The final action is Operate Hatchway , which unsurprisingly covers what happens when you open or close a hatchway. This one is performed at the end of the Move units step of your Movement phase and completes at the start of your Shooting phase, allowing you to walk forward, open a door, then shoot or charge through it in a subsequent phase. Players start each battle with 1 CP, and gain 1 CP at the start of each of their Command phases. CP can only be used on three Stratagems: Command Re-roll , Counter-Offensive , and Insane Bravery . These Stratagems are provided in the book but have rules that are identical to the Core Rulebook. No other Stratagems can be used. This truncated list really helps keep Boarding Actions games light when it comes to mental load and also helps prevent some of the more degenerate mechanics and combos that might otherwise destabilize the game from rearing their heads here. In our How to Paint Everything series we look at how to paint, well, everything, looking at different techniques and approaches along the way. Today we’re looking at how to paint the Gallowdark terrain used in Kill Team Into the Dark and Arks of Omen Boarding Actions games. I believe that my boarding actions terrain design is one the cheapest to print out there, and strikes a nice balance of printability, time and material savings, and nice aesthetic vibe.

That was not enough to prevent me from achieving objective 1 – build these on the Friday, ready for gaming on Saturday. The finished product is very satisfying, with the design ensuring that each part feels solid with a decent weight to it. Next up – creating a table. Assembling a Map Also, of course, there is a whole bunch of walls and other scenery to help set the Space Hulk scene.

The Price

However, as Warhammer 40,000 is gearing up to what seems like a new edition of the game through a series of Arks of Omen campaign books, Games Workshop has launched a new way to play Warhammer 40,000 that sits between the big battles of Warhammer 40,000 and the small skirmishes of Kill Team. It’s called 40k Boarding Actions, and it lets you play small scale encounters where a handful of units fight another handful of units like a mini version of Warhammer 40,000, but it’s all taking place inside huge space hulks in narrow corridors.

Thanks to the pillar-base indentation, once you’ve put it together it’s also pretty stable, and combining that with the satisfying weight that the walls have means that, while the layout will obviously be slightly more vulnerable to drifting a bit than with solid plastic, it’s barely a concern. The fact that the kit is fully modular rather than coming with some double-wall pieces or specificly directed columns also makes it super easy to put together as a team – no worry about grabbing specific parts, just add walls and pillars to follow the guidelines. Gaming Mix the Burnt Umber 50/50 with water, and slop this all over the model. The more water you use, the less dirty the terrain will look, so feel free to play around with this ratio. This gets messy, so do this over a lunch tray or something similar (bonus: the tray will catch excess paint dripping off the model, which you can re-apply to later pieces).You've got a lot of it to paint and drybrushing and airbrush work is going to be your friend. This could be a fun alternative to the plastic terrain made available by Games Workshop. As the mainline narrative expansion, we’ve been hearing about this new series for a while, so its exciting to finally know the first book is coming! Boarding Actions Terrain Set The set has been designed to match the dimensions and scale of both Arks Of Omen and Boarding Actions as well as the Gallowdark set for Kill Team. That means you could set these up on the official boards or on an alternative surface (bring forth the wipe-clean boards!) and they should work out nicely.

Edge of Silence • War Zone Charadon ( Act I • Act II) • War Zone Octarius ( Book I • Book II) • War Zone Nachmund ( Vigilus Alone • Rift War) • Crusade ( Beyond the Veil • Plague Purge • Amidst the Ashes • Containment • Catastrophe • Wars of Faith) • Arks of Omen ( Abaddon • Angron • Vashtorr • Farsight • The Lion) Few can withstand the might of the Salamanders’ flamestorm-wielding Aggressors and melta-armed Eradicators, especially when pinned by round after round of withering bolter fire from twenty Intercessors. This troop-heavy Warforged Strike Force is led by the mighty warrior Adrax Agatone, and also features four Salamander upgrade sprues and transfer sheets for outfitting your sons of Nocturne.** White Scars: Storm of Chogoris Let’s start with what is simultaneously the most important and most limiting factor to Boarding Action missions: The Terrain. Everything here is designed around using the Board Actions terrain set, from the rules for interacting with doors to the missions themselves. they all have very specific guidelines for each piece of terrain and how the boards should be laid out for your games. For example, this is the deployment map for the mission Power Struggle, which sees players attempting to gain control of linked power nodes:

