It’s soon to be summer, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, and therefore it’s time for a new Mission Deck for Warhammer 40,000. We’ve fought the war against Leviathan, delved into the Pariah Nexus, and now it’s time to, uh, Chapter Approved. The themed deck name appears to have gone, and we’re back to a generic “Chapter Approved” for the first time since 8th edition. The new deck comes with changes to both Primary and Secondary missions, the introduction of Challenger cards, Twists, and a whole new game mode in Asymmetric War.
Thanks to Games Workshop for providing a review copy of the new deck.
The Overview: What You Need to Know
There’s a number of significant changes in this pack, and we’ll go through each of them in detail below. If you want the short version, the headline changes are:
- Significant changes to the scoring in the Burden of Trust and Terraform primary missions, changes to how Supply Drop and The Ritual work, and the addition of Hidden Supplies as a new primary.
- Numerous changes to Secondary missions, plus two cards added and Containment removed for a total of 19 cards in the deck.
- Challenger Cards replace Secret Missions as a catch-up mechanic.
- Twists replace Mission Rules. Also they suck.
- Deployments are unchanged.
- There’s a new Asymmetric War mission style, replacing Onslaught, which you aren’t going to use in GTs but could be fun for casual or narrative play.
The Video Version
If you’d like watch a version of this article instead, Andrew’s got you covered over on our YouTube channel.
The Game Sequence & General Rules
There are a few changes hidden away amongst the mission sequence, scoring and Action rules, as follows:
- If you are playing Tactical Missions, you can now choose to discard cards at the end of the Opponent’s turn, but you don’t gain a CP for doing so. This can make life a bit easier if you hold onto a card thinking you’ll score it then fail but it matters less than it would have in Pariah Nexus, as fewer Secondary scoring conditions last through into your opponent’s turn.
- There’s a small change to how Actions and eligibility to shoot work. Previously, starting an Action always made you ineligible to Shoot till the end of the turn. Now, it’s until the end of the turn, or until the Action completes, whichever is later. This means that if you’re doing an Action that lasts through to the end your opponents turn, you cannot Overwatch with the unit that’s performing it. As above, there are fewer places this matters than there were in Pariah Nexus, but still some.
- In Incursion games only, all Battleline units can Advance/Action and Action/Shoot. This is a good change as it heavily incentivises actually taking some Battleline in Incursion rather than the most nightmarish skew you can contrive.
- There’s also a new Designers Note on Actions, making it clear that the specification of which units can perform an Action is limiting – if it says “one unit from your army”, it means only one unit from your army. This isn’t a change, but from judging at events I (Wings) can attest that it’s a fairly common rules question, so good to have it clearly in writing.
- Scoring is updated to account for Challenger Cards – you can now score up to 12VP from them in addition to whatever you score from Primary or Secondary, but are still capped at 90VP overall. We really don’t like this, and think they should have been rolled into the Primary cap, as we’ll get into more when we discuss them.
- On the topic of scoring, they’ve also now given an explicit sequence for scoring & discarding cards; in Pariah these took place at the same time so there was a frequent question around sequencing. Now scoring active cards comes first, then you can discard any remaining cards.
Incursion Missions
Games Workshop have finally added rules specific to Incursion with this mission pack. These are relatively simple – armies can only contain one TITANIC CHARACTER unit, and cannot contain more than two units with the same Datasheet name unless they are either BATTLELINE or DEDICATED TRANSPORTS, in which case you can go to four.
Additionally, in Incursion missions BATTLELINE units can start Actions after they Advance and remain eligible to shoot after they start an Action.
These do quite a bit of work to make 1,000-point games more competitively playable, but there are probably a few more guidelines you could add around army construction if you were so inclined. They’re a good start for a game mode that lots of people seem to have an interest in but that currently has little support.
Asymmetric War
A brief note on this new mode before we crack into the competitive stuff. There are two parts to Asymmetric war: five deployment maps and five Primary Mission cards. These cards are designed for Strike Force armies (2,000 points per side), and games use the same secondary mission cards (Fixed/Tactical) as the standard missions, as well as Challenger cards. In Asymmetric War games, the Attacker deploys their entire army first, followed by the defender. No alternating unit deployments, and any units which can’t be fit into a deployment zone end up in Strategic Reserves.
