long as the layouts are balanced it seems to work out making unique layouts for each game.