Saturday, December 30, 2017

KOW - Battlefield Cards - Another Winner!

Over the last six months I have been playing a bit of Warhammer 40k. There are a couple of drivers for this; firstly, I love the well-developed 40k backstory (something KOW has yet to develop) and secondly, the ease of finding a game.

One thing I have stayed away from playing in is competitive 40k. I loathe what you have to do with lists to be competitive and being a hard-nosed pr%&k I can't play in a tournament without wanting to kick ass and take names (yes, my ego is that fragile 😎). As a result I play 40k with a single Battalion and one book rather than go down the "soup" route. This means the list is probably only 75/80% the power of the various Chaos 'soup" lists which are abhorrent from a fluff viewpoint. Competitive 40k is also focussed on a set type of mission where they is potential to graduate scoring to separate competitors.

GW released a set of cards called "Open War" which allow you to generate missions each time you play. They have Deployment, Objective, Twist, Ruse and Sudden Death criteria meaning that the pack has potential to generate 50,000+ unique missions. I have been using these to play and they have created hard fought games every time. I love them.

Now it looks like Mantic have gone down a similar path.

They are releasing Battlefield Cards which give you Objective, Strategy and Condition cards to generate your own missions. Again the drawcard is that you can increase playability by ensuring every game you play is different. This is particularly great for small communities or for narrative players where playing the same mission against the same opponent or army gets old quick.

I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on a set as having seen how it has helped my 40k gaming I can only see good outcomes from these.

Reading the blurb that comes with news of the release it seems that there might also be opportunities to develop these further by playing asymmetric missions.

Count me in!

2 comments:

  1. The good news is that all of the missions are asymmetrical ;)

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  2. Really interested in picking up a set of these. The current missions are starting to merge in my head so this should freshen things up considerably.

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