How to fight a Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader battle according to White Dwarf 141.

By the early 1990s it must have been obvious to the game designers that most players dispensed with the GM and just set up and played skirmishes. The army lists certainly encouraged this direction.

However, there was no real guidance on how a battle should be conducted.

☠ White Dwarf 141 (1991)

Andy Chambers' Space Marines faced Jervis Johnson's Eldar in the Rogue Trader era's one and only 40K battle report. This battle employed all the rule changes published until this point.

Alaitoc versus Blood Angels deployment
Alaitoc versus Blood Angels deployment

The armies were products of two guides on picking an army and painting it. Andy Chambers explained the unit selection process for each. Both armies had a base 1000pt block with two additional 500pt blocks for larger games. WD138 selected an Alaitoc Eldar army and Mike McVey wrote a guide on assembly and painting. Tim Prow built and painted a Blood Angel Space Marines in WD139.

The preamble was chock-full of useful advice for setting up a good game. They played on a 8'x4' table with special rules for some terrain features - chemical tanks that had a chance of exploding when hit.

As a rule, it's best to make the terrain as dense as possible in Warhammer 40,000 games. This is so that the heavy weapons don't dominate the battle too much by blasting both sides to pieces before they get into bolter range. It's also more fun to have your squads dashing from cover to cover rather than milling around in the open. You don't have to have lots of pieces of terrain to achieve this, you just have to place what you've got towards the middle of the table and not leave a big open space in the middle by placing all the terrain along the edges (which is surprisingly easy to do without realising it). A good terrain set-up can easily make the difference between having a really good tactical battle and what can sometimes become a short and very bloody encounter.

For this game, we also chose to allow troops to deploy up to 12" onto the table. This enables the forces to take advantage of any terrain on their table edge and to get into combat relatively quickly. To prevent too much advantage going to the player with the first move, we also allowed troops to start the game in overwatch (the overwatch rules are in WD 129) or hiding if they were in cover.

-Andy Chambers, White Dwarf 141

☠ Andy Chambers vs Jervis Johnson

Battle reports involving this pair were often inspirational, describing new set-ups and narratives. Chambers & Johnson sometimes added elements on the fly if they thought an idea was entertaining. They weren't above admitting their mistakes, including details about how they had to restart games because their initial approach didn't pan out. The game systems didn't matter - it was their approach that was important.

☠ The Result

Blood Angel miniatures
The original Captain Tycho & chums

The game lasted four turns. I won't spoil the battle report by telling you who won the game.

We all know who won.