Life moves pretty fast, and so do leaks; we had about 36 hours of fun with the dodgy French translations before some kind soul leaked the full English battleplans, and I’m still none the wiser about how AI managed to go from “Malédiction de la Rogne” to “Curse of the Bitch”. That’s not what Rogne means.

Anyway. Today we’ll run through the Table 2 Battleplans, having a think about what each of them asks of your army. Part One started off with some general themes that you’ll see across the missions, and I won’t repeat that here, so shall we get into it?

Battleplan 7: Warped Ruins

Scoring is a pretty straightforward 3-3-4 VPs for holding One-Pair-More and the hook is that each round, one more terrain piece catches fire (Underdog chooses which). The flames leap from one terrain feature to the next (you have to pick one within 12″ and they have to be set up to facilitate that) which is pretty cinematic, with more and more of the board catching fire while the game progresses. Burning terrain damages every unit nearby: D3 mortals (non-shitty) within 6″ (not wholly).

I really like this one for the emergent narrative as the board progressively takes a’had¹, while the vanilla scoring keeps it competitive too. An elegant and inobtrusive way to weave some story into a mission that at heart offers a very pure Matched Play experience.

Battleplan 8: Curse of the Gnaw

Urgh, we’ve got our first full-on Jenga-style deployment. I hate this shit. 20 minutes of dicking around with measuring sticks to lay out not only the shape of your own zone, but THREE separate sets of 9″ bubbles from your opponent’s. Maybe I’m getting old², but whenever we roll up one of these missions for a casual local game, we just fuck it off and reroll a different one.

I suppose I’ll occasionally be forced to play this at events, so I’d best get my head around it. 3-3-4 for holding the Red, the Yellow and More is pretty simple and will drive you towards a smash-up in the middle. Since you probably need to hold both centre objectives to hold More, you might find situations where it takes a few rounds before you can push your opponent off theirs, and Primary scoring in total ends up lower than normal as a result. I think it’ll be quite common to dump an Anvil or two on the centre and push hard on one of the flanks, so there are a couple of subtle knock-on effects from needing More in a mission with an even number of Primaries.

We’ve got more book-keeping going on here (a major theme of this GHB) with a stacking “Instability Level”: every time either player tries to activate a POP, it ticks up by one to a maximum of six (which screams out to be tracked on a dice³). And then the Underdog can pick an objective and make every unit nearby take damage equal to the Instability (so up to 6 mortals on every unit if you’ve let the Instability slow-cook). Again that’s quite interesting because it gives both players some degree of agency over how much the potential damage builds up; so if you’re less likely to be the Underdog (for instance if you’re on for the double), you might choose not to activate a POP and slow down the damage.

Or both players might just activate every POP at every opportunity, just to see the damage build up really quickly and see what happens.

Outside of the janky deployment zones, I like this one: there’s a bit going on and it’ll create some interesting decision points and stories.

Battleplan 9: Seize the Embers

Whyyyyyyyyyy 😭

Won’t somebody please think of the deployment? It’s not fun, it’s a chore to get out of the way before the actual fun begins, and these Tetris deployments just give us extra chores.

Once you get past that, this is a full-on narrative battleplan with Matched Play trappings. What you’re doing is collecting a “Nugget” for holding one of the Yellow objectives, then the next turn, you can cash it in at a Red objective for 3 VPs.

A couple of things to note:

• In the first round it’s too early to have cashed in a Nugget, so you get 3 VPs for holding 2+ Objectives instead
• You can only do Nugget stuff on your own turn, so grabbing + cashing in across a Double could partially offset the “No Battle Tactics” penalty from taking the Double
• You can’t teleport to the Red if you want to cash in your Nugget (no setups)
• Underdog gets a free 6″ move after picking up a Nugget, to help them get closer to the Red, ready to cash it in next turn
• Since you need to collect + cash in across two turns, anyone holding a Nugget will have a massive target on their head on your opponent’s turn, but also for things like Covering Fire
• Stonks on shooting for targeting Nugget holders? Probably. By the same standard, it might also be worth putting the Nuggets on anyone who has protection from shooting
• Unit can’t use Power Through when they’re holding a Nugget (that free 6″ move is instead of)
• Any other End of Turn moves that can help you get to the Red will come to the fore: Soggy Sporesplattas spring to mind, although they are comically fragile and might well be going away anyway. Just one piece of tech to keep an eye out for
• Cashing in the Nugget is Once Per Turn (Army) but picking one up is not. So presumably you, the player, can pick up multiple units in a given turn for Search the Ruin (and potentially scooch around 6″ with all of them)? The fact that they’ve gone out of their way to make them different, and specify (Army) only on Back to Base Camp, suggests that’s probably intentional 🤷‍♂️.

