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We've all had those games that are highly competitive, that come down to the wire, and are just plain fun. But I think many wargamers have a tendency to drift towards pre-made and relatively balanced scenarios for a variety of reasons. So, what are the exceptions to that rule? What are some scenarios that you have played that, while maybe not the most balanced in terms of forces (though hopefully both sides were able to enjoy themselves), provided either a unique setting, unusual game mechanics, asymmetrical force compositions, or good old craziness? Did it include RPG elements? Was it based off of a historical conflict?

I've got a few to get the ball rolling. One of my group's most legendary games came back in 4th Edition, where we were running a massive ten player map campaign. The idea was that each player could use his entire collection. This, as you can imagine, led to some heavily unbalanced strategic matchups, with a few powerhouse players duking it out in massive engagements while several of the others would resort to Kill Team (yes, it existed back then!) raids to harass and annoy the other players.

One of our most daring commanders had a very small Ork army, probably less than a thousand points, while some of the other juggernauts had well over 5-6k points in total. This Ork player would continuously launch commando raids to assassinate enemy characters, blow up supply caches, and wreak general havoc. He ended up being very successful in the campaign, as the bigger players couldn't spare the resources to hunt him down, lest they be overwhelmed by their more formidable opponents.

I was running as GM for this campaign, and this Ork player got it in his head that he wanted to loot and hijack a Necron Monolith. Spurred on by his overwhelming enthusiasm, but wary of the potential blowback, we devised a heavily unbalanced scenario where the Ork player had to break into a Necron tomb complex, infiltrate to the Monolith holding pen with enough Orks to operate the vehicle (not the fluffiest operation, but who cares?), and escape. Despite dozens of warriors, scarabs, and a bodyguard unit of Immortals, the Orks managed to somehow pull it off.

This led to a ridiculous high speed chase as the Necron player, furious at this humiliation, spent an inordinate amount of resources hunting down his lost prize. After several game turns, chasing the orks across basically an entire continent, the Necron player caught up with them and cornered them in a mining facility, where he launched a frontal assault. The Orkoid Monolith (now with BS 2) proved pivotal to the defense, and after several turns the Necron player called off the attack, having lost too many men to continue. The Necrons were later routed by an Eldar player (another of the heavyweights), after having lost their points advantage after a series of poor decisions.

Another fantastic game was a convoy raid in a rocky canyon, Night Lords vs. Cadians, circa 5th edition. Chimeras, support vehicles, and a single platoon of infantry ambushed by numerically inferior Chaos forces, comprising Raptors and other CC units. This ended up being a very tense engagement, as the Imperial Platoon Commander tried to organize a defense, as a lightning-claw armed Chaos Lord ripped through his infantry.

Oh man, tons! I love custom scenarios, and I've had some great fun with ones in the past.

1) The war of the dark gods! Right at the close of 7th, my friends and I realized we had an army of Death Guard, an army of Thousand Sons, an army of Emperor's Children, and an army of World Eaters so we decided to play a special kind of 4-way battle simulating the ebb and flow of chaos.

Each round, alliances would shift based on who was currently behind and who was currently ahead. The player in last place got to pick one person who was not allowed to attack them, then the players in 3rd and 2nd each got an ally randomly assigned, and the player in 1st had no allies, anyone could attack them. A big throne in the center of the field that could only be held by characters was the major objective.

What resulted was an absolutely epic fight, with no one player permanently gaining the upper hand. In the end, my Thousand Sons won thanks to Ahriman psychically catapulting himself around the battlefield nuking enemy units and beating Lucius in a duel over the throne because he had like 5 separate buffs on him from allied sorcerors.

2) Drukhari Arena fight. I own a ton of random miniatures from different factions, and a large wych cult focused drukhari army, so my friend and I created a special arena scenario. Each turn, the arena would either create a trap, or spawn a unit of neutral enemies - Genestealers, Orks, Space Marines, Drukhari beasts, etc. We also agreed on totally different point metrics - I wanted to simulate a contest between Lelith Hesperax and a rival Succubus on ALL THE DRUGS, so my score was based on an average of those two models' performance, the closer they were the better. His army was a Covens army led by Urien Rakarth, so he had a mixture of wanting to demonstrate his fiendish creations' superior murdery talents and Urien wanting to experience unique - but not embarrassing - death.

3) Mad Max tank fight. When the new ork buggies came out my friend and I wanted to create a scenario where his tank company IG could fight my Mad Max orks and not have to worry about stupid infantry models. We removed the "Fall back can't shoot" rule and Overwatch entirely, and increased the damage that ramming did as well as reintroduced vehicle damage tables as an optional way to avoid damage points. We also put facing back into the game, and allowed larger vehicles to shove smaller vehicles out of the way when ramming.

One that sticks out to me was completely random deployment between 6 players, all with the same objective. We set up a 8 x4 and put a large terrain piece at one end. The objective was to hold the top of the terrain piece.

