Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

40k 9th edition has basically dried up here and I've read it a few times on Dakka and other forums that my community is not as uncommon as you expect.

For those with "thriving" 40k communities, what is currently drawing your crowds?
Tournament scene?
Casual game nights?
Leagues?

All of this was massive in 5-7th around here, but 8th started a decline and now 9th its non-existent. Looking for more inspiring stories to lift my spirits.

In game stores around central and eastern Iowa, 40K was in decline in 6th and 7th edition. 8th edition saw a big resurgence, including my brother and I. I live in Alabama now and the 40K scene is huge in the city. People have accepted the rules bloat and are learning to live with it. Lots of competitive, casual, and league play here.

The place I moved from was very casual, with a weekly Crusade and casual games over the weekend.

They hold tournaments, yes, but there's kind of an attitude more of "X faction I have is not competitive at all, let me see what I can do with it..."

Tittliewinks22 wrote:
40k 9th edition has basically dried up here and I've read it a few times on Dakka and other forums that my community is not as uncommon as you expect.

For those with "thriving" 40k communities, what is currently drawing your crowds?
Tournament scene?
Casual game nights?
Leagues?

All of this was massive in 5-7th around here, but 8th started a decline and now 9th its non-existent. Looking for more inspiring stories to lift my spirits.

Tournament and Leagues, the only "casual" games, are basically just practice for tournament style games.
There are rare off shoots of escalation but not often. Even crusade dried up, because the issue we had was because of the stripped down rules, narrative games even with crusade in 9th did not feel the same.

If you wanna lift your spirits look forward to HH 2.0

Our FLGS tournaments still have a decent amount of players. There's also a lot of people asking for 2k tournament practice games on the FB group. The Warhammer store has a lot of casual play, usually people starting new armies that are trying to learn them with 1k games, or multiplayer games. It's definitely not as healthy of a scene as we had a couple years ago. There's a lot of people who feel like they might as well take a break from the game if they don't play tau, eldar, custodes or nids. I'm trying to get a group together for literally anything else, Necromunda, Titanicus, Infinity, I'll play anything at this point just to get away from 40k for a bit.

My GW is still recovering from Covid and they haven't resumed in store gaming yet. I haven't checked in with my FLGS for a while, but I should drop in and see what's up.

Typically, I'm a garagehammer kinda guy, but I might soon start looking into more community options.

We also have a fully licensed pay to play space in the city so that you can go to have a beer and use someone else's tables and terrain to play, but I haven't checked it out yet cuz "pay to play"

Toofast wrote:
Our FLGS tournaments still have a decent amount of players. There's also a lot of people asking for 2k tournament practice games on the FB group. The Warhammer store has a lot of casual play, usually people starting new armies that are trying to learn them with 1k games, or multiplayer games. It's definitely not as healthy of a scene as we had a couple years ago. There's a lot of people who feel like they might as well take a break from the game if they don't play tau, eldar, custodes or nids. I'm trying to get a group together for literally anything else, Necromunda, Titanicus, Infinity, I'll play anything at this point just to get away from 40k for a bit.

Check out 7th ed Herald of ruin kill team. Its a fan made version of kill team that i shill for because it was legit the most fun i ever had in 40k.
http://heraldsofruin.net/
There are a few outlying broken armies, that you can self regulate or just ban, example assassins are broken in 7th ed HoR. But its a lot more customizable and interactive, and you can do a lot of things that current kill team does not offer.

I got to run a deathwing terminator squad, i had like 4 terminators but everyone else had like 10 or 15 guys. The best moment was when i basically got to atomic elbow drop an ork nob off of a landing pad with a power fist.

I am the youngest person at my store. There is , as far as regular players, 4 people in their 20s and everyone else is dudes in early 30s to early 40s+. Never been to big tournaments, so can't be sure how those look, but in general some people from store go to play in those, there are maybe 6-8 people out of 30+ at the store.

Ah and all the people I started with in 8th are gone. Most left when 9th started, then 2-3 hanged on , but because our store got closed and to play you had to take a drive to another town, they now only play durning tournaments and I don't think I have seen two of them since before winter holidays.

