With Halloween fast approaching, I thought it would be fun to get the School Warhammer Club I run involved in some 40k themed festivities.
At the club, we are still playing 8th edition rules. Everyone at the club is still very new to playing the game, so 8th edition works well.
I wanted a game that they could all take part in and I was inspired by the MiniWarGaming’s Halloween Special from a few years back. You can check out the video here:
With the video as the main inspiration for the rules, I made some tweaks and changes to simplify it and hopefully make it run quicker. Here are the rules that I created for the game:
- Each player controls 2 Primaris Space Marines.
- They will face wave upon wave of pox walkers (in units of 4)
- The pox walkers will be carrying festive treats. When a unit is destroyed, the treat is dropped.
- Players can pick up the treat by moving through it.
- Pox walkers will be deployed 6″ on from the edge of the board from one of six locations determined by a dice roll. Numbered objective markers used as entry points.
- Destroyed pox walker units are returned to the board at the start of the pox walkers turn (rolling a d6 to determine where they are deployed)
- The pox walkers will move and advance towards the nearest player until they get within 12″. When within 12″ they will attempt a charge (if they have not advanced)
- The player’s objective is to embark on the waiting transport.
- The game size consisted of two gaming mats that came with the Conquest magazine (22.5″ x 69″).
- The first player to embark on the transport with at least 2 festive treats is the winner.
- To embark, the player must start their turn within 3″ of the transport.
- Players can only attack another player if that player is over halfway across the table.
- The transport is guarded by 3 Death Guard Space Marines. They act independently from each other and will only attack the closest player when the are within 12″ range.
- The plague marine champion will always supercharge his plasma gun.
- When a player’s force is destroyed, all festive treats are dropped and the models returned to their starting position.
As we were playing the game, I had to drop some of the above rules (such as pox walkers charging) as we needed to speed the game up and not have the player’s bogged down in pox walkers. This was due to us having less than an hour to get through the game as some players were late to the club.
Time was a major factor in this game as we ran out of it before the game reached its conclusion. Also the rule about attacking other players stymied their advance across the table as everyone was keen to attack other players but not to be attacked themselves!
I may have been a bit ambitious with what I thought we could achieve in the time we had, but in the end, all of the players had fun and all came away with some festive treats. No one made it to the transport (although no one really tried) and all 3 players killed the same amount of zombies. The result was declared as a draw.
Maybe after the October Half Term break, the players will want to give this another go, or maybe I’ll need to start planning for a certain jolly character (who wears a red coat and hat) to have his own themed game…
Table Standard 