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The Crew have ran a few three player FFA combat patrol games in the past month and we are all pretty surprised by how smooth it works.

I went in hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. As much as I like Warhammer, truth is I find most 1v1 games, regardless of genre, kind of boring. Too much predictability and control, not enough chaos and betrayal. Whats a strategy game without getting double-crossed!?

We've all heard the heuristic that 3 player 40k doesn't work because "the most logical play" is for two players to gang up on one. In our experience this hasn't happened, because it isn't actually a wise strategy. Trusting too much in a competitor always results in a knife in the back when you get too comfortable.

We play on a combat patrol sized board with a bit more length added to each long end (about 6 inches) because that's how big our folding table is.

Deployment is a triangle and we come up with odd ways of deciding who deploys where. Rolling D20s, whoever shows up late gets the last choice, whoever brings everyone a coffee gets to go first... etc... We are still refining this part. It is really a shame GW has no three player missions at all.

Generally the crew is pretty generous with assigning terrain obscuring and dense keywords, and we have lots of terrain on the board. At face value, this would seem to heavily advantage melee armies. However with the third player in the mix, we allow shooting into combat that does not involve your own units. We have found this adds a good amount of caution to armies that like to charge, and so the extra terrain therefore helps their blender units weave in and out of terrain to get some extra defensive buffs as they try and get into a fight.

When it came to secondaries we're all still experimenting with different ones, unsure of which (if any) may be excessively skew for the games we are playing. Our regular armies are Orks, Ultramarines, Tyranids, Ad Mech, GSC, and Dark Angels.

Honestly, its been the most fun I've had in 40k in a long time! 500 points does mean some really cool units basically never see the tabletop. On the other hand, for me personally, having more players in the game makes everything a lot more dynamic. More humans is always better in strategy games imo. So it is a good trade-off. We're going to try it at 1000 points in the coming weeks. Being able to include everyone in one game is a lot more fun than trying to rush several games to get everyone involved in one evening.

Anyone got any ideas or thoughts on how to continue working on this gameplay? We will eventually try a crusade, but probably once we all have our codex. Or just play 10th edition, whichever comes first...

How do you work primary objectives? One big prize in the center? Capture the flag? Three around the center?

Interesting. I guess it makes sense that combat patrol games are small enough to eliminate many of the typical 1v1v1 problems.