Deployment Maps for Asymmetric War are just that – Asymmetric, and designed to simulate a specific attacker/defender scenario, such as Breakout modeling an army surrounded on both sides by hostile forces and attempting to break free. Or Defensive Line, which looks more like a siege warfare engagement.
The five Asymmetric War Primary Missions here are:
- Denied Resources – The Defender is trying to mark and remove objectives from the battlefield before the Attacker can claim and hold them.
- Hold Out – This is standard Take and Hold, giving you 5 VP per objective marker held, to a max of 15 VP per round.
- Syphoned Power – The Defender starts with 50 VP and the Attacker scores points for doing an action at the objective marker, syphoning energy and VP away from the Defender, to a max of 15 VP per turn.
- Establish Control – This is more or less Linchpin; you score 3 VP for holding markers if you don’t control your home objective, or 5 per if you do.
- Uneven Ground – This is a modified take and hold where you score progressively more VP for holding objectives further away – 2 VP for your own, 4 VP for markers in No Man’s Land, and 6 for markers in your opponent’s Deployment Zone.
Primary Missions
There are now ten Primary missions, with the existing nine all returning and Hidden Supplies being promoted from a Mission Rule. Most of these are the same as they are now, but the scoring for Burden of Trust and Terraform has changed, as has the selection method for the Supply Drop objectives and set-up for The Ritual.
On Burden of Trust, the change is that a unit can now guard an objective in battle round 1. However, the scoring is still done from the second battle round onwards, so the first player gets nothing out of this – instead the second player gets the first chance to score VP by guarding, as they can do it on turn 1 and score at the end of their opponent’s turn 2. There’s a designer’s note on the card to make this explicit. The purpose here is to fix the issue in the previous version where going second would give you fewer chances to guard things; now only the player going second can score Guarding points on turn 2, while only the player going first can score them in turn 5.
More significant is the alteration to Terraform. In the Pariah Nexus version, this is a one-and-done deal; you Terraform an objective and it’s yours for the rest of the game. This is a double blow to your opponent, because if an army has a plan to get out aggressively on the early turns and Terraform multiple objectives, they’re going to score VP for each of those for the rest of the game, while you’re unable to Terraform anything at all. In the new version of this, you are able to flip Terraformed objectives – you terraform it, and if your opponent had already done so, they lose theirs. The action also completes at the end of your turn, instead of your opponent’s. Finally, the scoring changes, with the terraformed objectives only being worth 1VP instead of 2. However, both players score at the end of each turn (from the second battle round onwards). The scoring is also independent of the rest of the Primary score, rather than there being a shared 15VP cap for objective control and Terraforming.
There’s a lot going on here. The mission becomes much more about taking and flipping objectives, and the end of turn scoring for both the Terraform points and also the action means that you’re incentivised to try and grab stuff that your opponent has terraformed because it’s a 2VP swing – one that you gain, and one that they don’t. It’s likely to end up very aggressive as players continuously try and push one another back.
You still score the same points as currently on Supply Drop. However, you no longer select the centre objective to be the Alpha or Omega – instead you essentially just coinflip which of the other two will disappear on round 4 and which will go on round 5, leaving you to ruck over the central one on turn 5. This is better than the current version, since you can reliably plan on the centre being the main objective, but still somewhat advantages the player who wins the Alpha/Omega randomisation and ends up with the favourable No Man’s Land objective in battle round 4.
The Ritual only has one change, but it’s a big one; you no longer remove the non-centre objectives in No Man’s Land. Having more objectives on the table without needing to do the action normalises the scoring a bit, though you’re still able to create a castle of defensible objectives each. This is likely to push scores up on this mission quite a bit.
Finally for changes on the Primary missions, we have a whole new one in the form of Hidden Supplies. If you remember Vital Intelligence from 9th edition, this is kind of like that. There are four objectives in No Man’s Land, with the centre objective replaced by two placed 6” from the centre towards the map corners. You then score 5VP for controlling one objective marker not within your deployment zone, another 5VP if you hold two of them, and 5VP if you hold more objective markers (anywhere on the table) than your opponent does. This is going to come down to your ability to hold two of the No Man’s Land objectives and keep your opponent off a third to limit their ability to score and try to pick up the hold more points, though it depends a bit on the maps – if the mid-table objectives are too protected this may end up with lots of passivity where both players sit and score 40 and hope to make up the difference on secondaries.
