5 Easy Ways to Play Warhammer 40K Competitively

So the word on the interwebs is (once again) that Warhammer 40K is ill-suited to be used as a competitive test of your skills against another opponent.

Admittedly, that isn’t the main focus of Warhammer 40K – and as long as there is such a thing as a “meta”, competitive 40K cannot exist out of the box (after all, there is no fair or unbiased way to test your skill at a game, as long as their is a meta-game around said game).

Still, if testing your skill against another opponent is what you want to do, whether as the main “mode” of playing 40K or just to change things up for a change, it’s actually fairly easy to do, as long as you get somebody to organise it and set some ground rules (which is obviously a given for tournaments).

Here are 5 ideas to make 40K a genuine competition of skill, which should be easy to do.

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#5 – Random Army Allocation

Every participant at the tournament writes a list and brings an army for the point costs set by the TO. All armies are given a number. Then, each game, players draw a random number from a hat and play with that army.

Skill and a profound knowledge of the game are almost certainly to weigh heavily in determining the winner in such a format.

The drawback, admittedly, is strangers playing with your miniatures, and you with the miniature of strangers. Probably a format better suited to local tournaments in a club with people you know, and not big conventions.

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#4 – Match Re-Match

A toned-down version of the above, which keeps your army in sight. In this format, each round consists of 2 games between the same opponents. In the first game you play your army. In the second game you swap armies with your opponent.

Not as elegant as the above, but it might ease peoples’ fears about their miniatures, as they can keep their eyes on their miniatures.

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#3 – Unbound Brothers

The new, 7th Edition actually offers some interesting options to level the playing field and thus create a more competitive Warhammer 40K event.

• First, all armies at the tournament are „unbound“, no battle-forged, formations or other bonuses of this kind apply.

• Second, all armies from all Codexes (Supplements, etc…) are considered to be Battle-Brothers.

Again, the result will be a leveling of relative army-strength, inevitably bringing players’ skill and knowledge of the game to the fore.

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#2 – One Codex To Rule Them All

An incredibly easy way to deal with the „problem“ of „external imbalance“ between different army books, is to do away with it.

Stage a tournament that only allows a single Codex, say Codex Space Marines, disallowing all other Codexes, Supplements, Dataslates, etc…

The result is similar to „Unbound Battle Brothers“ as everyone „draws from the same source“, but the source is much smaller and the test of skill that much harder.

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#1 – Mirror, Mirror

The greatest test fort he truly competitively minded, finally, wouldn’t narrow it down not just to one Codex, but to one army list, pre-set down to every piece of equipment. It does away with both “external imbalance” (see above) and (!) “internal imbalances”. What remains is pure skill (and a bit of dice-rolling).

Every match would be a perfect mirror-match. Admittedly, it is an extreme format that sidesteps a lot of what makes the hobby fun outside the competition.

However, as far as finding out how the best player is, there is no better format.

Z.