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 command assets are 70% of the reason you're buying this box, since it's possible to find a PDF of the rules.
Less essentially you might want to pick up some movement trays, as infantry are moved around in groups (usually bases of 5 guys). Games Workshop did some good see-through plastic ones that work great straight out of the box for 25mm and 32mm bases, and there's lots of MDF available from other suppliers if you prefer to texture them in line with your basing scheme, although obviously that requires effort.
The rules for your units are not in the rulebook, but in PDFs - it's generally possible to find these online. Currently you can actually download them directly from Warhammer40000.com. While you can CTRL+F your way to any given datasheet, I actually found that this is very inefficient, so I made my own digital summary. More on that below.
A big-ass table
The other thing you'll need is a big enough table. I suspect this is the toughest barrier to entry. I'm very fortunate in that with a bit of furniture rearranging I can fit two 6'x4' tables next to each other in my living room, making one 6'x8' table - a pretty ideal size for this kind of game.
 |
| Yesterday's battlefield, pictured as Andy starts deploying his Necrons against the combined might of my Chimeras (and I suppose the other units required to look on and clap while the Chimeras get all the work done). |
Why's it better than just playing a big 40K game?
Warhammer 40K is complex enough that as soon as your game goes past 2,000 points a side, you're in for the long haul. The Apocalypse ruleset won't work properly at anything less than 3,000 points a side (although the points are different in Apocalypse - it uses the Power Levels familiar to players of 8th and 9th edition 40K). It's the ruleset for people excited to execute big manoeuvres with squadrons of little tanks. You can have titanic units in this game and have them be just one of your detachments, making them feel more contextualised and less of a liability than in a regular game of 40K.
This is only possible because the rules are very different to Warhammer 40K. Each side's army is split into detachments, and during the course of five rounds, each side takes it in turns to move and fight with individual detachments. Essentially it's alternating activations, so you're never idle for long. A key difference is that damage is resolved at the end of the round, as the violence is happening simultaneously, and this means your favourite toy will get to do its thing at least once, regardless of how hard the enemy go after it. It also means that, beyond determining whether an enemy unit is LIGHT (i.e. infantry/beasts/swarms) or HEAVY (vehicles/monsters), you don't need to know your opponent's rules to shoot at them. You just roll to hit, then look up your own weapon's Strength Against Personnel (SAP) or Strength Against Tanks (SAT) to figure out what you need to roll. The resilience of the unit only becomes relevant during the Damage phase at the end of the round, where the unit's owner will make saving throws and apply damage markers. Not needing to get information out of your opponent helps speed things up considerably.
For all its elegant design, it's not perfect. A game this ambitious will inevitably have balance issues given that it didn't get much post-release support. There's also the added trouble of units that have been released since the game was written. The Fundamalleus crew have endeavoured to keep it alive by making Battlescribe-compatible data available for all units, including new ones, but this data is understandably not always complete or perfect, so you should expect to do a little rules legwork yourself for newer units. It's easy enough to figure out stats and costs from context. The Fundamalleus data had nothing for Desolation Squads, for example, so I just took the Devastator Squad entry, added on a wound (since Primaris units get two wounds), and homogenised their weapons into regular missile launchers. I then bumped up the cost by a few power levels, and job's a good'un.
How have our games gone so far?
I've played a couple of tiny test games and two proper games so far. In the first game, I took on Harvey's Night Lords and Andy's Chaos Knights and Alpha Legion. We all had fun, but felt the game was barely big enough to function (we were playing at something like Power Level 150 per side).
For our game yesterday we jumped it up to 274 a side (as determined by what Andy's Necrons could bring to bear against my Imperial Guard and Tom's Raven Guard). Here's what that gets you:
Raven Guard (split into 2 battalion detachments)
Captain
Lieutenant
15 Intercessors
10 Heavy Intercessors
10 Infiltrators
3 Aggressors
5 Hellblasters
5 Devastators
1 Redemptor Dreadnought
1 Storm Speeder
1 Gladiator Lancer
Imperial Guard mechanised infantry (in a battalion detachment)
Platoon commander & command squad in Chimera
4x Infantry Squads in Chimeras
Imperial Guard tanks (in a spearhead detachment)
1 Leman Russ Demolisher Tank Commander
2 Leman Russ Demolishers
1 Leman Russ Tank Commander
2 Leman Russ Battle Tanks
Imperial Guard artillery tanks (in a spearhead detachment)
3 Basilisks
Imperial Guard super-heavy auxiliary detachment
1 Baneblade
It's a lot of tank hulls, but it's not a mind-blowing amount of stuff. As the title of this post suggests, Andy brought four C'Tan Shards and had them hover across the midfield like a team of horrifying superheroes. It was cool as hell, and when they started carving tanks in half with energy beams Tom and I were fully into lobbing the kitchen sink at them.
