One-Pager

I bought a bag of soldier minis while browsing Value Village a couple of weeks ago. All I knew was they were soldiers and that it was a good price for minis. As a bonus (maybe) they were all painted. Got them home and found out that they are from the Warhammer 40K line; Cadian Imperial Guards apparently. WH40K seems to be the common abbreviation, so I'll just continue on that.

I looked into finding out more about the WH40K universe 'cause, you know, I now own a piece of it. I'd heard of it, of course, and knew that it involved space marines, but that was about all. I found the wiki pages for the game and I read a little about the game/story. The back story is interesting, but for a few reasons, some of which I can't even identify yet, I just kind of got turned off. Maybe it's too similar to Starship Troopers, a movie I only saw the first part of and didn't care if I ever finished. Maybe it's all the skulls. Maybe it's the premise of the human civilization/war machine being modeled as a grotesque derivative of the Roman Catholic Church (maybe it's some kind of subtle satire about making war into a religion). Probably some combination including all three and a few other things.

I do like the Spaceships designed to look like the fusion of a Gothic cathedral and a Roman trireme. And there was one of those in the bag too. So it got transferred to live with my scratch-built space fleet.

Of course, another reason not to get involved in the WH40K scene is the cost. Having read the rumours and being curious, I took a look at ebay prices and found that if I were interested, I could get a good WH40K army for about the same amount I spent on my last car purchase. After seeing this, I am now considering trying to sell the minis and use the money to get some that fit a theme that I am more interested in. But, even if I don't unload them, they are at least generic enough to use as any kind of modern/futuristic army.

In the meantime, I figured I should at least try out some game or other with these soldier dudes. So in searching around for some simple rules, I got directed to One Page Rules, a site listing a few rule sets that take up only one page. Other game aides like faction tables and unit strength tables are included in additional pages, but their use in a given game is obviously conditional or optional. Coincidentally, a couple of the games are written with WH40K in mind. I downloaded three rule sets: One Page Fantasy, One Page Skirmish, and One Page Warstuff.

The other two being fantasy-based entries, I printed off Warstuff as the rule set to try out. Sorry, no pictures. It was getting late and I wanted to play.

This was a solo play-through. A few of the dudes were painted grey and the rest were green, so I chose three from each colour to face off in my arena. I assigned each model a number (1-6; kept track with a die beside each model) and used cards numbered 1-6 to decide movement order. Each team consisted of two riflemen and one sergeant. In this rule set, riflemen shoot long range and sergeants shoot short range and have a leadership ability which gives the chance to give up to three near-by friendlies a free turn. There are a number of special abilities listed and they take up roughly half the page of rules, so you know this is a simple game to play.

Here is my "arena":

The Grey side lost, mainly due to a leadership bonus for Green on the second turn that took out the Grey sergeant. I don't remember much of the rest of the plays, but it was fun. I'll have to try it again. And maybe I'll see if Jeanette wants to play.