Playtest Tuesday’s! Maelstrom of War: Cleanse & Control
Hello ladies and gentlemen!
As you may be aware, Derp Studios has recently announced the existence of the Warhammer 40,000: Tactical Objectives App, to be released Q3 2015 on Apple, Android and Windows Phone app stores.
Every Tuesday since the announcement of the app, we’ve decided to field test the beta version (this thing is constantly getting polished) in Warhammer 40,000 tabletop battles. Each week my Tau Empire (may as well call them Derp Empire, since they fight for the Greater Good of Mother Derp at the moment!) will go up against different opponents playing different missions and faction decks.
We do have several social media channels so keeping all of them up to date can be a challenge, so we’ll try our best to keep these pages up to date!
So without further ado!
Maelstrom of War: Cleanse and Control
Tau Empire vs Necrons
Here we go (insert a WAAAGH if applicable)! The first ever field test of the Warhammer 40,000: Tactical Objectives App, at Derp Studio’s local wargaming club Pork Chop Gaming!
Tonight it will be my Tau Empire going toe to toe against my good friend Rob’s Necrons!Rob will be using his physical copy of his Necron Tactical Objectives and I shall be using the regular Maelstrom deck within the app.What you can see on the tablet below (Tesco HUDL if anyone is wondering!) is the deck select screen.
You can swipe along to get to the deck of your choice to either purchase/play that deck. However, like I mentioned earlier, I’ll be using the Regular Tactical Objectives, since Tau Empire don’t have their own deck (yet?).
So to kick it all off, we’ll go with the bog standard “Cleanse and Control” mission, where we draw upto 3 cards each turn and score as many objectives as possible. The screenshot below has buttons for missions 1 – 6 within the Maelstrom of War mission table (as titled in the top left hand corner). There is the option to go back to deck select as well. Instead of pressing the buttons to “jump to” a mission, you can also swipe your way across. Last but not least, you can randomise what mission you want to play. However for the purpose of this series of blog posts we will be going through each mission individually.
Once our deck and mission are selected, we move swiftly onto the play screen. As you can see, in the top left the the name of the mission is displayed clearly. This also doubles up as a menu that has options of displaying useful information about the mission, restarting the game and quitting the game back to the apps home screen. Along the top of the screen we have our important information. Starting from the left we have our secondary objectives, these buttons can be toggled and light up when pressed and also awarding the player with a victory point for First Blood, Line Breaker and Slay the Warlord in any order or combination.
In the top right we have a Victory Points AND turn counter, followed by the next turn button. Upon clicking Next turn, a dialogue asking you to confirm will appear and if you don’t have 3 cards, then the app will draw upto 3 cards at random for you automatically at the start of your next turn. Once you accept this there is no going back! You might be wondering what the “You Rolled:” box is for. Sometimes you will come across Tactical Objectives that offer more than one points value such as 1 or D3 or 1, 3 or D3+3 etc. The “You Rolled:” box tells the player what they scored on the D3 or D3+3 dice rolls (they are truly randomly generated numbers, we like to keep things fair!).
If we avert our eyes to the bottom of the play screen we see the Discard and Achieve buttons. Players can tap a card to enlarge it and choose to achieve or discard or drag the card onto the icon. Discarding simply gets rid of the card (prompting a confirmation dialogue). The same applies with achieving an objective, only sometimes you are presented with the option of how many points you have scored on that objective (we hope you play fair with this as only you and your opponent know how much you’ve scored, the app isn’t that clever!).
You might also notice that these screenshots contain completely different turn one objectives…that’s because I forgot to screenshot what I had during the battle.
There are a few minor graphical errors that we are aware of, but as you can see, the screenshots clearly state it’s a development build so it won’t be perfect just yet! Now in terms of the actual battle, the Necrons were a lot faster than I thought. I mean I though Tau were pretty mobile but these Necrons bum rushed me with scarabs and wraiths and tore me apart. Below is a photograph of the board and on it is an entire unit I hadn’t had chance to put away in my case just yet as well. You will also notice my Riptide in close combat. We can all guess how that turned out. Anyone who’s thinking “that massive mech would surely win!?” think again!
Necrons – 10 Tau – 1
