Multi-Player Free-For-All Battles

Sometimes there are several people who want all to fight a battle at once. You can of course just split up into two groups and play a team game. Lately however we have been experimenting with free-for-all battles with 3 or 4 players on the table at once, all out for themselves! Carnage often ensues with loads of alliances, backstabbing, and sneaky maneuvering for objectives in the final turns. In this post I'm going to outline the simple rules and mission we use in such games, so read on for the details...

The first thing to point out here is that these rules are definitely more a set of guidelines we came up with to keep things flowing smoothly and to keep us entertained. They are not necessarily completely fair, so I wouldn't use them for tournament play (except maybe a 4-way brawl for some kind of finale...?). On the other hand, for a very entertaining game with your mates with a bit of added mayhem, these rules are great. It's an objective-based game designed to encourage players to get stuck in and not hold back.

Setting Up
Firstly, set up your scenery in some mutually agreeable manner and place an objective marker in the dead center of the table.

Deployment zones are shown in the diagrams below. In four-player games, they are located in each corner. For three-player games, they are located in two opposite corners and a short table edge. All edges of deployment zones should be 24" away from the closest edges of neighboring deployment zones (in a straight line) and should have the same width/depth dimensions.

On a 6' x 4' table this all works out to be:

• Three players - a 3' x 1' deployment zone in two opposite corners and one 3' x 1' zone centrally on the short edge furthest from these two corners.
  
• Four players - a 2' x 1' deployment zone in each corner.

 Three Players:

Four Players:

Players then roll off to determine the order in which they deploy and take turns. The highest roller chooses their deployment zone, sets up their army and takes the first turn. Any players who get a draw re-roll against each other to determine the order between them. So for example, four players get a 6, 4, 4 and a 3. The player getting a 6 goes first, the two players who got 4 roll off to determine who goes second and third, and finally the player who got a 3 goes last.

The first player now picks their deployment zone. In a four-way game this is easy - just pick a corner. For three-way games, the first to choose can pick either short edge or any corner. This then determines the locations of the other deployment zones as shown in the diagram above. The player deploys their army and one objective marker inside their chosen zone. The next player then chooses an available deployment zone and deploys their army and objective, and so on until all players have deployed.

You should end up with one objective in each player's deployment zone, and one free objective in the center of the table.

There is no Seize the Initiative roll. This would just get too confusing (who gets to seize initiative from whom?), so to speed things up we just ignore it. Players just take turns in the order rolled initially.

Playing the Game 

From this point we just follow the standard rules for an objective-based game of 40k, with just a couple of things to bear in mind.

• Reserves are rolled for normally. When available, they may move on from the long table edge of your deployment zone in three-way games, or any table edge of your deployment zone for four-way games. We do not allow Outflanking as there is not really any place to outflank from. Units may of course Deep Strike normally.
• Any mention of enemy models/units refer to all models/units on the table that aren't your own - everybody else is the enemy! For example you cannot move within 1" of any model from any of the opposing armies during your movement phase. 
• You can assault multiple enemy units from multiple enemy armies if possible, exactly as if you were assaulting multiple units from the same enemy army. This includes piling in to an existing combat between two enemy units! 
• In any assault phase, all combats are resolved that involve a unit owned by the player whose turn it is. This means potentially a particular combat could be fought in all players' combat phases in a single turn, if all players' had a unit in the mix! 
• For multiple combats involving units from multiple armies, just resolve as a normal multiple combat. For each unit, determine which enemy units they are engaged with and allocate their attacks following the normal rules.

Winning the Game
The player with the most objectives wins the game - simple as that! Objectives are captured or contested as in any other objective based mission. We usually play a variable turn limit as you would in a normal game - starting to roll to see if the game ends from the end of turn five, with a maximum of seven turns.

Let Battle Commence...
So there you have it, a quick and easy method of playing multi-player free-for-all games of 40k. The standard 40k rules work just fine with only a bit of modification around getting things set up. A few questions arise here and there, but they usually aren't hard to answer agreeably - I've tried to cover how we've dealt with the ones we have come across when playing these kinds of games.

If you have a few friends who want to play, you should try a free-for-all. The carnage that ensues can be spectacular to behold as everyone scrambles for the objectives - no-one ends up with much left alive by the end of it.