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So some folks and I have been discussing this a bit as a way to add some variety to small tournaments and in general to the local play and we wanted to hear what the community thought about it. Any obvious holes/problems we are creating, etc. Game-time implementation is not currently a problem since this is friendly play, but thoughts on how to properly implement it would also be appreciated.

Sideboard:
A sideboard exists to provide a user an up to X amount of points of legal sized units from Codices already in use by their core army composition as potential swap-ins during the deployment phase.
1) Any swaps require entire units of equivalent or more points from their Army List to be removed from play. You cannot swap in more points then you swap out.
2) The player may not side board any units that belong to codices that do not already exist in their core army composition.
3) After all swaps, a player must still have a legal army list. You cannot break detachment rules on numbers of units or unit types.
4) When swapping out, you must remove entire units. You cannot simply swap wargear or weapon choices. So if you want say a different crisis suit load out, you would want to sideboard another full squad with a load out that is equal to or cheaper than your existing core army unit.
5) Swaps can feature an uneven number of units. So you could swap out a single 400 pt unit for 4 100 pt units, as long as the above rules are not broken.

Usage in Practice:
Sideboard usage occurs during the deployment phase after rolling to go first. The player deploying first will have already seen the core army list of their opponent (but not the sideboard [note: Thoughts on this? Should they know the opposing sideboard first?]) and may make swaps during deployment, making clear what is being swapped. The player deploying second will be able to make their swaps once the first player has completed their deployment and declared reserves/outflanking/scouting.
In practice we are thinking about making this a fairly round number that scales to the Army List size. At 1850 we were thinking 400 or 450 points, but we could go less.

Intent:
In some ways, just to break up the monotony of many of the lists and give player some more game-time freedom. More importantly though we feel this change will have two impacts - The first being to lessen the impact of deathstars. Deathstars will find it very difficult to properly change/tailor a death star with ~400 points, so mostly they will only use sideboards to switch up their support or flanking/chaff units. Although there will be some freedom for switching out key commanders, so that can play a nice role for them. More importantly, TAC lists which generally have to take many different units for different threats will have a new freedom to quickly adapt to new challenges without changing their core list. In a multi-game tournament this could assist a lot of also-ran TAC lists which tend to have fatal flaws to a single category of major threats. The second (smaller) impact would be strategic, giving a little more weight to potentially going second as you get the last say on the swaps.

Anyway, what do you guys think? We're just hoping to vary it up and make it more fun. Any thoughts on the point limits, if both players should know each other's sideboards up front, etc. would be more than appreciated. A change of this type could really allow some niche units that never see tourney or competitive play to suddenly shine as ace in the holes for specific matchups, and would allow other lists to have load out changes for their core units available.

Thanks for your time/interest all!

I do like this idea. Now, I think players should know each other's sideboards up-front, and here's why: keeping them secret mostly doesn't add anything except to give the player deploying second an even larger advantage. In all other cases, both players get to see each other's lists before deciding which model will be the warlord, deciding which psychic disciplines to roll on and other deployment-time decisions.

Now, that's another issue: psykers. Normally you roll psychic powers before you deploy. Would you roll for all psykers, including sideboarded ones? If you did, what would stop you from sideboarding several of the same unit to improve odds of rolling a specific power, then swapping in the one that got it? Would that be abusive, or is that exactly the kind of swap you intend to permit?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I'd also say in the interest of avoiding inadvertent unbalance, say that both players must make their sideboard swaps after seeing each other's lists and rolling to see who deploys first, but before any units have actually been deployed. The player who will deploy second gets to make their substitutions after the player deploying first does, but all substitutions happen before any models hit the table.

That way you don't get shenanigans like "Oh, cool, I'll deep strike my Assault Marines" countered by "Ok, I'll swap in my interceptor Iontide", which is just kinda cheap. Instead, the second player would see "oh, hey, there's deep-strike-capable units, I'll take my interceptor Riptide", and the first player could respond by just not deep striking the Assault Marines, same as if both they and the Riptide had been in the lists from the beginning.

Ooo good call on the psykers. Ok sounds like we'd have to house rule up the order of game setup a bit to fit this in if it was to happen after rolling for who goes first.

Perhaps we should just leave the order of operations alone and have the sideboard happen after the standard army list exchange. We could have the sideboard choices then displayed or shared at the roll for goes first, so they're still secret until that point but they aren't impacted by knowing you are more likely to go first or second. We'd still have to move the psyker/warlord abilities/traits to be between the roll for goes first and actual deployment, as those may have to change based on swaps.

The real trick, regardless of if players swap sideboard info before making the choice of what goes in/out, is by what point in game setup they have to make their choices. Clearly psyker and warlord rolls have to come after that decision, because you may be changing. So perhaps the whole thing needs a ~2-5min phase between army swap and proceeding for changes to be made, then declared/shown at the same time?

A friend and I use sideboards sometimes. Rather than swap out equal points, the main army is 1200 and there are two sideboards of 300. We run though the army details and sideboards to each other; and then select our sideboard simultaneously.

Yes, and warlords and psykers roll powers after sideboard selection.

One issue is that it is a tad harder to make things add up to 1500 points exactly. The way we play it is the sideboard can include wargear/models for squads in the main 1200 (e.g. my sideboard is 250 points of extra models AND the main army scout squad take 2 extra marines, camo cloaks and a missile launcher).

Hi Kenny P,

Quick question, are you guys playing it that you have to add up to 1500pts total all the time? Usually the rules are played as say, 1850 tops, but heck if you want to throw just 1812.. you're just that pimp

1850 tends to be the "tourney" norm, but we're definitely thinking a sliding scale all the way down to 500 Skirmish points, probably making its way up to 2500 "core". Something between 100 and 500 points, or a 20% sideboard - similar to Magic.

I don't think we''d like to change it so that you could add wargear into existing units.. that can be somewhat problematic to double check and leads to pretty confusing sideboarding. Making a simple X, Y, Z units are out, and B, C, D, and E units are in, should make it easy to quickly glance at as an opponent and say yay or nay.