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Recently came across the White Dwarf rules of Space Marine Operations. For those like me that live under a rock, this particular rule set is inspired by the Space Marine 2 video game. In this tabletop version, you select 3 marines from 6 different class of fighter and throw them into Objective focused missions against waves of Tyranids and hopefully not die.

The pdf of the rules was released on the White Dwarf website during Grotmas. I've supplied the link to the download page here if you're interested.



https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/downloads/white-dwarf/


I'm curious as to what other peoples experiences with this rule set has been?

For myself and a friend I've introduced it to, it simply has been the most fun we've had with our 40k models in years.
After I'd had a few games and wrapped my head around the rules, I've found it to be quick and engaging and surprisingly strategic. Most importantly: fun.

My mate and I are not space marine players however. So we've used models we have on hand to play the heroes. He his mixture of scratch built models from Necromunda and Kill Team; me my Sisters of Battle.

I'm loving the way the stat cards for the characters work. They're written open- no specific weapons or the like. Just Shoot and Mellee and an equipment that does a thing. So you're free to model whatever you like as long as it fits. So i get to field my Heavy flamer sister as the Heavy, Seraphim Superior as the Assault and Greyfax as the Vanguard (yeah, her crossbow is totally a grapnel launcher). I get to play out the power fantasy of the girls kicking butt. That's something everyone can do.

You can swap out the marines to be whatever you play and play out the power fantasy. Let's face it, we love our armies and we all know the lore is written so everyone is awesome and curb stomps little gribblies every Tuesday.

Then the same can be said for the Tyranids you fight.

I also play Necrons, so I've gone and found models in my collection that can match the Tyranid cards and now can fight against them now (i houserule that each enemy square regenerates a wound every turn just for that little necron flavour).


I've been fiddling with making up my own mission based on Termination from the game. Had a few games at it and they've been enjoyable

So what are your experiences with this?

Are you only hearing about this now?

.

I've got all the magazines and been intrigued by it for a while, though I haven't played it yet. As you say, it's a fun little power fantasy romp with neat little design ideas to play around with.

I also picked up that issue purely based on interest in a simplified game mode. Also yet to actually try it, I assume that just cardboard with a grid drawn on will be suitable to play. I wonder if those game boards the 40k starter sets come with have suitable grids.

Thanks for bringing it up as I'm not following WD closely. Saved the downloadable stuff for later. I have a lot of Archon Dungeon tiles to play around with and this might be a good way to use them.
Marines will be proper Marines though (Death Guard) and Tyranids will be Orks.

 RustyNumber wrote:
I also picked up that issue purely based on interest in a simplified game mode. Also yet to actually try it, I assume that just cardboard with a grid drawn on will be suitable to play. I wonder if those game boards the 40k starter sets come with have suitable grids.

You could use cardboard with a drawn grid. I used one of the 4x3 mdf boards I use for normal 40k with a grid drawn on it. I looked up the dimension of the official board set that this was designed for. Grid squares are 100mmx100mm, 7 squares by 12 squares. Ended up cutting up some paper squares and laying them all out and spray painted a green and grey checker board pattern to help just make it easier to see the squares (since been painting them all to look like marble as a painting project). I just use bits of foam and barricades as the walls/doors.
I don't actually know what those starter sets come with. Never seen one out of the box.

Thanks for bringing it up as I'm not following WD closely. Saved the downloadable stuff for later. I have a lot of Archon Dungeon tiles to play around with and this might be a good way to use them.
Marines will be proper Marines though (Death Guard) and Tyranids will be Orks.

Glad to hringnit to your attention, hope you have fun. I don't follow White Dwarf either, I'm not sure exactly how I came across this- might have been a random picture on Facebook that piqued my interest. Tried to find the rules and couldn't find a single pdf online anywhere (or any talk about this at all really, even youtube was lacking), went and tracked down the white dwarf issue and bought it (only for the pdfs to be released in grotmas a week later )
Those tiles sound pretty promising.