The Beard Bunker

They say a balanced game is good for both competitive and narrative players. This is true, conceptually, but as with all things it depends on the execution. With frequent balance updates, Games Workshop’s design studio have achieved an incredibly tight win/loss ratio across Warhammer 40,000's many factions. Moreover they have been tweaking individual units that see too much or too little time on the table. It’s an incredible effort entirely alien to the 40K of yesteryear, and in general I think it's great. Unfortunately win/loss rates and the frequency with which certain units appear in tournament lists are an incomplete picture. There’s no avoiding the fact that almost all the available data comes from the tournament circuit, so Games Workshop are in a tricky position, but I think one of the most consistent areas where I find myself disagreeing with their approach to balancing the game is when something is balanced at the expense of immersion. Take Space Marine Intercessors. ...

We have a guest post for you today from Pete, one of our group's newest nerds. He first featured in our 2024 roundup , and has since been hard at work bringing his Blood Angels up to 1,000 fully armed and operational points. Since his army looks repugnantly good for his first foray into painting miniatures, I asked him if he'd be up for sharing his progress here on the Bunker, and to my delight, he agreed! Over to Pete. There’s a moment in every hobbyist’s journey when the pile of plastic stops looking like a mountain to climb and starts looking like, well, an army. For me, that moment came as I finally hit 1,000 points of Blood Angels, led by Captain Matthias Virelan of the Blood Angels 2nd Company, and wondering how on Terra I’d actually managed to get there.  It didn’t happen in a burst of hobby productivity or a caffeine-fueled painting weekend (friends know caffeine and I are not on speaking terms). It happened slowly, glacially even, over countless ‘just one more highligh...

The Beard Bunker is all about narrative wargaming.  But the games we play ourselves are not the only source of 40k narrative, GW has been making major bank from our collective narrative thirst for decades in the from of Black Library publishing.  That said, and don’t tell my teenage self this, but a lot of what they publish isn’t actually that good.  I think my teenage self and people like me are pretty much their core audience, nerds with more enthusiasm than taste.  A lot of what BL publish can be summed up as “Bolter Porn”, i.e. exciting descriptions of battles and gunfire and big damn heroes gurning and killing aliens.  Unfortunately it is, in my opinion, not actually all that interesting.  Once you’ve read a few you’ve read them all. Contrawise, BL do have some extremely good authors working for them, as well as some decently mediocre, and have published some really excellent books.  The problem of course is always sorting the wheat from the chaff...

When Krug was a young ork, a runtherd took him into Mek City to see the Goff Parade. He said, "Krug, when you grow up, will you be a really fighty Goff boy, a killer of our foes?" Krug said, "Yeah course." "Good lad." 'Parade' was doing some heavy lifting, as words go. Mostly it was a bunch of Stormboy yoofs marching down the road in lines in their silly polished boots, with onlooking orks lobbing stuff at them to see how distractible they were. But the best bit of the whole thing, as far as young Krug was concerned, was the energy of so many orks in one place. He'd come out of the ground way out beyond Vulcha Cliffs. There weren't a whole lot of ladz out that way. Being here, in the city, filled him with something. Something that needed to get out. And it did. Legend has it that Krug spontaneously vomited so much green energy out of his mouth that it torched a whole mob of Stormboyz, which inevitably prompted their mates to come over with ...

One wouldn't expect the coming of the apocalypse to be something that could just pass you by, but judging by the swift disappearance of 2019's ruleset for Warhammer 40,000 Apocalypse , that's exactly what happened. A number of reasons naturally suggest themselves, and it's not without its issues, but having now played a handful of Apocalypse games I can tell you this much: my fellow players and I are having a lot of fun. What is Apocalypse? It's a ruleset for fighting bigger battles on bigger tables with your 40K minis. You can make bigger armies by forming into teams, or by painting a ton of little dudes yourself. Or both. There's a fairly solid overview on Goonhammer from when it came out. Is it even possible to get a copy? What do I need? The rules We've found it's still pretty easy to get your hands on a copy of the full set on eBay. The set includes a rulebook, command asset cards, gaming tokens, and all the dice you need to play. The tokens and co...

Populating an army with characters who have names and personalities really brings miniature battles to life for me. But five years into using my Cobalt Scions Space Marines on the regular, it was starting to strain credulity that none of those characters had popped their clogs. Reasons not to kill off characters I will always be reluctant to kill off characters who have faces. I'd have to remove the head and paint a new face if I wanted to keep using the mini. I'm really proud of some of those faces. Then there's the characters, like First Sergeant Tyvus, who are helmeted but have their names lovingly painted onto their armour. Plus of course there's a question of how many emotionally distinct characters I can write for the same group of marines, and every time someone dies, I have to come up with something new. Now that there's a sergeant for all ten squads of the Third Company, plus all the command staff, there's a lot of individuals running around. Side note:...