All the above really. The crusade leagues and weekly groups meet during the week days so I can't make those. However tournaments and the weekend groups are pretty big too. There's a few stores in the area I go to that have a decent size of 40k players so I typically rotate when I can.

At the shops:
Right now 9th is doing quite well.
Little bit of tourney play.
Alot of casual matched play. Sometimes someone will post a FB or Discord message specifically requesting a tourney style game.
Crusades & Leagues. Our last Crusade at the one shop had 30some players. And that's definitely not all the players....

# of players? Between 3 shops within easy driving range of each other & with some overlap of people there's probably close to 100 players. And that's just the ones who play at the shops.
Age range is a bell curve of between 15 or so to early/mid fifties with many in the late 20s/mid-30s range.
Factions/Armies/styles of lists/degrees of power? Even just counting those who regularly play in the Crusades we've got everything covered.

 Backspacehacker wrote:

Toofast wrote:
Our FLGS tournaments still have a decent amount of players. There's also a lot of people asking for 2k tournament practice games on the FB group. The Warhammer store has a lot of casual play, usually people starting new armies that are trying to learn them with 1k games, or multiplayer games. It's definitely not as healthy of a scene as we had a couple years ago. There's a lot of people who feel like they might as well take a break from the game if they don't play tau, eldar, custodes or nids. I'm trying to get a group together for literally anything else, Necromunda, Titanicus, Infinity, I'll play anything at this point just to get away from 40k for a bit.

Check out 7th ed Herald of ruin kill team. Its a fan made version of kill team that i shill for because it was legit the most fun i ever had in 40k.
http://heraldsofruin.net/
There are a few outlying broken armies, that you can self regulate or just ban, example assassins are broken in 7th ed HoR. But its a lot more customizable and interactive, and you can do a lot of things that current kill team does not offer.

I got to run a deathwing terminator squad, i had like 4 terminators but everyone else had like 10 or 15 guys. The best moment was when i basically got to atomic elbow drop an ork nob off of a landing pad with a power fist.

It's hard enough to get anyone here to play anything but 2k nachmund missions. I doubt homebrew rules for anything would be very popular. I'm usually not a big fan of them either as when I travel or move to a new city, I have a whole new group of people to convince to play this special blend of fan-made rules when they already own the books for and memorized the official rules.

Around my FLGS 40k has dried up, only a small very competitive group left, all the casual players have stopped playing. The local GW has stopped all play in store and not planning to restart.

Meanwhile the AoS and LOTR SBG groups have more than doubled

MaleficentRuler wrote:
The local GW has stopped all play in store and not planning to restart.

Nobody can complain about how broken your game is if you don't let them play it *thinking cap*

Toofast wrote:

 Backspacehacker wrote:

Toofast wrote:
Our FLGS tournaments still have a decent amount of players. There's also a lot of people asking for 2k tournament practice games on the FB group. The Warhammer store has a lot of casual play, usually people starting new armies that are trying to learn them with 1k games, or multiplayer games. It's definitely not as healthy of a scene as we had a couple years ago. There's a lot of people who feel like they might as well take a break from the game if they don't play tau, eldar, custodes or nids. I'm trying to get a group together for literally anything else, Necromunda, Titanicus, Infinity, I'll play anything at this point just to get away from 40k for a bit.

Check out 7th ed Herald of ruin kill team. Its a fan made version of kill team that i shill for because it was legit the most fun i ever had in 40k.
http://heraldsofruin.net/
There are a few outlying broken armies, that you can self regulate or just ban, example assassins are broken in 7th ed HoR. But its a lot more customizable and interactive, and you can do a lot of things that current kill team does not offer.

I got to run a deathwing terminator squad, i had like 4 terminators but everyone else had like 10 or 15 guys. The best moment was when i basically got to atomic elbow drop an ork nob off of a landing pad with a power fist.

It's hard enough to get anyone here to play anything but 2k nachmund missions. I doubt homebrew rules for anything would be very popular. I'm usually not a big fan of them either as when I travel or move to a new city, I have a whole new group of people to convince to play this special blend of fan-made rules when they already own the books for and memorized the official rules.

