Horus Heresy: Challenges – It’s Time to Duel To The Death
Get ready for the Challenges to take over your melee scrums in Warhammer: The Horus Heresy. It’s time to duel!
If you’ve ever wanted to have your Primarch throw down with another Primarch but all the pesky Space Marines got in the way, well, it’s about to change. There’s a new Challenge sub-phase coming and it’s where your duelist characters can shine.
“Up until now, these confrontations weren’t really replicable on the tabletop – sure, the Primarchs have impressive stats and loads of special rules, but while they could certainly knock lumps out of one another, they hadn’t been duelling. Until now.
The new Challenge sub-phase makes these into the pivotal confrontations they should be.”
Challenges and Duels in the Horus Heresy
With the new Challenge sub-phase characters are going to get the opportunity to duke it out on the tabletop. It’s an extra step in the Assault Phase and where players can issue one challenge per combat as long as a character is in the combat.
The opponent can accept or decline the challenge. If they decline, then a character must step back from the combat and take a penalty to their combat prowess for that turn. If they accept things get a bit more interesting…
“Once the challenge is accepted, the two combatants are then separated from the wider fight and face off.”
The players get to choose different Gambits for these combatants to use during their duel. Below are a few examples to choose from:
” There are nine universal Gambits, which offer defensive and offensive boosts, as well as several that are unique to Legions and characters. “
Once you and your opponent choose your Gambits, you then make a focus roll to determine who’s got the striking priority. You’ll roll those dice and add your Initiative and any of the Gambit or other modifiers to the roll. The winner then gets an extra attack as well as strikes first!
It’s worth noting that only models with the Command or Champion sub-type may issue and accept challenges. Also, if the active player doesn’t issue a challenge, the other player can initiate a duel using the Heroic Intervention reaction, too!
There are ways to get bonuses to your Focus Roll as mentioned above. There’s also other penalties you can incur as well. Be sure you check your wargear and see what options you’ve got before you go off issuing duels!
It’s Time To Duel?
I’m going to be honest here: I don’t like this challenge system. This is my personal preference and bias showing through here. I get what GW is going for here as these duels can be super cinematic and lead to some amazing game play moments. However, I have a bad feeling about players are going to do with this system. It feels like there’s going to be a lot of high-powered combat duelist running around looking for a fight. But then there’s going to be a lot of “chump-champs” in the same combats who are going to be sacrificed to these duelists as other characters destroy the squad. So you’ll either have accept the duel with the a sacrificial lamb or just lose out on your duelists abilities.
I really hope I’m wrong about this one. Ideally, there’s more to the combat rules that I’m just not seeing here. But as of right now I’m not hyped about having to deal with the challenges in this way. Challenges feel like yet another extra layer of rules added into the game that is just going to take up more time. I would like to see this in action before I make a final judgement as to the challegne system. But I’m starting to worry that all these extra steps are just going to start to get in the way of playing games of Horus Heresy.
The return of Advanced Characteristics and Challenges? Oh boy…