 |
| FIRE AT WILL! |
Much as we played very slowly, since we were still learning the rules and - being middle aged - utterly failed to remember them from the game we'd played months previously, we came away from it thinking that each side having a power level of 300 would make for a great game. I could see bigger games than that being great, but we'd need to be more practised to speed up first. We started too late in the day to finish, but by the end of 3 highly entertaining rounds, the Necrons had taken a lot of punishment but had racked up a big lead on points.
 |
| Here you can see Andy's main assault on our left flank. The Raven Guard were dug in and held on tenaciously. You can see blast markers on the Necrons, mostly caused by an orbital bombardment that Tom called in on the Necrons during approach. In the distance you can also see the many blast markers Andy deluged the Baneblade with; suffice to say it did not survive turn two, but it felt great to see it on the table hammering away at nightmare robots. |
Things we've learned
Make a summary sheet for your dudes
Bouncing around the PDFs is very time intensive, and actually a lot of data is repeated. Almost all Primaris Space Marine units have the same stat line, so consolidating those and having a weapons summary beneath it makes for much faster reference material mid-game. Here's a screengrab from one small part of the roster I made for myself in Google Sheets:
This one entry covers Intercessors, Reivers, Hellblasters, Desolators, Infernus Marines, Infiltrators, and Eliminators. That's a lot of different pages in the original PDF.
 |
| Here's the roster section - it's tall and thin because it's formatted to fit well on a smartphone screen. Below this is a whole load of Imperial Guard stuff. When I tick a unit, it automatically deducts that unit's power level from the 'unused power' box at the top. All the blue hyperlinks go to the relevant tab for that unit's rules. There's only 9 tabs in the sheet: the roster, 5 for the marines, and 3 for my Imperial Guard. |
I won't lie, it took me quite a while to make a summary sheet that enables me to add up my power level and have hyperlinks to all the relevant rules, but it proved invaluable during the game, and will be there the next time I need it. If you'd like to see what I made, you can find it here. To make your own copy, go to file>make a copy.
 |
| The Raven Guard instinctively forming a battle pile despite themselves (I'm kidding, this was all about getting line of sight to the C'Tan Shards). |
 |
| The Ankran 107th Mechanised Infantry surge forwards to overwhelm the Necron Warmaster and his bodyguard of warriors (I made a lot of pewpew noises when the lasguns went off). Also, and this is vital news, the command squad put a blast marker on the C'Tan Shard made of fire by using a heavy flamer. Don't question the physics. |
Get your command asset deck sorted before the game
One step you need to do before the game is pick 30 from the 300ish command asset cards. There's a bit of reading and sifting, and in a way this is almost a part of the list construction part of the game, and could easily be done ahead of time so that you can start rolling dice that much faster.
Use timers
It's a faster more efficient game but still painfully slow when there's team chats to be had. Setting a timer limit would make a huge difference, and would be worth trying. You could do it per detachment, but I suspect the real move would be, say, 30 minutes for your turn in total, so you pause your timer during your opponent's activations.
Don't get me wrong, the main objective is to have a pretty table and hang out with my friends, but for that reason I'd also suggest a 15 minute tea break at the end of each round.
What I'd like to do next time
I want to play more team games, and soon enough that I internalise the rules a little better. But also I have so much Imperial and Ork nonsense that I'm really eager to play a game 1-on-1 and use more of my own toys, because I am a princess, and that's what princesses do. Happily, everyone in our group who's tried this ruleset so far has come away wanting more of it, so I feel I won't be short of opponents.
Comments
Post a Comment