You would actually be surprised, funny enough, HoR was actually one of the most popular events we ran, and we ran it at GW store, we had about 9 or 10 people that join in on the campaign, and that held all the way till the end of the campaign.
The rules for HoR really make it fun to make "Your dudes" and expands slow enough you dont feel burdened keeping up with it, and the amount of things you can customize, its much more akin to Mordhiem.

I already have necromunda for that. We had about 25 people in our recent campaign and everyone is excited to start a new one when ash wastes comes out

Toofast wrote:
I already have necromunda for that. We had about 25 people in our recent campaign and everyone is excited to start a new one when ash wastes comes out

Oh yeah necromunda, and really all GW specialist games have been on point. HoR is just for if you want more outta the current kill team.

I wish there were better catch up mechanics. My friend is playing corpse grinders with ogryns and has like 3200 credits, I'm playing van saar plasma with ambots/arachni rig and have 2800, everyone else is at 1500 or less and we've all played the same amount of games. I even lost my first 3-4 games but played cagey and bottled out rather than risking death on my important guys. As soon as I got the credits to add ambots and start upgrading my guys, my gang became unkillable. Always hitting on 2s and shooting twice with plasma guns, +1T and shields.

Toofast wrote:
I already have necromunda for that. We had about 25 people in our recent campaign and everyone is excited to start a new one when ash wastes comes out

Doesn't it have rules spread over like 4-5 books though? That is hardly enticing to start playing.

Karol wrote:

Toofast wrote:
I already have necromunda for that. We had about 25 people in our recent campaign and everyone is excited to start a new one when ash wastes comes out

Doesn't it have rules spread over like 4-5 books though? That is hardly enticing to start playing.

I printed out all 400 something pages of the ruleset that has been collated for free on yaktribe, threw it in a 4" binder with page protectors and we all just use that. The arbitrator has one too. Some people bought the gang book for their particular gang and that's about it. Yes it sucks and it's stupid that the rules are in so many places, which is why we use the magic of the internet and a printer for most of the rules.

9th is the most popular it's ever been locally.

Nearly every night it's packed with people playing. There are monthly RTTs and it's very easy to get pick up games. There are also ongoing crusade leagues.

I'm a little suprised that it was massive in 6th-7th and dried up in 8th and 9th. That seems to be the opposite of all the places I know.

Where I am there's a hard core of tournament players who are happy to buy new armies on a regular basis and shelve armies for years while they're not competitive, and a slow churn of people who play casually for about an edition and then quit as they realize the game isn't going to improve. Which is basically the same as it's been since I've started playing, except for a brief hype-based bump around the start of 8th.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Karol wrote:

Toofast wrote:
I already have necromunda for that. We had about 25 people in our recent campaign and everyone is excited to start a new one when ash wastes comes out

Doesn't it have rules spread over like 4-5 books though? That is hardly enticing to start playing.

One rulebook, one Codex, same as 40k, now that they've done the "house of..." compilations to put everything in one place.

In my little frontier city we have a strong 40K scene. Tourneys occur every two months and they sell out in a matter of hours of registration being open. Until recently all "40K Open Gaming Day" had to be pre-arranged due to contact tracing, but now are back to pickup games. Usually a good turnout each week.

As much as I love a chance to provoke the GW faithful I think a big part of 9th's issue is the germageddon of Covid

Locally now stores are open again we have store events fairly regularly with folks seemingly willing to travel to them, quite a consideration given the shires rubbish roads and the price of petrol

The main dip locally seems to be at the club level, I'm not sure we've had a 40k game at my club since we restarted in October or so and even the other more GW centric club seems to skew AOS rather than 40k, again it might not be a 9th issue just folks adapting to lockdown and home gaming being the new normal

The St. Louis scene is bigger than ever. There's 4 FLG stores, 2 GW stores, and 2 stores on the good side of the river in IL. You can pretty much get in a tourney every weekend. The stores do a pretty good job to use each others discords to minimize overlap so everyone can play everywhere.