Planning for the Apocalypse

Posted by Ranillon on 16. December 2008 22:50

As I announced last week we here at 40KOrigins.com are running what will hopefully be the “World’s Largest Apocalypse Game” for next year’s Origins Game Fair.  I’ve been in a number of such games before and they’ve always been fun.  However, this particular game is designed to be as large as possible.  We especially want people to bring their titans and other spectacular models.  Pictures (and more) will be taken so we want everything to be as impressive as possible.

However, that means a heck of a lot of models out there.  So, this thing has to be planned properly.  That’s why with this post I will be starting a new series where I invite everyone to post their own experiences and to provide feedback for any ideas offered.

By far the biggest headache for Apocalypse games is to keep everything running as smoothly as can be.  With so many models out there with so many special rules it’s easy for things to get bogged down.  We don’t want turns to take five hours.  In order to help prevent this I propose the following special rules:

1)       Every player must pick one table (there will be from 4-8 in a long line for the game) and deploy from there:  One tendency I’ve noticed from the Apocalypse games I’ve played is for people to deploy their models all over the place.  Tactically, this makes sense as it allows you to spread around your units to wherever they are needed.  The problem is that a player can easily be stuck rushing back and forth between different parts of the playing area trying to finish combat with various enemy individuals.  He can get distracted, lose track of what models he needs to finish using, and generally being inefficient.  Multiply this by every player and you get chaos (no, not that type of Chaos).  Forcing people to start play on a single table may be a bit limiting tactically, but it means that his models will all be nearby and easier to manage.

2)      While players are allowed to move their units wherever they like he needs to be willing to let other people conduct combats with his units, especially if they are on other tables:  Another big problem is how the process can end up being log jammed with everyone on one side waiting to have his turn shooting at a particular single enemy individual’s units.  As he can only play one combat at a time the game starts to grind to a halt.  Therefore (and especially for those who brought a large amount of models), people are encouraged to allow others to temporarily run portions of their troops for the sake of completing turns faster.

3)      If you can, bring along a friend to help:  Not everyone has suitable 40K armies for an Apocalypse game or even one at all, but they may still be interested in playing.  People will be encouraged to bring along friends to aid them run their armies.  If nothing else, this would be a great opportunity to bring newbies into the game.

4)      Turns will be 1 hour per side:  Or, to put it another way, every turn will be two hours long.  This will hopefully allow us to get in a full 5-6 turns.  It will also push people to get done as fast as possible.

So, what does everyone think?