Crab-Stuffed Mushroom’s Terrain

Then we played some games – Liam proceeding to comprehensively own both me and Scott across a couple of rounds, with my poor Necrons getting shot to death by Dire Avengers and the White Scars outwitted on objectives. This section is mostly just an excuse to dump action shots below: Boarding Actions can only be played using the specific Boarding Action missions found in the Arks of Omen books and on the Boarding Actions battlefields you can build with either the official terrain set or with Kill Team terrain from the Into the Dark season. Setup for these missions are quite different from 40K missions, both because of the special indoors terrain layout and the replacement of one big deployment zone for each player with several entry zones for each player in which you can place a unit at a time. From the first battle round onwards, a Reinforcement Step lets you field the units you have in reserve into those entry zones. As well as spinning an epic yarn, Arks of Omen: Abaddon lets you take part in the saga of the Balefleets by introducing rules and missions for Boarding Actions – a whole new way to play Warhammer 40,000, offering fast-paced games set within the confines of voidcraft, space hulks, and orbital stations. I recommend varnishing the model again before this next step to avoid re-activating the oil wash that you applied previously. The presence of an open Hatchway can change Engagement Range. If the shortest path between two models passes through an open Hatchway then the models are considered to be in Engagement Range if they are within 2” of each other. This can lead to a unit opening a door and suddenly finding itself in Engagement range!

Things are looking good but now it’s time to make them gross and weathered, which is by far my favorite part. I basically paint the bottom half of the walls with Typhus Corrosion technical paint, which goes on dark brown and dries with a bit of grit in it. It’s great on its own but where it really shines is when you drybrush it with Ryza Rust, a bright orange dry paint. I hit the steel portions of the walls with a light drybrush of Ryza and it gives me the wonderful layered orange rust look you see above. Rob: Yeah I can see this being used as a set of side missions in a Crusade campaign, and it’s a much better 500-point start to a campaign in terms of balance and play experience. It’s something we’re planning to use and work into our upcoming global crusade campaign. Boarding Action Missions Beanith: My best guess is the Angron book will contain the Faction-specific content and rules for Chaos Marines, Space Marines & Imperium; Vashtorr will cover Chaos Daemons, Admech and probably have the Necrons shoehorned in somehow. The 4th book is unnamed but ‘will be a distinctly xenos affair’, which I assume is code for it will be some horrific Xenos mashed burrito. Assuming you have the terrain set available, the game board consists of two game boards laid side by side to create a long battlefield area. The terrain is the same system as provided by Into the Dark , consisting of columns, walls, and hatchways. The system is intended to be flexible and you do not want to glue the pieces into subassemblies, as all of the missions specify the board layout down to the position of individual wall section. Setup is very explicit about using the provided game board, which features a template where columns and walls can be located in a grid-like pattern. Each square that is formed by this grid is referred to as a Zone.Rob: There’s a really cool bit of lore in here that talks about the difficulty actually leading the chaos legions, with Abaddon musing about the difficulty of managing a bunch of disparate warbands. It’s a cool setup for the Warmaster’s headspace as he figures out his next steps. When selecting the targets of a charge, if the charging unit or the potential target are wholly within a Lighting Area that has the lights off: All measurements are done between the closest points of the bases of the models being measured, but measurements cannot be made through Walls or closed Hatchways. Instead a path must be drawn around those terrain features, and if it is impossible to draw a path then the distance between the models is considered to be infinite.