Here is an instructional battle report between the two Inquisitors above and their warbands.
In the beginning of the game you will turn over cards from four different decks. The first one is the terrain card and each card give a layout for how the pieces of terrain will be set up.
This was what we got for this game:
Next each player divides their warband into three groups. We call these groups the Eye, the Hand and the Finger.
The finger is represented by a daggar on the deployment card, the hand by a hammer and the eye by a shield.
You then determine which player will be the red player and which will be the blue player and then pull a deployment card.
In this case the blue player started with his eye in the center of the board, his hand in the lower left corner and his finger in the upper right corner. The Red player started with his eye in the middle of the right hand side of the board, his hand in the center of the upper side of the board and his finger in the center of the lower side.
The next card we drew was for the scenario. This was find the hidden vault. Players had to roll off to see who was the attacker and who was the defender. The Red team, the Orthodox inquisitor, was the defender and got to place 4 objectives on the table. These were possible hidden portals to the vault, or for our narrative purposes, the webway.
Then they noted down which one of them was actually the portal in secret to be revealed at the end of the third turn.
So the strategy was for the defender to defend the actual portal without making it look like that is the one they were defending.
After that we drew a twist card and this just prevented the players from having a wild dice in the first turn.
So onto the combatants.
The red player's army cards looked like this:
The blue players's army cards looked like this:
Other than having the stats and the list of abilities and being a convenient place to track wounds the cards don't have any real use in the game and could just be on a sheet.
The little cards with three spaces on them under the other cards indicate where multiple models of a certain type are on the board.
I like the cards as they do give you a nice place to put wounds. I better like them because they were expensive to make and print.
At the start of each game turn players roll 6 dice and collect multiples and singles. The blue player rolled Four 4's, a 5 and a 6. The Red player rolled Four 2's and a 4 and 5. That gave each player a quad and two singles.
The singles are used for initiative so in this case it was a tie and the players had to roll off. The quad is used to activate the abilities on the ability card or any of the universal abilities.
The Blue player went first and used his quad to have the acolyte use his flame staff to blast the Red player's inquisitor and inqusitorial stormtroopers doing 4 wounds to each of them. He then advanced towards the objective.
The Red player then activated his priest who used his quad to use the Overcharged Plasma ability and did 4 points of damage to one of the bounty hunters on the Blue side. He then moved and fired his plasma pistol hitting that same bounty hunter twice and killing her.
Each model gets two activations and can also use an ability by spending a multiple. They can move, shoot, fight in close combat or get out of close combat for the actions. So his actions were move, then move and used the Flame Blast ability.
Each player then took it in turn to activate a model. The Red player's subjugator charged the blue player's squat. When a model is charged and there is an enemy within 1" they cannot use shooting weapons that have a range over 1".
During the turn the players tried to move their models so that they were close to the objectives or in an advantageous position vs. another fighter.
At the end of the first turn the player's cards looked like this:
Blue player:
You can see that one model has been eliminated and is on her card. As you will note there are multiple bounty hunters armed identically with pistol and dagger. She is placed on the card in one of the slots.
You can also see from the markers that the squat has taken 4 wounds and the acolyte has taken 10.
Red player:
The red player came off a little better with no models dead but a few banged up including the inquisitor who had 4 wounds this turn.
The second turn of the game was more bloody with both inquisitors involved in melee.
The orthodox Inquisitor was a better swordsman than the radical and dispatched his opponent, but not before the servitor crushed the life out of a stormtrooper.
The medicae rushed in to help the acolyte but she was too late.
It would now be up to the Blue team inquisitor to use his Reanimation ability if he wanted the acolyte to fight on, which he did.
At the end of the second turn we have
and
Things have evened out some with both sides having two models dead.
In the third turn the tides of fate really turned against the radical Inquisitor and his 6 dice resulted in a straight, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 so no multiples. Great for initiative but pretty bad for getting some abilities. Fortunately the Inquisitor had reanimated the acolyte last turn, albeit with only 2 wounds.
The Orthodox did better and ended up with a double and a triple.
At the end of the game the Red side controlled two objectives and the blue only one with a fourth occupied by neither.
The defender then revealed the objective that was the real portal and it was the one near the Orthodox inquisitor meaning they won the game by controlling the actual portal.
At the end of the game the cards looked like this:
Obviously the Blue team came off a lot worse than the Red. The former lost 6 models while the latter only lost 3. This has no impact on the outcome of the game, had it been reversed the Red player would still have won as long as their inquisitor controlled that objective, but if you are playing a campaign game it may have an impact.