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Something I've been thinking about putting together, to help with forgetting rules/spacing out on things you're supposed to do, is arranging a stack of cards or a checklist or something that goes over everything you need to do every turn. (Possibly with a pre-game extra card for setup things.)

The idea being that I would go over everything on one card, then move it to the bottom of the deck, and repeat. That way, I can't miss any rules. If it's an irrelevant card (Say, 'Psychic phase' related stuff when I don't have Psykers,) it gets moved to the bottom of the deck immediately. It'd be main categories (Pre-movement Reserves,) with extra references. (Say, reminders to roll IWND at the end of my turns.)

Do you guys think this would be a good idea?

It’s not a terrible idea for a new player, but 40k, at its core, is not that complex.

Most of the issues I hit the rulebook for are odd interactions between special rules, not what order to do stuff. After a handful of games you should have the phases down.

And it’s not going to help with the most common form for forgetting to do stuff, like moving or shooting a specific unit. It’s not that you skipped the whole shooting phase, just missed the snipers off in a corner.

On that vein, at the end of my movement and shooting phases I go down the table. Moved, moved, stood still, moved. all set. Helps keep track of if I’ve forgotten anyone.

 Nevelon wrote:
It’s not a terrible idea for a new player, but 40k, at its core, is not that complex.

Most of the issues I hit the rulebook for are odd interactions between special rules, not what order to do stuff. After a handful of games you should have the phases down.

And it’s not going to help with the most common form for forgetting to do stuff, like moving or shooting a specific unit. It’s not that you skipped the whole shooting phase, just missed the snipers off in a corner.

On that vein, at the end of my movement and shooting phases I go down the table. Moved, moved, stood still, moved. all set. Helps keep track of if I’ve forgotten anyone.

I dunno, I've been playing for years, some of my friends have also been playing for years, and we still space out on all kinds of stuff. Usually, it's a single roll that happens in between phases that isn't always applicable. (For example, forgetting to roll Daemonic Instability and forgetting to roll IWND usually happens at least once a game where those are involved.) Forgetting whole phases is pretty rare, but forgetting one small step of that phase happens pretty regularly.

But putting all the possible things you could forget for every phase is going to make a huge stack of cards.

It’s one thing to have “remember to make reserve rolls” for a start of movement phase. That applies to all armies. But once you go down to the codex level of “use doctrines” “demonic tables” etc, that’s another whole batch of things. And then there is the unit specific level, like Acts of Faith, which units get in different phases.

So you’d need a specific stack of cards for each army, adjusted by lists in some cases. Just seems a lot of trouble.

Then again, I’m having flashbacks to high school. Putting together one page allowed cheat sheets for open note tests. The act of writing the cheat sheet helped cement the information, so I didn’t actually need to reference it that much during the exam.