Large games of 30K are a blast, but they require some planning and preparation to go smoothly. I’m going to use an example of a game I played earlier this month that was 12,000 points a side with 3 players per team. We divided up into Loyalists and Traitors (per the norm) and planned out 6 hours to play our game. So if you want to gather up all of your friends for an epic battle, here are some tips that can help.
1. If you have more than one person a side, it’s a good idea to delegate someone as the team captain. This person will help determine the mission, table setup, scenario rules in use.
In our game this helped because the team captains helped streamline the setup of the game, which can take a lot of time. Setup time reduces the amount of fun to be had so why not speed things up? We decided to do away with mysterious objectives so there wasn’t so much book keeping involved, we also choose our mission instead of rolling because we wanted to already be familiar with the objective. Our table size was 6’ x 8’ with pre-arranged terrain. We did roll random on deployment, which didn’t take away from the game and added an element of uncertainty.
2. Have prepared army lists before you arrive.
Come on. This is a no brainer here.
3. Allow for some out of sequence actions in order to keep people involved and the game moving at a good pace.
We tried to keep things moving as much as possible. If one side of the board was done moving, but the other side was still pushing models around we would allow some shooting phase actions to occur like running or shooting at units far away and unaffected by those other side of the board units. The psychic phase bogged us down a bit since we had a Thousand Sons player on our side. I couldn’t find a good way around that, but at least our efforts to speed things up elsewhere made a difference.
4. Set a reasonable time limit or a turn limit.
We originally planned for a random game length battle, but ended up calling it on turn 4 since we were approaching our 6 hour time limit. I felt we still got a good game in, but it would have been nice to at least have one more turn in. Some feedback I got after the game is to maybe scale things down a little on our next big game, 10K instead of 12K should allow us to complete a game in 6 hours.
5. Play a practice game or two leading up to the big game.
This was helpful for me in getting familiar with the rules again. There are times where I can go months without playing a 30K game so a refresher can help me work out rules in my list that I forget about or misinterpret. I think a 1500 point or 2000 point game is ideal. They are quick enough to do even with the occasional rule lookup.
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| Fulgrim managed a charge on turn 1 from his Spartan and proceeded to wreck face |
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| Early game set up |
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| The loyalists hit our flank with a large portion of their army via deep strike and outflank |
Just in case you are wondering who won, the Loyalists did. We had 5 primarchs being taken out of 6 total legions. The Emperor’s Children, Iron Warriors, and Thousand Sons on one side while the Space Wolves, Ultramarines, and Iron Hands were the Loyalists. The traitors were doing well for most of the game by leading in victory points, but suffered a few hardships like losing Magnus plus retinue to a deep strike mishap. I can also of course blame those few horrible rolls that came up at the most inopportune times!