Speaking of those, let’s take a look at the Secondary missions in this deck – there are a lot more changes to these than there were to the Primary ones.
Secondary Missions
There are FAR more changes to Secondaries, with significant impacts on how games will be played.
Firstly, the cards eligible for Fixed scoring are now:
- Engage on All Fronts
- Storm Hostile Objective
- Behind Enemy Lines
- Assassination
- Cleanse
- Establish Locus
- Bring It Down
- Cull the Horde
- No Prisoners – but not in the Chapter Approved Tournament Companion
Let’s take a look at the detail of the scoring, as more than half the deck is either altered from Pariah Nexus or completely new. Also if you liked being given 6 free VP for pulling Containment on turn 1 then sorry, that’s gone.
In no particular order:
- Engage on All Fronts now gives 1VP for having units in two quarters, 2VP for 3 quarters, and 4VP for 4 quarters. It’s now trivial to score something off this, though 1VP isn’t a lot and in the narrow situation where you have better options but can’t manage to be in 3 board quarters it will likely be worth cycling it still. Conversely, if you don’t cycle it in your command phase you’ll usually score 1VP for being in two quarters. That will prevent you from discarding the card for a CP, so be mindful about which objective you want to cycle if you’ve got a pair of bad draws.
- Assassination is unchanged in Tactical, but Fixed you now score 4VP for characters with 4+ Wounds and only 3VP for those with fewer than 4. This is probably a good change, making life a little less painful for armies like Guard.
- Cleanse becomes 2VP/4VP for Fixed or 2VP/5VP for Tactical
- Bring It Down has significant changes. The Tactical version is now just 4VP for killing one or more VEHICLE or MONSTER units – no differentiation in points for different weight classes, and no extra scoring for killing multiple. In Fixed it’s the same as in Pariah Nexus, so 2VP each time a MONSTER or VEHICLE is destroyed, +2 if it had 15+ Wounds, +2 if it had 20+, for a maximum of 6 per unit (with no cap on scoring per round).
- Cull the Horde now targets INFANTRY units with a Starting Strength of 13+ INCLUDING Attached units, with no consideration for the Wounds characteristic – so you’re just looking directly at the number of models in the unit, including any Leaders. The main impact here is that it enables a few more ways to “finesse” a unit into being eligible if you want to make this a bad tactical draw for the opponent, an example being Aeldari Guardians, who start at 11 models for their platform, and can add either two Characters or a Character and a Support Weapon.
- No Prisoners is unchanged in its Tactical form, scoring 2VP per unit destroyed up to a maximum of 5VP. However, in its Fixed version you score each time an enemy Bodyguard unit or enemy non-CHARACTER unit is destroyed. This is basically two clauses that say the same thing – you don’t score for killing Characters, in whatever form they come.
- Marked for Death, arguably the worst card in Pariah Nexus, returns with a slight tweak. You now have “Alpha” targets which are what you’re used to when you draw this and sigh; your opponent picks 3 of their units and you get 5VP if you kill one. However, to make this a bit less of a dead card, you also get to pick a Gamma unit now. If you destroy this unit and none of the Alpha units, you still get 2VP.
- Recover Assets gets several changes which make it a MUCH easier card to score. The total VP is a little lower, scoring 3VP if two units do the action and 5VP if three do, but the action completes at the end of your own turn so it’s much more reliable and removes the ability for an opponent to just kill one of your recovering units and kill your scoring. You can also discard it when drawn if you have fewer than 3 units left rather than fewer than 2, which is worth bearing in mind if you feel like you’ll struggle to score even the 3VP version.
- Extend Battle Lines is now lowered to 4VP instead of 5VP for the normal scoring of holding your deployment zone objective plus another in No Man’s Land. In addition, the ‘small’ version of scoring 2VP for any objective marker in No Man’s Land is no longer conditional, so if you’ve managed to lose your home objective this no longer swings from a great card to a dead one.
