When I first encountered the Challenger Cards in the Warhammer 40k 2025 Chapter Approved mission deck, I thought they were pretty innovative – they give players the choice of an extra objective to score or a free Stratagem to use, points or power, a neat little brainteaser. I still think they’re cool, but having tested the steampunk wargame Armoured Clash at the UK Games Expo, I don’t think they’re anywhere near as innovative – and I’m less impressed with how 40k uses cards in general.
Seventh edition Warhammer 40k introduced Maelstrom mission cards, which are the grandfather of today’s Chapter Approved mission decks. Though the details have changed from edition to edition and even from season to season, the central premise is that your secondary objectives are determined by flipping over cards from a deck.
It’s a fun way to randomise elements of a battle, but it feels very much like a bolted on system rather than an integrated part of the game. Having tested Armoured Clash, it seems clear that there are ways to use card decks in wargames that deliver way more interesting gameplay.
Armoured Clash is a 10mm scale mass battle game set in an alternate version of the industrial revolution, turbocharged by sci-fi tech. Human infantry figures are about 20% bigger than the Space Marine Legions models in Legions Imperialis, but the game as a whole will work perfectly with Legions Imperialis terrain – and the Armoured Clash terrain in the pictures above would be amazing for LI. There are already five playable factions, with three more incoming.
Each player in a game of Armoured Clash needs a Command and Conquest (C&C) deck, and you’ll start each turn by discarding any you don’t like from last turn and refilling your hand. These each have a Command, which lets you do something that modifies the normal rules of the game, similar to a Stratagem – and a Conquest, which is a way to score extra victory points, similar to a Secondary Objective.
C&C cards are all numbered between one and 12. When you announce you’re using a Command, your opponent can play one of their own to try to interfere. You reveal your cards simultaneously, and if the number on your opponent’s card is higher, the Command is cancelled.
Those numbers have many other uses. The game uses alternating activations, and at the start of the first turn, both players flip a card from the top of their decks to determine who goes first – high flip wins. For the second and subsequent rounds, players have to choose and play a card from their hand to be their Initiative for the turn, before they draw new cards – if their hand is empty, they automatically surrender the initiative to the opponent.
The card deck is also used for Discipline tests, the equivalent of Leadership tests in 40k. For most armies, it’s tested by turning over a card from the C&C deck and hoping the number is lower than the unit’s Discipline stat. But the soldiers of the British-Empire styled ‘Crown’ faction are more scared of their officers than they are of their enemies, and they can use a card from their hand instead.
All the Warhammer 40k factions interact with the mission deck in the same way (though they will have an easier or harder time completing certain objectives), but the factions in Armoured Clash often have unique ways to use the C&C Deck.
The China-coded Empire can discard Command Cards to ignore the accuracy penalty for shooting across a friendly unit; the mad scientists of the Enlightened can Overcharge their weapons, flipping a C&C card and adding its number in dice to the attack roll, at the risk of blowing themselves up.
The deck even acts as a timer. If you ever run through the deck, you reshuffle it, but from now on you can’t refill your hand – the deck is only used to generate random numbers. If you can force an opponent to take a lot of Discipline tests, you’ll burn through their deck, and eventually rob them of a major resource.
By way of offering full disclosure, I have received review samples of Armoured Clash from the publisher Warcradle Studios: the Battle for Singapore two player starter set, the Enlightened faction starter, two Command and Conquest decks, and a rulebook.
Prior to UK Games Expo, these were glaring at me from my pile of potential. I was honestly worried they would be buried by bigger releases this summer, particularly Horus Heresy Saturnine. But I was so fired up by the demo that I bought another box of minis at the stand just so I could get the giant Crown landship.
Take that as a sign of my poor impulse control, not a full review – though I’m now really hoping to get to one sooner rather than later. Already play Armored Clash? Want to ask me more about what I thought of the demo? Come and say hi in the official Wargamer Discord community!
The other thing to be said for Armoured Clash’s Command and Conquest cards is that they’re not in short supply – unlike the Chapter Approved 2025 decks.
Source: Wargamer
