A Few 6th Edition Initial Thoughts

Have you read a thousand of these posts yet?

We had a sort of informal tournament on Saturday at At Ease Games.  There wasn't a prize pool or an entry fee or scoring, but we had a time and a points value and a very large turnout.  By the end of the day, we had improvise extra tables, and there were still people standing, watching, and waiting for their turn.  The excitement was palpable and great to see.

I went 2-0-1 on the day, playing my Chaos Space Marines, with games against Daemons, Tau, and vanilla Marines.  I played the new versions of Seize Ground and Capture and Control, plus one of the new missions called "The Relic."  Overall, I really like the changes, while it also feels like I'm still just playing 40K.

I don't know that this edition will be kind to the tournament-centric mindset.  The random elements seem to be pretty prevalent.  By way of example, I'd pick Warlord traits.  A single D6 can have a pretty significant effect on the game.  In the Relic mission, I turned my Daemon Prince into a scoring unit, while my Tau opponent got the ability to score victory points by slaying enemies in challenges.  To me, that seems like a pretty big disparity.  On the other hand, the game is really fun, seems to play quickly, and does a good job of making things cinematic.  For those kinds of games, I think it's going to be a tremendous rule set.  Woodchuck and Hanover's please.

I'm not too worried about Allies.  It seems like it was written similarly to how it was in the 8th edition Fantasy book, which never seemed to see a profound emergence of allies.  And while there may be some crazy combos, everyone can play them.  It also gives me the opportunity to field a detachment of daemons in my Chaos army while I'm building them up.  Now I don't have to buy a whole army to start playing with it.  I can have an all painted force, even while building one up.

A few other brief thoughts.  First, overwatching Plasma Guns are TERRIFYING.  Second, I like the way vehicles work.  They're more reliable and easier to kill at the same time.  I don't think we'll see a lot of light mech in assault armies because you need to be out of them a full turn to charge, but shooty armies might still spam light chassis.  Hopefully this means we'll see the addition of lizard and Spock to the rock, paper scissors mix.  Finally, I really hope flying things don't become the level 4 wizards of 40K.  They seem to be difficult to handle and able to dish out the punishment.  Most armies aren't ready to handle them beyond praying for sixes.  That may change as each book comes out, but that will take a while.

In the meantime, game on!