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I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to play 40k but doesn't have the time between school/ work/ life etc. What are some ways to make the game go quicker without actually changing the game? Is there a way I should be rolling or a specific way I should be sorting rolls more efficiently? What are some ways to make set- up go faster?

Play an older edition.

Play Warhammer 40,000 Conquest

 Crimson Devil wrote:
Play an older edition.

This on so many levels.....40K is a blotted mess ATM.

A possibly more useful reply than the ones above:

As far as rolling dice, I find the fastest way to do things like to hit/to wound/to save is to roll the batch, if it was a 4+ required, pull out the successes and then scoop the rest to the side and roll them again to wound, then do the same and hand the successes to your opponent to roll. That's just about the best you can do. If it's something like a 2+ or 3+ roll, remove the failures and scoop up the successes rather than pulling out the successes and shoving away the failures.

If your opponent is happy to do it, make a house rule where if you want to run, you do it in the movement phase, moving 6+D6 and not shooting in the shooting phase. Only moving models once instead of twice will speed things up, especially for horde armies.

For horde armies you can do the "move from the rear" technique when you have a unit that wants to move a smaller distance than the actual footprint of the unit. Measure the movement distance from the front of the unit, but move the rearmost model up to that point, keep moving rear models until you've filled the gap of where the unit should be. It's only useful if, say, you want to move a unit 6" and the unit is more than 6" deep, but combined with running in the movement phase can really speed up play against horde armies.

There's probably other things that aren't coming to mind immediately, there might be 7th edition specific things I haven't thought of because I haven't really played a lot of 7th.

Beyond that, if you are interested in playing an older edition, 3rd or 4th were much simpler editions, but IMO they were still pretty time consuming to play.

If you want to invent your own rules, what you can do is take the overall turn structure of 2nd edition, but replace many of the rules with ones from later editions. Editions 3rd and newer have a basic turn structure of moving in the movement, shooting OR moving in the shooting, moving again in the assault phase. 2nd edition had (IMO) a smarter turn structure of declaring whether you are going to run (move up to twice your movement characteristic), walk and shoot (move up to your movement characteristic and then shoot) or assault (charge up to twice your movement). It may sound similar... but it actually means you only move once in a turn which speeds things up.

BUT... 2nd edition had a lot of other very time consuming things, like the close combat phase was fought model by model rather than unit by unit, so you need to copy/paste bits of later editions like the CC phase. A few other things you might want to change as well.

Otherwise you can invent profiles to use alongside a completely different rules system like Bolt Action which is much more streamlined and tends to run faster, but I don't know how well that will work for the larger games you typically play in 40k, I've personally never tried it.

EDIT: Another thing could be using movement trays, but to use most movement trays you end up having to change the rules a bit to make them work

Learn your weapon strengths/AP ahead of time. Discuss area terrain and cover saves pre-match so defining cover saves is faster. Finally, if its still taking a long time, A) realize 40k is a long game or B) play smaller points, like 1000-1500

Smaller point battles.
No allies.
Understand your rules and phases.
Digital rulebook good for searching fast.
Measure and move first model at front carefully, rest as close as possible but no measure.
Speed roll, pick up hits, roll for wound, opponent pick up to roll saves if applicable.
Have squads sorted and packaged together for fast setup.
Use colored dice for different weapons or rolling pairs of dice.
Everyone keep your own tape, dice, templates, books handy. Borrowing delays much.
WYSIWYG models really help play with clarity.
Full army list with unit stats on record is handier than leafing through codex (excel, army builder, hand notes).
Laid back opponent, argumentative types makes games last forever.
Rule, if you have to ask or say a rule with a loud voice: you look it up, learn it, not BS, DO NOT ask others to find out for you.
Plan while your opponent is playing his turn, at the very least your movement.

Best I could think of now.

Echoing other suggestions. Also, maybe movement trays? Perhaps rolling to hit/wounds at the same time with different colored dice? Using a Chess Clock to limit the amount of time a turn takes on average?

Play smaller games. If you want to play larger games play doubles.

OP, have you ever thought about just playing kill team campaigns? They're a lot of fun with a low model count required.

You can speed up the game a lot by playing low-model count armies. By the time i'm gone through turn 2 with my orkses, all the knight spam, serpent spam, LR spam, etc players on the other tables have allready finished.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
A possibly more useful reply than the ones above:

As far as rolling dice, I find the fastest way to do things like to hit/to wound/to save is to roll the batch, if it was a 4+ required, pull out the successes and then scoop the rest to the side and roll them again to wound, then do the same and hand the successes to your opponent to roll. That's just about the best you can do. If it's something like a 2+ or 3+ roll, remove the failures and scoop up the successes rather than pulling out the successes and shoving away the failures.

If your opponent is happy to do it, make a house rule where if you want to run, you do it in the movement phase, moving 6+D6 and not shooting in the shooting phase. Only moving models once instead of twice will speed things up, especially for horde armies.

For horde armies you can do the "move from the rear" technique when you have a unit that wants to move a smaller distance than the actual footprint of the unit. Measure the movement distance from the front of the unit, but move the rearmost model up to that point, keep moving rear models until you've filled the gap of where the unit should be. It's only useful if, say, you want to move a unit 6" and the unit is more than 6" deep, but combined with running in the movement phase can really speed up play against horde armies.

There's probably other things that aren't coming to mind immediately, there might be 7th edition specific things I haven't thought of because I haven't really played a lot of 7th.

Beyond that, if you are interested in playing an older edition, 3rd or 4th were much simpler editions, but IMO they were still pretty time consuming to play.

If you want to invent your own rules, what you can do is take the overall turn structure of 2nd edition, but replace many of the rules with ones from later editions. Editions 3rd and newer have a basic turn structure of moving in the movement, shooting OR moving in the shooting, moving again in the assault phase. 2nd edition had (IMO) a smarter turn structure of declaring whether you are going to run (move up to twice your movement characteristic), walk and shoot (move up to your movement characteristic and then shoot) or assault (charge up to twice your movement). It may sound similar... but it actually means you only move once in a turn which speeds things up.

BUT... 2nd edition had a lot of other very time consuming things, like the close combat phase was fought model by model rather than unit by unit, so you need to copy/paste bits of later editions like the CC phase. A few other things you might want to change as well.

Otherwise you can invent profiles to use alongside a completely different rules system like Bolt Action which is much more streamlined and tends to run faster, but I don't know how well that will work for the larger games you typically play in 40k, I've personally never tried it.

EDIT: Another thing could be using movement trays, but to use most movement trays you end up having to change the rules a bit to make them work

Thank you for this. I didn't know about the "move from the rear" technique and the running in the movement phase is something I will have to try.

The obvious answer is play smaller games, don't play Hoardes and don't play Daemons with boatloads of psychic powers. Personally, as someone who plays slowly anyway, playing Tzeentch Daemons/Thousand Sons only exacerbates the issue, just generating powers can take 10+ minutes. Summoning only makes this even worse, as you're now deplying even more units, which often have to also have psychic powers generated and tracked.

Be careful about moving from the back when special weapons are involved, as the orks up the back with the rokkits suddenly moving to the front on a 1 inch move though terrain means they could conviniently be in range of your opponents tanks for your shooting phase (cheating isn't cool). Conversely, moving your rokkit orks from the back to the front on a 1" run move will also ensure that they get wiped out by enemy shooting first too (getting your ranged AT fire destroyed because you wanted to save 20 seconds also isn't cool).