- A Tempting Target makes its return, and works the same as it used to – your opponent picks one No Man’s Land objective, and you score 5VP if you control it at the end of either player’s turn. This will probably be just as annoying as it used to be when you draw it and your opponent shrugs and points at the objective just outside of their deployment zone that their entire army is piled on top of. It is worth noting that this can be scored at the end of either player’s turn, so it’s one of the ones where it’s more relevant that you can discard at the end of the opponent’s turn as if you’ve started a fight on an objective and think you’ll win soon but not just yet, you can hold onto it at minimal risk.
- Finally there’s Display of Might, a new card with a simple scoring condition; you get 4VP at the end of your turn if there are more units wholly within No Man’s Land from your army than from your opponent’s. Like Defend Stronghold, this is a compulsory re-draw in the first battle round.
This is a big shake-up of how secondary scoring has worked for the last 12 months. Containment going removes a soft option for lots of points, but many of the other cards are easier to score than they were before, particularly Recover Assets. Cull the Horde should also be relevant a bit more often, and Marked for Death is a much more reasonable card now that you have the option of the Gamma unit. We don’t love A Tempting Target immediately being added to take its place as the card you draw and write off to being a free CP at the end of your turn, but Display of Might is pretty cool and incentivises going forwards rather than sitting back.
The addition of No Prisoners to your options for Fixed objectives looked like being a huge deal, but the Tournament Companion removes it from the list again, so let’s not worry about it.
Challenger Cards
The Leviathan and Pariah Nexus mission packs both had “catch-up” scoring mechanics, in the form of Gambits and Secret Missions respectively. The former were mostly a bad joke, requiring a player to give up any further primary scoring and punt on being able to pull off a difficult condition at the end of the game and still high-roll. The latter were a bit better in terms of their implementation, still allowing players to score some of the regular Primary mission points and being more reliable to pull off if you did meet their conditions, while also giving reasons to bring BATTLELINE units whether you planned to use them or not. If anything they were a little bit too easy in some circumstances; a player going second with Genestealer Cults could reliably expect to score War of Attrition, for example. They also were very binary; you either picked one at the end of battle round 3 or they were irrelevant, and they either scored big or scored nothing.
Challenger cards replace these systems, intended to be a smaller, more incremental catch-up. In this new version there is a deck of 9 cards which is shared between players. At the start of each battle round one player will become the Challenger if they are behind by 6 or more points. Do note the start of battle round timing here, it’s important. If one player is the Challenger, they then draw a card from this shared deck at the start of their own Command phase. Each card has a 0CP Stratagem and a Mission on it, and you can either use the Stratagem once (you discard the card on use) or complete the Mission. If you don’t do either of these, you still discard the card at the end of your turn.
There’s some key points to remember on the Stratagems. You can’t change the cost of the Stratagem, so Lord of Deceit and similar abilities don’t work, and you cannot generate Command points from using them – so something like the comms array on an Infiltrator squad doesn’t do anything.
There are 9 of these cards and they are all pretty strong, with a choice of good Stratagems or very straightforward missions to complete to score. In all cases, these award 3VP. The cards don’t have names, so we’ve named them after the Stratagem and the Mission in that order.
Force a Breach/Secure Extraction Zone
Stratagem: Use in the Movement phase on one unit that hasn’t been selected to move yet. Until the end of the phase, that unit can make Normal or Advance moves horizontally through models and terrain features.
Mission: Complete the Secure Extraction Zone action. In your Shooting phase, pick one unit from your army which is not within your deployment zone and is within 9” of one or more battlefield edges. The action completes immediately (don’t get excited – remember the action rules still apply to the end of your turn).
Opportunistic Strike/Sow Chaos
Stratagem: Use in your Shooting phase on one of your units that is not within Engagement Range of an enemy unit. Pick one enemy unit within 6” and visible and roll six D6; that enemy unit suffers a mortal wound for each 4+.
Mission: Completed at the end of your turn if you killed one or more enemy models from two or more different units in this turn.
Burst of Speed/Focused Effort
Stratagem: Use at the end of your Shooting phase. One unit from your army (excluding units which have moved this phase – no bonus Battle Focus, Aeldari players) can make a Normal move of up to D6”, then cannot move again this phase.
