Since JoyToy released its first licensed Warhammer 40,000 action figures back in 2021, fans have been united behind a single dream – if you somehow had two armies of these massive figures, could you play a giant game of Warhammer with them? Warhammer fan Chris Tilley and his friends brought that dream to life at Illinois game store Fantasy Books and Games earlier this year, in a titanic showdown between the Ultramarines and Sons of Horus.
“It started as a joke with the Horus Heresy group I play with”, Tilley admits. “I had mentioned my collection of JoyToy Warhammer 40k action figures, and John” – another player in Tilley’s group, “brought up that we should do a Kill Team game with them”.
That first plan got rewritten when the group realised “none of us knew or played Kill Team”. But they did know Zone Mortalis, a set of variant rules for Horus Heresy that allow you to play games with small forces in the cramped corridors of bunkers or space ships – equivalent to Warhammer 40k’s rules for Boarding Actions.
John and Tilley ran a game “with an off-the-cuff version of Zone Mortalis”, using “about 900ish points per player”. They used the written stats from the Heresy rulebooks, but “doubled the number of wounds and movement speeds”, and “ignored range restrictions since the models were so big”.
The pair faced off in a Loyalist vs Traitors grudge match: “John played the Sons of Horus and I played the Ultramarines”, Tilley says. The pair “had to play fast and loose with the lore accuracy”, he admits, “but Rule of Cool beats everything”.
The Sons of Horus fielded Horus Lupercal himself, plus four Justaerin Terminators and three Indomitus Terminators, while the Ultramarines had Roboute Guilliman, six Indomitus Terminators, and three Assault marines represented by JoyToy’s Vanguard Veteran figures. There isn’t a JoyToy model for Guilliman during the heresy, so Tilley used the Warhammer 40k Primarch version, wearing the Armor of Fate.
“I really wanted to make sure the Primarchs fought each other”, Tilley says, so he and John agreed on a scoring system to make a Primarch duel the best way to win the game. Holding an objective was worth one point, “killing the enemy Primarch was worth five, and killing the enemy Primarch with your own Primarch was worth ten”.
The “five-round game took about an hour to finish”, Tilley says. “The Ultramarines were able to use their numbers to hold more objectives, but the Sons of Horus were able to steamroll everything in their path and kill Guilliman, which won them the game”, he explains. “Justerain Terminators are really good in melee and Horus is nearly unstoppable in a duel”, he adds.
Though the game didn’t have any truly epic moments, “having Guilliman and Horus duel each other was pretty fun”. The pair made the most of playing a game using action figures instead of static miniatures: “Any model that was killed was kept on the table, and posed so it looked like it had been slain in the heat of battle”, Tilley says.
Tilley and his friends are exploring ideas for improving on the game, “like having some kind of tag team wrestling match where there are different teams that duel each other and players can ‘tag out’ their character for another”.
He also has a pre-order in place for the utterly colossal Imperial Knight figure JoyToy is making. He’s considering running a scenario “like those boss fights in Metal Gear Solid where a single infantryman has to fight a big robot”.
This is probably the most expensive way to play Warhammer out there, short of paying a commission painter to paint your entire army to competition standard. While the JoyToy range has figures from several Warhammer 40k factions, the great majority of them are from the Space Marine chapters, so the dream of massive-scale Kill Team remains elusive… for now.
If you’re interested in using action figures in wargaming, the world of indie Gundam games may be a good place to start. The fangames Mecha Stellar and 30 Minute Missions Wargame both offer rules for playing with chunky Gunpla kits. We also covered a custom fangame recently that involves shooting Gundam figures with an actual airgun!
Source: Wargamer
