Saab's Mission Highlight of the Week: Mission #1

Mission # 1 Dawn of Confusion

This past October (2009), I attended the Da Boyz GT in Rochester, NY. Let me tell you; the decision to attend this October 16th, 2010 was agreed upon before we even started the 8+ hour car ride back home. Da Boyz hosted a wonderful event with top tier people, both in gaming skill and attitude. I was quite pleased by the willingness of the players to share ideas and great booze with those they’ve just recently met. Usually, when you start drinking rum at 10 AM things take a turn for the worse, but the day only got better. Tables were well constructed, missions were well written, and other than listing our club as The Wrecking Crew (we can ruin our OWN reputation, thank you very much j/k ) the whole event ran extremely smooth.

I want to examine one of their specific missions since I remember doing a double-take the first time I read it. Never had I played a mission where both players could complete the first objective! You can find a link to download the mission as a PDF. HERE.

Did you print it out yet? “Yes”

Good!

This is a prime example of how to present a mission correctly (in my opinion). It has a small fluff section, a section for mission special rules and game length, and an outline for the specific deployment. Note the picture of the deployment on the bottom right. This picture is absolutely necessary when you use different deployments such as the 3rd Ed(?) “triangles” , or if you alter a 5th Ed deployment like they did here. Also, it helps those like me who can’t remember what “pitched battle” means by game three cause your friends busted out the Jager early.

The Objectives are split into Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary sections, which I like. What stood out for me were the headings in parentheses. You knew the goal of the objective without having to really fish through a couple lines of text. The Objectives themselves aren’t too far fetched. We’ve all played victory points and objective markers.

I love interesting missions, but sometimes they can get too far outside the realm of 40K, and then you have an instance where The Mission defeated you, not The Opponent(I’ll expand on this in another post). However, this mission gave an interesting twist on target priority. You could spend time trying to kill your opponent’s two units, but at the same time you can’t neglect his other ones due to the fact the 2nd and 3rd Objectives are VPs and objective markers.

Having both players able to complete the Primary Objective was a new thing for me. At first glance, I was worried people would feed each other their two primary objective units, but in practice this was avoided due to Victory points. In my case my two units were a LR Crusader and Assault Termies. I wasn’t about to march those out to be killed; they were almost 500 points! The ability of both players to complete the primary objective also mitigated some differences between army power. Just because you had soft units didn’t mean you couldn’t put the boot to your opponent even though he squashed two of yours. You get 40 pts; he gets 20, everyone’s a winner! *kinda*.

Also notice that the secondary and tertiary objectives together are worth as much as the primary objective. I love this aspect of the mission. You can sometimes go up against an army that is an extreme “one-trick pony” who gets lucky with the primary mission objective being tailored to his strengths. Instead of going, “I’m boned!”, you can go and beat him on the secondary and tertiary objectives and still walk away on top. I ran into a 7 KP army with KPs as the primary objective (mine has about 15+ KP). Instead of panicking, I focused on winning the secondary and tertiary objectives when it became clear I couldn’t table him.

So all and all, I really enjoyed this mission and the Da Boyz GT, and I hope you do to. Even better, I hope to see some of you attend their GT in October 2010.

Cheers,
Greg (Saab)