Mission: Completed at the end of your turn if models in two or more of your units made one or more attacks against the same enemy unit this turn, and models in that unit lost one or more wounds as a result of any of those attacks.
Renewed Focus/Establish Comms
Stratagem: Use in your Shooting or Fight phase on one of your units that has not been selected yet. Until the end of the phase, models in that unit re-roll Hit and Wound rolls of 1.
Mission: Complete the Establish Comms action in your Shooting phase with one unit in your army that is more than 15” away from all other units in your army. The action completes immediately.
Pivotal Moment/Attrition
Stratagem: Use in your Movement phase on a unit from your army. Until the end of the turn, that unit can shoot and declare a charge in a turn in which it Advanced or Fell Back.
Mission: Completed at the end of your turn if one or more enemy units were destroyed this turn.
Great Haste/Over the Line
Stratagem: Use in the Movement phase on a unit that has not been selected to move this phase. Until the end of the phase, add D6” to the Move characteristic of models in your unit.
Mission: Complete at the end of your turn if one of more units from your army, excluding AIRCRAFT and Battle-shocked units, are within your opponent’s deployment zone.
Strategic Retreat/Zone Defence
Stratagem: Use at the start of your Shooting phase, to target one unit from your army which is NOT a MONSTER or VEHICLE that is not within Engagement Range of one of more enemy units. Remove that unit from the battlefield and place it into Strategic Reserves.
Mission: Complete at the end of your turn. Score a point to a maximum of three if you have a unit that is not AIRCRAFT or Battle-shocked and is wholly within your deployment zone, 6” of the centre of the battlefield, No Man’s Land, or your opponent’s deployment zone. (These don’t seem to be exclusive, so if you have a unit within 6” of the centre of the battlefield you will score for both that and being in No Man’s Land).
All In/Self Preservation
Stratagem: Use in your Fight phase on a unit which has not been selected to fight this phase. Until the end of the phase, you can make Pile-in or Consolidation moves up to 6” instead of up to 3”. In addition, models in that unit do not need to move closer to the closest enemy model, as long as they end up as close as possible to the closest enemy unit.
Mission: Complete the Self Preservation action. Done in the Shooting phase by one unit in your army that is more than 18” away from all enemy units. Unlike the other actions in this set, this one completes at the end of your turn.
Harboured Power/Dug In
Stratagem: Use in your Shooting or Fight phase on a unit that hasn’t been selected to shoot or fight this phase. Until the end of the phase, weapons equipped by models in your unit gain HAZARDOUS and either LETHAL HITS or SUSTAINED HITS 1.
Mission: Complete at the end of your turn. You score 1VP for each objective marker you control, up to a maximum of 3.
What does all of this mean?
Given the ease of scoring these, what this boils down to is that if you’re 6VP down at the start of a battle round, the game more or less hands you 3VP for free, or if you really don’t feel like you need them you get a free, powerful Stratagem to use instead. Opinions are split in the Goonhammer offices on how this will affect patterns of play, but none of us think these were an especially good idea. 6VP is just not a very big gap, especially given how easy most of these are to score. Some of our team have even suggested deliberately playing to minimise your own score to get one of these cards instead, particularly if you’re going second – imagine if you could score 3VP or 5VP on Recover Assets, for example, and you could opt to make the less risky play of just taking the 3VP, knowing you’d be behind by 6+ and probably end up getting more points from a Challenger card and preserve one of your units that otherwise might have had be sacrificed. Whether this will actually come up in practice is a different question, of course; to make it worthwhile you likely have to give up fewer than 3VP, and it’ll be much harder to do if going first than going second.
As mentioned in the summary at the beginning of the article, these points are a separate pool all of their own, within the 90VP you can possibly score. This is the worst possible decision for how these work. The most likely thing they enable is taking Fixed Secondary missions expecting a fairly low score from each (say 14VP per), with a plan to make up the difference from Challenger cards – which you will be more likely to be getting if your Secondaries are lower-scoring.
The shared deck element also adds a bit of a twist, especially with some of the Stratagems where an effect that might be great for your army can easily be something your opponent draws and prefers to score instead. Speaking of twists, let’s look at those in this pack.
