As you’ll have seen on our previous post HERE, Dad’s James and Rich visited the
Warhammer World 40k Doubles tournament in early February. We went with the focus on having fun but winning and so did a lot of prep beforehand, not
much gaming as we were struggling for time, but a lot of other prep including
getting solid strategies for each of the missions, planning out all the stuff
we needed to remember in sequence for a turn (See below for our own cheat sheet for our army) and even pre-deployment. But in
all this prep time, in the few practice games I did get, I noticed that neither myself or my opponent were getting through the turns quickly enough - one game didn’t
get past turn 2 as my opponent spent 75mins on his first turn! This could totally ruin our chances as we have found throughout all of the editions in 40k that the Astra Militarum (our army) always get stronger the longer the game goes on. The amount of units available and the options that the army has means that turn 5 has always proven to be crucial to the Astra Militarum for securing a victory.
Now our tournament was at 2,000 points with a strict 2.5hrs
on the clock. This would mean an average of 15 min turns per team and that
excludes set up time. We knew from experience that if you spent 30 - 45 mins each on
turn 1, you were unlikely to ever get to that magic turn 5 (even if there were fewer models to
deal with for the remainder of the game).
To tackle this, we did a number of things, including seeking
advice on the Competitive 40k Facebook Group and Reddit. We have collated these thoughts and our
own experiences and have listed some of the processes we put in place during the tournament and our opinions on some other time saving ideas below:
