New Edition – New Format

As we’ve hinted at over the past number of months, we’ve been working on an updated event format for 8th edition.  One focused on the things we have always taken great pride in – story-driven games of Warhammer 40,000.

We have made a lot of changes which we hope will give players a very enjoyable Narrative 40k experience.

The foremost change is to drop the ‘Tournament’ label.  Our signature events will no longer follow the ‘Swiss’ Tournament style. Ours will now be promoted as Narrative Events.  Players will be paired-up across factions to better support narrative play.

We’re also moving away from the conventional Matched Play Points format into new territory – Power Level will be the new standard for army selection – with a few restrictions to help ensure fairness.

Players will represent their army’s Faction and compete with other members of their Faction for a Best in Faction award.  However, they will never directly face each other across the table, due to the narrative nature of game pairings.

Scenarios will continue to be one of the things that makes our events unique.  With 8th edition, we have the opportunity to revisit all of our scenarios and give them some much needed streamlining – but also added twists with things like Stratagems, Warlord Traits, and Battlezones! Scenarios will also have their own Narrative Objectives for players to try and achieve in addition to the Primary Objective.  All in the name of good storytelling!

We’ve listened to our players asking for larger battles, and we expect armies to have a little more going for them with a 90 PL cap.  To help ensure that players get complete games in, we’ve brought the time limit for each round up to three hours.  Without the need to determine swiss-pairings each round, we’ll be able to have player pairings posted in a fraction of the time it required in the past.  So less time waiting and more time gaming!

We’re also making a change to the number of games.  For our upcoming Toronto event we will be doing five games – Three on the Saturday, and two on the Sunday – this will hopefully allow players (and us organizers) to wrap up the event at a more reasonable time to allow everyone to be present for awards and better allow us to tear-down in a reasonable time-frame to give us all a chance to visit over dinner and drinks afterwards.

While we still have plenty of work ahead of us to have everything ready for September, we wanted to share our new format with you all so you can be better prepared for what’s ahead. We are excited for what’s ahead and hope that everyone will try and approach our new format with an open mind and an expectation of a fun weekend of what we hope will be the best the hobby can offer!