Twists
The Leviathan and Pariah Nexus packs have both had Mission Rules to add a little extra to the Primary/Deployment set-up for missions. The Leviathan ones were mostly not very good and often just defaulted to Chilling Rain, i.e. you don’t have a rule. Interesting how many battles in 40k took place in sheets of rain when so many planets in the Imperium are apparently so arid you have to ship the water in from elsewhere. Just a little lore consideration for you there. In Pariah Nexus, Chilling Rain was removed and many of the Mission Rules were tweaked to be neat effects for incentivising BATTLELINE units. Some of them could be pretty impactful (ask anyone who’s played using Swift Action against a War Dog spam list) but mostly they were just ok.
Twists are pretty clearly not intended to be used in competitive play – anyone who’s familiar with the old Open War Deck will recognize these at once – or at least, the concept behind them. Many of these are a bit more… “bonkers” than those and change the game in ways that are bound to make them unrecognizable with regard to balance or competitive play. That’s not necessarily a bad thing if you’re really looking to mix it up, but it’s worth knowing going in that some of these just tilt the scales completely for some armies.
Here’s what you’re working with:
- Night Fighting – Each unit can only be the target of a ranged attack if the attacking model is within 18.”
- Ruinscape – Each time a unit makes a Normal or Advance move, it can move horizontally through terrain features.
- Martial Pride – BATTLELINE units can start Actions if they Advanced, and can shoot while doing Actions. This excludes VEHICLE units (yeah, someone didn’t like that War Dog thing).
- Rapid Escalation – In the first battle round, players can set up units from Strategic Reserves in the Reinforcements step of the Movement phase, wholly within 6” of any battlefield edge but not within the enemy deployment zone, and units cannot use Deep Strike. For Strike Force, you can set up up to 400pts of units in this way.
- Adapt or Die – If you’re playing Fixed, then once per battle you can change one of your Secondary Missions for a different one (which must still be eligible to be Fixed). If you’re playing Tactical, then twice per battle you can draw an extra Secondary Mission card after drawing one and then shuffle one of those cards back into your deck (this wording is specific – you draw two and keep one of those, you can’t discard a card you already have active).
- High Octane – Units can auto-Advance 6”.
- Bloodlust – Units are eligible to charge if they are within 18” of one or more enemy units, instead of 12”, and roll 3D6 for Charge rolls.
- Point Blank – Ranged weapons (except Blast weapons) have the PISTOL ability.
- Lords of War – You get +3 Attacks for weapons equipped by a non-VEHICLE WARLORD model.
Opening with “everything has Lone Operative” is pretty heady stuff and it only gets more crazy from there. Martial Pride is probably ok, since it’s just a reskinned Swift Action. Adapt or Die is probably fine, although in this pack where scoring is already very easy and powerful players don’t really need more ways to guarantee high scores. The rest of these are crazy and would look pretty wild in a narrative pack, let alone one intended for competitive use. Auto-Advance 6” for everything? Roll 3D6 for charges? We really cannot understand what these are meant to be and why they’re here. Readers will have their own opinions on whether just re-printing the Pariah Nexus ones would have been value for money, but it would be better to have had those again than these. Games Workshop apparently agree with us, and the Tournament Companion removes them from competitive games.
What Does All This Mean for Competitive Play?
We wrote about the “mythical 100pt game” in Hammer of Math a while ago, and well, that game just became a lot less mythical. The most likely outcome here is that games get higher-scoring on both sides of the table. The Secondaries which changed either award more points or become much easier to score. Challenger cards will help mitigate bad hands of scoring, and mitigate weak Fixed picks. In general, scoring has been significantly de-risked – there’s 102VP available for a cap of 90VP, with points available from more sources.
None of this is great for competitive play. Some of the more frustrating Secondaries changing is a good thing – Marked for Death was a particular villain in Pariah Nexus for being either a gimme or a dead card – but overall the pendulum has likely swung too far the other way. Poorer players will probably feel better about their games, while stronger ones are going to take advantage of a more favourable environment to pick Fixed and machine-gun their way through 100VP games where the result is in very little doubt.
