40k Rampant

 

I am a massive fan of the Osprey Games line. They have given us popular gems such as the Frostgrave franchise, and its less known but possibly superior sci fi version Stargrave. Another big win for them have been the rampant series of games. I first looked at Lion Rampant circa 2015 when I was totally over the hot mess of 40k 6th/7th edition and looking for new ways to push my little toy men around tabletop battlefields. I wasn't quite ready yet for rules lite, elegant rulesets like the rampant system but I still liked what I saw and filed it away in my mental archives. 

Fast forward to now and while I love the 41st millennium and all things grim and dark the rules are again a hot, steaming pile. the game has become both so mind bogglingly convoluted and mercilessly killy that it is nigh unplayable and unenjoyable respectively. I find myself playing games of 9th edition which by the way is the tightest core rules the game has ever had and ending them mentally exhausted from trying to remember: faction abilities, subfaction abilities, mono-faction abilities, abilities from the quarterly balance dataslate, strategems, relics, warlord traits, dataslates, etc.......

I have remarked to people I play with that I expect each player to make at least a couple mistakes throughout the game because it is nearly impossible to keep everything straight and these honest mistakes tend to hurt the player as often as the opponent. On the bright side many of these mistakes don't matter as units possess such absurd lethality that the majority of attacks obliterate everything they are pointed at such as that the games tend to hinge more on who gets the first knockout punch in first rather than the back and forth that I'm hungry for.

Now I get it, plenty of people are totes fine with this. "But that is the tactics" (of course it is) or "that is kind of realistic" (it most certainly isn't) and cool, drink up. I however find that the massive cognitive load and ludicrous lethality keep me from engrossing myself in the narrative of my tiny plastic and metal warriors.

I was terrifically excited when I saw this previewed around the end of summer on one of the myriad of online gaming websites or subreddits I peruse and immediately pre-ordered it. When it arrived I pitched it to my primary wargame partner and we resolved to give it a shot. We had been playing a more and more heavily houseruled version of 40k lately as a break from the superlative onepagerules.com rulesets.

This simply does not disappoint. It is highly abstracted and gives a set of generic unit types such as light infantry, heavy infantry, fighting vehicle, yada yada. These types have tons of options and "xenos powers" that you can use to fine tune them to match the feel of whatever you want to send to battle. I have yet to make an honest attempt at any 40k unit that I would consider classically 40k (meaning from the glory days of 4th-5th edition) that you can't make a satisfying facsimile for. You could even shoehorn in knights as totally tricked out fighting vehicles (although they might not feel right to a knight loving player but I'll happily go into why knights don't belong in 40k in some other blog post). 

I just think that anyone that is sick of the mental exhaustion that comes with playing a game of 9th edition 40k or that is tired of their unit of genetically engineered super dudes getting casually shot to oblivion by a unit of over-tuned spess dorfs might want to check out these top notch rules. Making up your own unit stats is a big part of the fun  so I think I'll be doing that just for kicks over the next couple weeks and post some representations of what I feel the 40k factions should look like to my google drive.