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I was playing my old copy of the Siege of Terra board game recently (a lot of fun BTW) even if new lore made some of the deployment locations for armies inaccurate. I got to thinking about how many board game tie ins we get to 40k. There are some good ones like Space Hulk and Siege of Terra, some meh ones like Assassination Squad, and some bad ones like that scout one from a while back and (from what I've heard) the new video game tie in one.

It got me thinking though about what other settings in the universe would make a good board game and I think it could be really neat to have a "dudes on a map" style game set in the unification war. You'd have Big E and the other Terran Warlords all vying for control over the planet, you could maybe even tie in the Lunar Gene Cults, and/or do a Mars expansion. A lot of people like the setting, but it's not like we'll ever get a miniature game in that era, so why not a board game?

What are your thoughts, if they released it and it was good, would you play it?

So sort of a grimdark version of RISK?

Not as a GW game, no. They'd expect me to assemble 30 models that were 15 parts each.

You can hunt for , IMO, one of the absolutely best area control/4X games ever - Forbidden Stars. It's been long out of production, so prices are steep, but very much worth the investment.

Nowadays GW wants to sell you models it produces in its board games, so I doubt we'll get anything that isn't "push your toy soldiers closer to opponent's toy soldiers and roll dice to see who kills whom".

Tawnis do you mean the old boardgame with cardboard pieces and the map board? I've got the Armageddon equivalent of that game and it's excellent fun. We have kept meaning to run an Epic campaign based off of it (you play a tabletop game for some of the key battles rather than a dice roll) and will hopefully one day get around to it.

Something like that would definitely work well for Unification too, although as the guys have said it wouldn't happen nowadays as GW is a miniature company first and foremost.

There are a few Unification Wars FB groups that might be worthwhile joining, although they seem mostly to be about miniature conversion and painting. A friend and I had discussed playing Heresy era but using 2nd edition rules, to give a more Necromunda/squad-level experience to the game - that might also work for something like Unification, as you have that extra level of granularity.

Personally I'm on board with the idea that generic rules work better for providing a framework for wargaming over overtly specific theme-locked systems, so I'm already happily playing Unification Era games with Kill Team and such

But yes. The Unification Wars are a fascinating period which one could use as a basis for an area control board game. If the game was good, I'd happily play it like I play Forbidden Stars and Chaos in the Old World. Fun IP enhances good mechanics, but isn't really the deciding factor.

Just play Fortress America?

I think the idea of adding more customization options to miniatures is awesome. It really lets you put your own stamp on your army, ya know? Like, who doesn't want to make their squad stand out on the battlefield?