Hi there. My stuff has arrived, and my friend and I were looking through the cards and ships I have, and the suggested setups for them on the internet and we realised that pretty much every game was going to be the same for the near future, so we came up with the following army-choosing procedure to shake it up a bit and keep us on our toes.

1) Choose Imperial or Rebel

2) Split off Imperial cards for the Imperial player, and Rebel cards for the Rebel player

3) Divide the mutual cards into 3 rows - one rebel, one mutual and one imperial.

(hardcore mode is all non-faction specific cards are mutual)

The armies are chosen in turns, flip a coin to see who goes first. Take it in turns to chose either:

1) One ship

2) Up to three squadrons

3) Up to two cards, but the cards must be put on a purchased ship.

Objectives, initiative and terrain are decided in the usual way. Bidding for initiative is surprisingly tense this way.

This nicely prevents the armies from being too similar, and army choosing strategies come into play - if you want to delay purchasing ships by buying squadrons first, then you will get a slightly worse choice of gear. If you want a power set up (Demolisher+ACMs) then you'd better make your opponent aware of your intentions early!

This is not for tournament practice, but if you have a limited supply of ships and want to push them around while drinking beer, it is actually a kinda cool way to set up the game.

Sounds like a good fair concept for when you have only a small card pool or 1 core/expansions

Oh! I would recommend that you build the list in secret afterwards so that you both don't just grab things to counter the others list

How are you dividing cards in step 3?

I imagine it could get a little awkward if Imperials got AP or Rebels got ACM.

Oh! I would recommend that you build the list in secret afterwards so that you both don't just grab things to counter the others list

That's actually the entire point. As you take it in turns to build the list, you have to plan the order of your purchases to get the best gear, but not give the game away to your opponent so they counter your plan. It gets very intense, like playing poker.

That's called tough titty. Part of the fun is adapting to an uncertain situation and designing your list around the fact that you got s***ty luck and ended up getting lots of ordinance upgrades as rebels. Mind you, at least the imperials didn't get them. Realistically though, only 1/3 of all mutual cards are unavailable to you. There is always something you can do with your ship, especially given you have 100% use of all faction specific characters and titles.

This may seem like a weird way to play if you are used to planning out tournament lists on the internet in advance, but as a long-term 40k player I really wish I had a game that was more fluid with wargear choices, improvisations and combos than 40k is. This method of choosing armies really adds to the intelligence level of the game, as you have to create good situations out of a potentially unpredictable environment.

Please some people bust out the beer and pretzels over the next week or so with a buddy and give this a go. We had a lot of fun, I hope you can too.

I wasn't criticising - just asking. How do you divide them? Is it random? Or is it a draft? Or some other method?

May I suggest you take the upgrade, teams and officer cards, mix them in a giant pile and divide it to 2. I do that with my sister.

I wasn't criticising - just asking. How do you divide them? Is it random? Or is it a draft? Or some other method?

Sorry, my bad.

Just shuffle them and deal them out like you are playing poker.

do a bidding thing like in powergrid, with a future market and draw pile.

Oh god, this is getting too complex! Noo shut it down! Shut it down! It cant happen!

One alternate objective card selection method I used recently is something like this:

Shuffle, draw 3 objective cards.

First player discards one of the objective cards.

Second player chooses from the remaining two.