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