Final Thoughts
Liam: This isn’t all doom and gloom. The changes to the Primary missions are largely good – Terraform being flippable and Burden of Trust no longer arbitrarily giving the second player fewer chances to score from guarding objectives are sensible changes, and Hidden Supplies feels like a decent mission using a formula that’s worked in the past. The changes to Secondaries are also mostly good on a per-card basis, and removing Containment is a good decision even if it’s oddly against the grain in a pack that otherwise wants to shower you in VP.
Challenger cards aren’t conceptually terrible and having a catch-up mechanic which is less all-or-nothing and is more part of the game is a good thing, but should probably be based on a 10VP gap rather than 6. They perhaps also shouldn’t have been quite so easy to score, though anyone who played with Gambits will be thankful to have one that is more realistic to achieve.
The less said about twists, the better.
Rob: The Asymmetric War missions here are a good deal for Narrative players, who previously had to rely on Crusade books for tenth edition missions that are asymmetric. These give players a quick, easy way to run attacker/defender missions without having to worry about how they tie in to whatever mechanics are in the latest Crusade book.
Curie: I’m hesitantly optimistic that this mission pack won’t shake up the meta too drastically, but these things are always accompanied by a dataslate & MFM updates so that could prove the bigger change. I can’t comprehend why Unexploded Ordnance remains a Primary Mission to tempt TOs to run a bad event. The Challenge system may be an issue, as James lays out below.
James: I wanted to carve out a space to specifically focus on the Challenge system. I am concerned that this will ultimately undermine the overall good primary/secondary changes made in this mission update. I am greatly outspoken on the extent of this impact, even amongst the review team here at Goonhammer, but the way this is being implemented I believe will lead to greatly altered decision making and playstyles that will first appear amongst the top tables before slowly migrating down as the gamey possibilities of the mechanics and decision processes are worked out amongst the general player base.
The problem I see is as follows:
- It will strongly benefit the player going second who has full information and limited control ahead of the score check
- It will strongly benefit armies, factions, and playstyles that play primary in the late-game (and thus are often behind early)
- It is a mechanic that you can game and/or proactively plan into your scoring with little to no downside risk
To be perfectly clear, this is not something you are generally game planning to maintain a 6-point deficit or a 5-point lead. That’s foolish, you should always just plan to blow your opponent out and be in control as much as possible. However, there are many games or in-game situations where this can come into effect and where the correct play will be to actually game this mechanic around that 6-point margin, most especially as the second player.
Secondary play will be the primary intersection – how you plan for your turn – where units move, how they score, what they target, what you risk, etc… whether you even keep a secondary. With the tiering of scores and how they factor into this mechanic, any 1-3 VP difference in a secondary is subject to considering the challenge card as an alternative. Some of these are obvious, Behind Enemy Lines or Engage on All Fronts. But even something like Marked for Death can otherwise force you to play in a manner you don’t want to or result in spending a CP to swap it out. Under this system you can settle for something lesser, avoid spending a CP, or avoid committing units in order to net out with a Challenge in many circumstances, especially going second where you know with certainty the score.
Some armies will naturally favor late game play over early game, those armies tend to fall behind early only to catch up later when they have effectively whittled down their opponents as a matter of course. Consider a situation where in order to keep up on primary, the player is afforded bad options to either take a big risk or make a sacrifice they don’t want to make early in the game. Instead they might choose to allow a minor deficit of -5 on primary to kick that decision a turn, maybe even a second, play their secondarily appropriately, and then plan to mitigate it with a challenge card, potentially multiple. The effect will be that where the player previously may have had to be more aggressive and risk their position late game, they can instead choose to play conservatively, still keep the score close enough, and take advantage in the late game as their style allows – this is purely boosted because of the challenge mechanic. Of course, for armies and styles that leap ahead early and try to hold on late, the opposite is true. The effect here is that players are incentivized towards neutral play that doesn’t grant an opponent to big of a scoring advantage unless they are certain they won’t get caught up against.
The player going second is ultimately in the driver’s seat here by being the player who has full information on the score, but also controls the scoring ahead of the Challenge card draw and can therefore put their thumb on the scale in a way that the player going first simply cannot. This is in addition to any other scoring advantage the second player may or may not have for end-game scoring. Solutions to this theory, if indeed realized, are subject to a separate discussion. In the meantime I’ll wait and see whether my theory proves out or if I’ve overstated the impacts.
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