Last Friday's Battle - 2nd Variable Mission game

As you may or may not know, our group has been running a couple of games with variable missions. We are currently running with a single deck of 6 cards that each represent one of the 6 basic missions from the Core Rulebook. Last Friday night we played our second game using this system and it seems to work great, or well it did for Scott and myself.

So a run down of how this works, you get 6 cue cards or similar sized item and put the names of each of the missions on a card, shuffle them and put them to the side. Set up the table in what ever manner you see fit, we usually just have someone do the whole thing up in as even a manner as possible. Place a marker for the Relic and then 6 markers (with the variable point values for the Scouring) as evenly around the table as possible. Determine all the normal stuff such as Warlord Traits, Deployment, etc. and then each side chooses a card.

Now we talk a lot while we are playing so in order to not give away our mission we tend to talk objectives in a way that it can be any mission. Oh I forgot to say this but, DON'T SHOW YOUR OPPONENT YOUR MISSION CARD! What fun would it be if he/she knew what it was. Also we have always played where in the Scouring you don't flip the Objective Marks to determine their value until the end of the game. I guess we are just weird like that.

So how did our game play out, Scott and I played Blood Angels and Dark Angels against George and Austin who were playing Eldar and Tau. Austin and myself were the Warlords with Austin drawing the Relic mission and myself drawing Purge the Alien (I had to refrain from doing the Happy Dance). Deployment saw Scott and myself just outside of range for two objectives and our opponents a little further back. We blocked Infiltration by getting first deployment for them and I set up a group of scouts on the Relic (remember we didn't know they had the mission). Our battle plan was rather simple, march straight across the board and hold as many objectives as possible while attempting to eliminate what ever presented itself. Austin and George were going to flank to our rear, slay the warlord and retrieve the relic from there. Well that was a great plan except my Librarian decided that he was going to Perils of the Warp himself to death in turn two (2 turns of double 6s). This kind of broke their battle plans and they never did recover from it. Mean while my Scouts sat on the Relic for 5 turns and in the end we walked away with more than their 3 VP for First Blood, Slay the Warlord, and Line Breaker. I didn't think it was necessary to do the math once we counted 4 kills.

So if you want to change up your game a bit I definitely suggest giving the mission cards a try.