As someone with a great deal of history around Warhammer, I don’t get to play it very often. Tonight I managed to do exactly that when I bounced dice with a good friend trying out the new Boarding Actions format. My Leagues of Votann force covered the decks with blood against their Adeptus Mechanicus enemies. They were victorious, but more because of my opponent’s generosity in pointing out rules interactions and lines of play than my supreme generalship. Kinfolk of the Match was my Grimnyr who incinerated a good chunk of the opposition with her mind bullets.
My thoughts on Boarding Actions are very positive. The format is much more manageable than a full game of Warhammer 40,000, both in terms of the length and size of the games and the amount of information a competent commander has to cram into their head. I’d like to play more games, both of Boarding Actions and other smaller-scale miniatures games, including some more Marvel Crisis Protocol which particularly suits my tastes.
I feel the only thing really missing from Boarding Actions is a sort of narrative element where units open a door to a previously sealed section of spacecraft, only to be confronted by something horrible, dramatic and possibly fatal. Mixing an unfolding story with a traditional objectives-based wargame seems a rich vein of design space to mine.