We are officially in crunch time for the Warmaster’s Challenge. This means that we are hard at work building terrain for our new tables.

We already have a very nice collection of terrain built around trees, jungles, ruins, and buildings. They provide very stable, standard play-styles, which means that on most tables everyone has a fairly similar, level playing experience.

Moving forward, pushing the quality and variety of our tables to the next level has become a major goals. With this in mind, we have planned a number of projects. They include developing sets of 3-4 tables with terrain that revolves around a theme. Our themes for Warmaster’s 2010 are:
1. Planetstrike based tables – that work in standard 40K. These tables will consist of a few bastions, two Fortresses of Redemption, and two sky shield landing pads. This might raise a few eyebrows, as armour 14 buildings would vastly disadvantage some armies. Don’t worry, we have thought of this.
a. The bastions will be treated as AV 12 buildings, with disabled automated weapons.
b. The fortresses and the sky shields are area terrain, not buildings.
c. In addition, we are developing area terrain that fits the Planetstrike feel – Aegis Lines and Defensive Weapon emplacements, etc.

2. Ork Compound based tables. Here we are developing a series or tables that reflect our thoughts on what an Ork compound might look like. We are definitely drawing on Dawn of war for some inspiration here
a. There will be turrets and barricades
b. There will be orkish buildings...
c. We are thinking about what a mek’s scrap shop would look like... and have some thoughts brewing...

3. Our third idea is to add some Desert tables, perhaps with some Tau themed emplacements of some sort. This idea is very much in the incubation stages, and we will see how far it evolves before the tournament itself.

On top of this, long-time Warmaster’s attendee, Howard Russell, is putting together some excellent terrain that we have nearly painted up completely.

I’ll try to get some pics of our work-in-progress and finished terrain on here in the near future.

Cheers,
Nate

I thought that I would have some down time following up on the mad rush to complete the Games Day Thunderhawk Down Board. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

I turned my attention to the Warmaster’s 40K Challenge, coming up on September 26-27 in Waterloo. I already had some scribbled notes on scenario ideas, and in my discussions with other members of the team, we had started considering new ideas for the challenge itself. But nothing was set in stone.

A hasty Tuesday evening meeting to discuss ideas and a day-long gaming marathon on Saturday resulted in four new scenarios ready for wider play-testing.

Some Things Change and Other Remain the Same

This year’s scenarios still feature everything you have come to expect – Primary, secondary, and tertiary objectives, headhunting, mulligans, and tactical bonuses. But we are trying something different within that framework.

Instead of having the tertiary objective tied to a specific scenario, we have decided to decouple it. This year, teams will get to choose which tertiary objective they are going to achieve each round. Teams will still have to complete them all over the course of the day, so an additional layer of strategy has been added to winning. Are teams going to want to hold on to the Kill Point Tertiary until the end of the day, or are teams going to go for it early, even if the chances of success aren’t that great that round... Add in the fact that teams may be pursuing different tertiary objectives, and there will often be four goals that forces will be trying to achieve or prevent.

Next Steps

Play-test, play-test, play-test. I highly encourage anyone interested in attending to play-test the scenarios and provide extensive feedback. Let us know if you think some objectives should be achievable by more than troops. Are there instances where things don’t make sense?

Don’t just tell us – “objective X sucks” but tell us why and give us a specific instance of it producing a poor situation. We listen to all feedback – we don’t guarantee that we will make a change exactly to your liking, or make any change at all, but we will consider any and all comments put forward.

On September 1st, we will post the final versions of the scenarios, so everyone has until August 30, 2009 to provide input.

Cheers,
Nate