Thursday, December 10, 2009

Rounding Off 40k

The other day I was thinking about how I could re-laminate this really great 5 foot round table I got as a castaway from a school and turn it into my main dining room table. Often as it does, my mind wandered off to gaming, and I started thing of many alternate uses for such an item. The most obvious was as a card or board game table, because surely you couldn't play 40k on it, could you?...
That got me really thinking. First off, was it big enough? well doing some quick math I found the surface are to be 19.625 sq. feet. (3.14x radius squared) that equals a table that roughly 4ft x 5ft. Not bad for small to medium games. A 6ft table would give you 28.26 sq ft; roughly 4 sq ft larger than a 6x8 table.
Next was deployment zones. I did a quick mock-up in google sketchup, here's what I have so far:



Now this is an example of the 5 ft table quartered with a 12" deployment zone shown in light green. Having a circumference of 15.7 ft, you could divide up the zones for any number of players easily. Want to make infiltrating more challenging and random? Mark off roughly 15 ft around the table edge, then assign then numbers between 3 and 18. When your infiltrating reserves come in roll 3d6. That will change your strategy.
I see a lot of potential for some fun games on a round surface, but there are some downsides too. Castling up would be a bit trickier. No more hiding arty or objectives in the corners. A devastator squad in the center would have range everywhere on the table. And lastly, not everyone has access to a round table.

I think I will have to experiment more on this subject, in the meantime tell me what you think or if there is something glaring that I missed in my ramblings.

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