Now with all of that said: is the whole Nugget mini game a trap? Maybe. You can still score 10 in the first round just by holding One-Two-More, and in all other rounds you can score 7 by holding One and More, plus everything you get from VPs. It’s maximum 12 VPs from Nuggets (from 80 total) so while you do need to go after them, just make sure you don’t get tunnel vision and pour all your energy into chasing rainbows. I suspect this mission will still quite often be won in practice by just smashing the shit out of your opponent and walking onto objectives, as is so often the case in modern AOS.

Battleplan 10: Treacherous Ground

There’s a lot of talk about “Stable” objectives in this one, and the short version is that you can only score VPs on Stable objectives (it’s just your basic One-Two-More for holding Stable objectives). But while non-Stable objectives are not active for scoring Primary VPs, the wording to me looks like you’ll still be able to control them for the purpose of Battle Tactics.

I had to ready the wording for how you switch them on an off a couple of times to get my head around it:

Violent Tremor seems to assume that one will be Stable and the other not – and of course, that will be the case, because the pairs are side by side in each deployment zone. So as soon as you use Tread Carefully at the start of the game, one of that pair is Stable and the other not; then the Underdog gets to flip them over (either theirs or their opponent’s).

So at any point in time, 4 of 6 objectives are Stable (including both objectives on the centre line and one in either deployment). The objectives are quite spread out and with the Stable ones jumping around, I think this mission has a lot of value in any event pack, because so many others have their centre of gravity towards the middle.

Battleplan 11: Escape from the Coast

We’re removing objectives again! Yesssssss. Always a big fan of the rolling puzzle that creates. Battleplan 3 Ash Avalanche has that too, and if I was drafting up a tournament pack this weekend, I’d probably include one or the other.

Classic One-Two-More scoring and the Underdog gets to remove one of the Yellow or Black objectives, so it’s another one with massive incentive to be Underdog.

This is weird deployment done right: creating that valley in the middle where all the VPs sit (until they don’t) is cool and cinematic, but because it doesn’t create multiple points of contact between red and blue sections of the board, you’re not dicking around with measuring a bunch of 9″ zones. It’s an interesting question how much you devote to the thin strips when those objectives might disappear mid-game too. I like it.

Battleplan 12: Power of the Realms

Scoring is weighted towards the one Primary objective, which starts out at the Yellow, and the Underdog can switch it up:

The Underdog has to control a POP to switch the Primary, and the one they pick effectively has to be on the same side of the board as that POP. There’s 3 VPs for holding the Primary, so similar to that whole Nuggets thing, it definitely matters – but it’s hardly the only thing that matters.

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WWPD?

Let’s close it out by cooking up a 5-mission pack for a GT, if I was hosting one this weekend.

My criteria are:

• Get some interesting missions in there
• 0-1 zig-zag deployment zones
• Exactly one “Objective Removal” mission: I love ’em, but 2/5 would be too many
• Avoid too many centreline smash-ups
• Aim for fairly straightforward missions on Rounds 3 and 5, when people are cooked after a long day’s rolling

So what I’ve come up with is:

1. What’s Yours is Ours
2. Escape from the Coast
3. Bloodstained Coasts
4. Caverns of Slaughter⁴
5. Treacherous Ground

It’s with tremendous regret that Avalanche of Ash doesn’t make the cut: as much as I will enjoy playing it this season, I think you only need one objective-removal mission at a 5-game event, and the volatility in Primary scoring will annoy some people at a competitive event. So Escape from the Coast gets the nod instead.

Most of these missions have a large number of objectives and / or encourage you to move around the map. The jagged deployment zone missions are interesting in their own right, but there’s enough other good options that we don’t really need to go there. Honestly, it was hard to pick just five.

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Closing Thoughts

Overall this is undoubtedly a bookkeeping heavy GHB, which is a pain in the ass, but I reckon it’ll be outweighed for me by the elegance of these missions. We as a community are all very aware of the menacing shadow of shooting that looms over the game currently, so if I’m picking nits, my main regret is that the only anti-shooting mission (Hidden Under Ash Clouds) is buried beneath a mountain of measuring and hassle; but at least we do have +1 to hit in combat from Bloodstained Coasts, and that one is easy to slot right into any event pack.

I appreciate the effort by the Devs to include a bit of emergent narrative into tournament-style gaming; it’s something that AOS has lacked for a little while, so maybe this GHB can reignite that spark.

Fingers crossed.

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1. Geordies know. ↩︎
2. I am. ↩︎
3. Real ones know that you’ll get to Round 4 and ask “Where’s that Instability dice gone?”, and realize that somebody must have picked it up and rolled it at some point. Such is the way of tracking shit on dice. ↩︎
4. Hey, I guessed that one right in the first article. ↩︎