Grimdark Future

I haven’t been posting as much as I would like lately, although that’s not for a bad reason, it’s for a very good one (albeit a gaming one). A major distraction from my usual repertoire of Deathzap, Bolt Action and whatever other strangeness I can play with has been Grimdark Future from One Page Rules.

After realising any decent sized game of 40k was too much for your average evening, or sometimes even a whole day, and after an attempt at the new version of Kill Team had stalled it has been a pretty liberating experience to approach Games Workshop’s model range without having to push through the nightmare that is their rules.

I suppose you’d call Grimdark Future 40k-esque, it follows the same pattern of roll to hit, roll to save, deals wounds (although did that originate with Featherstone?). The only real departure is the alternate activation turn structure as opposed to the Igo-Ugo of 40k. One thing I think the One Page Rules team has done very successfully is make it so each army has enough flavour that they feel right, without you becoming bogged down in too many additional and largely unnecessary rules. My Khorne army feels very different to my friend’s Blood Angels army, despite them being fundamentally the same (angry, red space marines), but they definitely also feel like they should.

The core of any 40k-esque game is here. All your weapons have a pretty short range and you’ll have a diverse array of units with wildly different abilities, so you need to plan ahead to get the right units to the right locations to perform the tasks that you built them for. Unlike 40k though Grimdark has hugely added tactical depth in the alternate activation turn structure as now you have to prioritise the order in which you perform those tasks. Or by the time you get to a unit at the end of the turn it may already be crippled to the point it can no longer perform its function.

The best thing about Grimdark is that it makes you nostalgic. You remember afternoons spread out on your bedroom floor, surrounded by dice, badly made cardboard buildings and precious, plastic heroes and playing Warhammer (sort of). I say ‘sort of’ because you know you weren’t playing the game as intended. 40k now is too complicated, too rules heavy to stir up those same feelings, but Grimdark Future isn’t, it’s the game you are actually nostalgic for.

You can play Grimdark Future for free, so if you have any 40k forces or Mantic Warpath forces I’d highly recommend giving it a go. You can support One Page Rules through patreon if you’d like and that gets you access to models for 3D printing, all of the full expanded rulebooks (which are great and clarify a few things but they are definitely not necessary to get playing) and also their unit builder so you can stat up any figures you have available and get playing with them too!

If I was Games Workshop I’d seriously be considering a streamlined version of 40k for 10th Edition along the same lines as Grimdark, it’s certainly the reason 8th did so well and got so many back into the ‘hobby’.