We then marked off 6 1 foot by 1 foot deployment zones along each long edge. Armies were on a side table. Deployment was randomized each turn by 1d3 units all deployed in a random deployment zone labelled 1 to 6.

Units were coming on behind other units that just deployed, and it was absolute madness! I don;t think we ever finished after only getting to round 6 or so.

edit:

I do not have pictures for the APOC battle and I thought I did

the_scotsman wrote:
1) The war of the dark gods! Right at the close of 7th, my friends and I realized we had an army of Death Guard, an army of Thousand Sons, an army of Emperor's Children, and an army of World Eaters so we decided to play a special kind of 4-way battle simulating the ebb and flow of chaos.

Each round, alliances would shift based on who was currently behind and who was currently ahead. The player in last place got to pick one person who was not allowed to attack them, then the players in 3rd and 2nd each got an ally randomly assigned, and the player in 1st had no allies, anyone could attack them. A big throne in the center of the field that could only be held by characters was the major objective.

What resulted was an absolutely epic fight, with no one player permanently gaining the upper hand. In the end, my Thousand Sons won thanks to Ahriman psychically catapulting himself around the battlefield nuking enemy units and beating Lucius in a duel over the throne because he had like 5 separate buffs on him from allied sorcerers.

That sounds absolutely amazing. Will definitely need to try this idea sometime.

There was one where I was holding the centre of the battlefield (with some ruins) with my Angels Revenant (Blood Angels) and my opponent was attacking from the edges of the battlefield (mostly hit, run and hide) with his Eldar.

Was a tough game, but really enjoyable and we both agreed pretty realistic (fluff-wise).

Rolling Road scenario of IG vs Orks. It was in an old Imperial armor and was one of the coolest 40k scenarios ever.

Basically orks were fleeing IG. orks deploy mid board, and IG on one of the short ends. Terrain moves 6 or 12" per turn TOWARDS the IG side. New terrain is randomly generated on the opposite board edge of IG. Goal is to get the orks off the board. Everyone is in fast attacks. If your truck blows and your troops spill out, they will never ever catch up and eventually fall off the trailing edge. Occasionally like "tuscan raiders" orks or grots will appear in some of the terrain. It was very cool. Highly recommended one off.

The most fun I've had has been with Dungeon games. Get a table of space ship or dungeon terrain and have a battle royale.

I did one years ago where players entered randomly, stomped around and fought, they could also find special items scattered around. When they died they respawned but lost half their points.

Another time it was the Emperor vs Horus on Horus' flagship. Same general idea but with an Emp and Horus on each team . Oh and you could sabotage the ship and create a line of death that ate everything as it burned up in the atmosphere.

I ran a game with a Ork invasion of a former Imperial human world found that they were worshipping a strange Ape God.

When they attacked a temple - the god would manifest and attack the orks

Basically an excuse to have King Kong vs Ork Stompa

Also enjoyed running a Aliens Vs Predator Vs Inquisition Kill team.

Lastly made up rules for skirmish games in a Dark Eldar arena including teleporter discs, andom beasts being released and of course anyone straying too near crowds getting shot at.

everyone seemed to enjoy them....

recently our club had a fun 40k HH game (8th ed rules from the internet) - the best thing about it was that the 4 of the 7 players (should have been 8 but one guy did not come) were secretly Chaos and new who they were, the other three did not know who was and was not an traitor - We then set up in wedges into the table - half of unsure who was going to attack who and very close to each other.

Worked really well and was great fun (we did add in some rules to allow respawning of the loyal Troops units)

I think the most creative scenario I played was a Dust Battlefield game where I had a 1/2 of my army in flyers with the other 1/2 in ground forces with at least 1 hero. I deployed my ground forces first anywhere on my opponent's half (played long ways or Hammer and Anvil if that helps) of the table with my opponent's deployment zone being that side's short table edge. My flyers were deployed on the opposite short table edge. All short edge units were deployed as if the models started just off the table which required at least a Move (and reduced shooting accuracy in the Dust Battlefield rules).

The objective of the game was to get my hero to one of the three landing zones before my opponent removed them from the game. Note, in Dust Battlefield Heroes could join units to pawn damage off to them. The Landing zones where 6" wide spots along both long table edges on the half of the table closest to my deployment zone and the short table edge of my deployment zone. Until round 3, my opponent could remove one landing zone considering it 'too hot for pick up'.

One was an evacuation scenario on a Maiden World invaded by Tyranids, which concluded in an epic sky duel between a Flyrant and dragon mounted Exodite Lord.

Another was Phoenix Court trying to reach and slay Norn Queen in her lair. Eight models against an endless Tyranid horde on terrain full of hostile features. A bit like Space Hulk on steroids

I have multiple usable tables in my garage. Once in 7th we set up a MEga-breakthrough battle using all three. The center board was a trench line with its back edge cut by three passes where a mixed force of IG and SoB's desperately tried to halt a chaos invasion, while Space Marine allies rushed to their aid. One table represented the IG artillery battery, and was 3 feet from the other table (baselisks could shoot 10 feet etc). The third was the "road" leading to the battleline from behind the IG/Sisters. The players had to make this choice of dividing forces to send after the main line/defend the main line AND send raids after the artillery/reserves.

It's been a while but I remember an epic brawl where a platoon of infantry tried to keep the artillery alive against raiding demons long enough for said artillery to smash the MASSIVE force of noise marines and Berzerkers the sisters were holding off.
Meanwhile, the Ultramarines had to run an ambush of Slaanesh to arrive and save the day.

The 3 chaos players pulled one over, and basically sent a piddling force to stop the marines and loaded up against the sisters on the main board. This was also when long range artillery had to guess shooting distance, so that seperate table made it a tough guess. And the IG player was NOT good at remembering what he guessed last time...

The lasting image is my friends Dread, which was one big eye for his body with the normal limbs etc, standing in the main pass as a cannoness sacrificed herself to stop him from moving off the board. She died horribly, but the one turn allowed a space marine predator to drive off the "reserves" board, onto the main board, and shatter him.

Despite this, I still think Chaos won...

I played a Blackhawk Down scenario using Stargrunt rules. I had 2 elite snipers against half a dozen mobs of green militia.(green both in terms of quality of troops, and they were played by orks versus my rail rifle pathfinder as the snipers).

Amazingly, the stargrunt suppression and panic rules meant that as long as my guys managed to cap the squad leader, which was definately doable, the enemy troops lost all.their actions for the turn. Almost made it, but I fluffed a couple of rolls.and the snipers were dragged from their position by the angry mobs.

When the Eldar Falcon and Vyper were first released we did a Deathstar trench run style mission. Imperium forces were set up down the long edges of a 8x4 and the Eldar vehicles had to fly down the length of the table twice before claiming the objective

Bar Room Blitz. Old School Kill Team Rules. We had several bars. The goal was to find the guy who supposedly knew where the Soul Forge was, a tool the Old Ones used to make life, literally craft it from warp stuff. We had four players. Each wanted the contact. We had some Dark Eldar, Eldar, Imperials, even some Tau somehow were in on this get the dude.

The thing is, these bars were full of drunk people. So, they didn't take kindly to being disturbed so every time you searched a bar, you'd roll on a table and find out what happened. Even if it happened to be the bar with the contact, you might have a brawl of 20 models come spilling out and you had to get to the contact in the middle of the melee.

It was a mess, but the dark eldar got the contact as he tried to skeedaddle from the growing riot of drunk bar folks in the square which was now over 60 strong and totally overwhelming the players.

This was game one of a campaign for the Soul Forge which would alternate between Kill Team, 40k, and Apoc battles as the involved players sought to secure the forge. We also used persistent play lists. Which mean we were all allocated 20K points at the start and made up multiple lists and this represented all the units available to us and after each game we would track the wounded and roll for loss or recovery using some rules. It was awesome and the characters that came out of it were fun. The Dark Eldar surprisingly got the Forge, which they did by making alliances between players and then later betraying them at the last battle. It was awesome. As it turned out the DE player was a true follower of Commorragh because he was a cheeky bastard and had the other players totally convinced he was on their side.

Every single year (JUNE) the Waaagh Fest tourney has a 'theme" (changes every year) and all scenarios are bashed off that theme. Some years are better than others, but it is always a surprise!
http://www.waaaghfest.com/

Back when Forgeworld first released the rules for An'ggrath (the 888 point Bloodthirster) we ran him alone against several different 1000 point armies, just to see what would happen. It didn't end well for any of the armies involved...


My favourite scenario though was way back in 2nd edition, shortly after the then-fledgling Necron army had just received its expanded rules. We set up a night raid, with a Necron infiltration force attacking a sleeping Guard Armoured detachment. The Guard encampment had a motor pool in the centre, surrounded by bunkers. Each bunker had sentries on top, and tank crew sleeping inside.

The Necrons had to try to get in close without alerting the sentries. Sentries could try to spot any Necrons within a set spotting distance (at which point they would alert the camp), and any weapon fire or explosions could potentially either alert sentries or wake up the sleeping guardsmen, with a modified roll based on the strength of the weapon involved.


In the end, the Necrons slaughtered most of the sentries before anyone managed to sound an alarm, and by the time the couple of tank crews that did wake up before dying a horrible death made it to their vehicles, their armour had been half eaten away by flocks of scarabs. Turned into a massively one-sided victory for the Necrons, but was nail-biting all the way through, as the guy playing the Guard army kept just missing those crucial spotting rolls and the tank crews turned out to be capable of sleeping through a literal alien invasion...