Apocalypse Missions 2016: A Variation on Personal Objectives

In ever Apoc game I host, I always try to mix things up a little bit so that things are a little unique to each game.  In doing so, we’ve found a variety of little tweaks to implement over the years.  Some that make a pretty consistent showing include the use of chess clocks and the one for personal objectives.   This particular Apoc game involved both of these, but as the chess clocks had literally no change from the previous iterations, I’ll skip over how that worked.  Instead, I’d like to focus on Personal objectives as we put in another additional twist this game.

First, I should say that my friend Sam came over and helped to plan the missions out.  We decided this time that there was no need for traditional “grab and hold” style team objectives, and instead assigned a quantity of points to each of a series of “personal objectives.”  At the end of the game, each team was to earn points equal to the total points earned by each player.

Our goal was to give each player a different way to “win” without forcing them into a specific role.  Based upon feedback we’d received in previous games, we made changes in the objectives that were given and how they were given out.  In previous games we had some objectives that were largely considered “bad” (such as “in defense of defense” and “pacifism,” of which you can see more details here).  We tried to make all of the missions (except one) be something that people could achieve and likely have some fun with.   We tried to create missions with flexibility as we were unsure what the opponents would be fielding (so having a mission that was all about killing psykers when your opponent had no psykers would prove problematic).  Lastly, we decided to have the “General” (a volunteered/nominated team leader) of each side get to see all of the missions and then hand them out to everyone at the start of the game based upon their army composition.

The missions (And rules given to each commander ) we came up with were as follows:

++++ BEGIN FIRST RULES BLURB ++++

After the draft has been completed, the commander will divvy out personal objectives to the members of his team. These objectives will be hidden from other players, so only you and the player holding a given objective will know what it is. There is a rule to allow them to share that information at a penalty later.

Although these objectives can’t be shared by players throughout the game, you will know at the onset which objectives were given to each of your team mates. Though you’re not allowed to share with the team who has which objective, you can certainly encourage people to deploy or target certain areas of the field instead of others. (ie. “Hey Bob, maybe you should concentrate your fire on the infantry there and let Rick take out that titan…”).

The summary of each of the objectives is listed below. NOTE: for “Earth Shaker, there is an additional special rule that you know of, but is not known to the person who has the card. It is written in red below.

• Earth Shaker (-5)
  • Earn 2 points for each enemy fortification you destroy during the game. AT THE END OF THE GAME, YOUR TEAM GETS A +25% BONUS TO ALL VICTORY POINTS AT THE END OF THE GAME. (the +25% bonus should remain a secret until the end of the game when tallying up the score—if it comes out earlier, no bonus will be given—so you should keep this sheet secret from the rest of your team).
• Hammer of the Gods (-2)
  • Earn 3 points for each enemy superheavy destroyed during the course of the game.
• Stand Your Ground (-4)
  • At the end of the game, earn 10 points if you control one unit within 6″ of the Imperial Statue and there are no enemy units within 24″. For each enemy unit within the range, subtract one from the earned points.
• Heroes’ Bane (-2)
  • Earn 5 points for each enemy warlord you kill during the course of the game. Due to the difficulty of this mission, the maximum number of points you can achieve for this is not 10, but is rather 20.
• Death from the Skies (-2)
  • Choose one of the following:
    • Earn two points for each enemy flyer destroyed by one of your units during the game. OR
    • Earn one point for each enemy unit destroyed by one of your flyers or flying monstrous creatures during the game.
• Grand Theft Rhino (-4)
  • Earn 3 points for each enemy transport stolen during the game. Your units gain the ability to embark on enemy transports as if they were your own. Your units still need to meet any model size requirements of the transport. Once embarked, you may not fire any of the weapons, but may use fire points normally. Your units ignore the distance that the vehicle previously moved for embarking on them.
• Purge the Witch (-2)
  • Choose one of the following and consult the chart:
    • Earn points for each enemy psyker destroyed by one of your units. OR
    • Earn points for each enemy unit destroyed by one of your psykers.

Total Psykers	Points per kill
1-9	2
10+	1

• EACH Team also has one of the following:
  1. A Penny Saved (-1) —
     • A penny has been placed on each of the buildings. At the end of the game, earn 1 point for each penny that shows TAILS. As you move a unit (via any means) into the footprint of any building, you can choose to flip the penny over. Moving includes normal movement, runs, falling back, consolidation, etc.
  2. A Penny Earned (-1)
     • A penny has been placed on each of the buildings. At the end of the game, earn 1 point for each penny that shows HEADS. As you move a unit (via any means) into the footprint of any building, you can choose to flip the penny over. Moving includes normal movement, runs, falling back, consolidation, etc.

++++ END FIRST RULES BLURB ++++

Additionally, the following rules pertaining to personal objectives were given to each player (plus each player would be given one of the above listed personal objective cards):

++++ BEGIN SECOND RULES BLURB ++++

• Personal Objectives:
  • There will be no team objectives in this mission. Instead, team victory point totals will be determined by adding up each team member’s total points at the end to determine the winning side.
  • Personal objectives will be in use for the game.
  • Personal objectives are missions that apply to each player and will help to set the theme (explaining why a diverse group of armies have appeared to fight on a single battlefield) and gives players an alternate method to achieve victory.
  • The actual objectives will be unique for each player and will be dealt out to each player.
  • Players are not allowed to share their personal objectives with any other participant (including team-mates) until the game is over. If they do so, there will be a penalty to pay:
    • Sharing what your objective is with anyone else before the end of the game will incur a one-time penalty indicated on your objective card.
  • No personal objective can score more than 10 points during the course of the game (though we expect most to score less than that). If a player decides to take the penalty to share his objective with the rest of the team, that penalty counts against the 10 (so thereby reduces the maximum amount of points achievable by a player).Players are encouraged to coerce their team-mates throughout the game to help assist them to accomplish their personal objective. For example: If my personal objective was to destroy all super heavies on the table, I should encourage people to kill those super heavies even if it might not be the best move for my team mate at that particular time. Coercion should be done in such a way that it’s not obvious that I’m trying to get them to complete my objective for me.

 

++++ END SECOND RULES BLURB ++++

Sam and I, though we knew what all of the missions were, opted not to become generals because we had done a significant amount of talking in advance and felt we knew which missions were the best because of it (hint: we both really like “Earth Shaker” despite knowing that there would likely be very few fortifications in the game).  We also thought it was an added element of fun for other players to be the general.

Our goal before the game was to balance each objective so that a team should score roughly 6 points per objective–so each team should end up with roughly 6 points–no matter which one they choose (assuming they all played relatively well).   Since we don’t have much experience designing missions like this, we also included the “no more than 10 points” rule so that one army didn’t tilt the scales (an army of Flyrants basically breaks the “killing a unit with your flyers” or “killing with psykers”).  I won’t spoil the end of the game much, but it turns out that we were relatively close to that goal by the end.  I’ll go more into that at a later date.

For anyone that’s interested, I’ve uploaded the Word format cards that I printed out at this link: Apoc2016Cards. I didn’t spend a long time editing them or making them look particularly fancy, but someone might find some value in these. To print them out, I used Avery template 5871 “Clean Edge Business Cards” to print them out. I”m sure you could just use normal paper and cut it out with scissors though…