Boarding Actions

In August 2024, a rulebook called Boarding Actions was released for Warhammer 40,000. Having played a previous iteration of Boarding Actions, I pre-ordered the book the moment it was revealed, and I received it in the mail a month later. For the past 6 months, most of the games of 40k I've played have been using the Boarding Actions rules, and so this is my review of the book and the game.

Normally, a game of Warhammer 40,000 is set on a battlefield. You add buildings or rocks or trees or other obstacles so it's not an entirely open space, and then your little toy soldiers run around and kill each other while capturing the other's flag. Boarding Actions changes that by setting the game in a maze. Usually, the maze is meant to be the halls of a great spaceship, but you can imagine it's the interiour of a building, the winding alleyways of a city, the corridors of a dungeon, or whatever. It seems like a minor change but it's actually surprising how tactics has to adapt for cramped corridors compared to an open battlefield.

To be clear though, the concept of Boarding Actions is as simple as it seems. As long as you already know how to play 40k, I've essentially told you everything you need to know to play Boarding Actions.

Your battlefield is a maze. End of story.

That'll get you 90% of the way there, but of course, it's not entirely everything. The book actually has a heck of a lot to add.

Special rules and exceptions

Boarding Actions has a few special rules. I mean, it's a few paragraphs (8 pages, but it's mostly photos) of special rules. These rules cover everything from the extremely mundane to the esoteric. You get rules for opening and closing doors, and you get rules for how leaders convey their effects onto units they aren't actually attached to. Some of these rules seem obvious when you read them, but when you start playing the game you quickly realise how nice it is to have precise rulings on edge cases you never thought about until putting your miniatures in a maze with corners and doors that open and shut and rooms and control panels and so on.

Small armies and big skirmishes

Warhammer 40,000 is an army game using 60 or 100 models, and Kill Team is a skirmish game for 8 or 10 models. Boarding Actions is the place in the middle. You can play Boarding Actions with half your army, or with a little kill team. I've done both, and it works fine either way.

In fact, there are about 110 pages (a third of the book) of special detachments for each faction. Just like in a standard game, these detachments list which miniatures you can use in your army, what unique Stratagems and detachment special rules they have access to.

The Factions included in the book are:

• Adeptus Astartes
• Adeptus Custodes
• Adeptus Mechanicus
• Adeptus Sororitas
• Aeldari
• Agents of the Imperium
• Astra Militarum
• Death Guard
• Drukhari
• Genestealer Cults
• Great Devourer
• Grey Knights
• Heretic Astartes
• Leagues of Votann
• Legiones Daemonica
• Necrons
• Orks
• T'au Empire
• Thousand Sons
• Tyranids
• World Eaters

That doesn't cover literally all Citadel models ever, but if you have a Warhammer 40,000 army then you probably have models you can muster as part of a boarding patrol. You can't use vehicles or Imperial Knights or very large robots, because they just can't fit in the hallways. There are probably some miniatures that don't appear in the detachments, but I feel like these detachments cover a lot and leave a fair amount of room for substituting a model here and there, or just using a model in place of one you don't have. These are just detachments, after all, not miniature profiles. If you're not bothered about exact points costs and details like that, it's easy enough to approximate a boarding patrol given the examples.

Missions

The other part of the book (140 pages or so) is filled with Boarding Actions missions. All of these, I think, have been published before, either in The Arks of Omen scenario books of the previous game edition or in White Dwarf magazine. I don't know whether they've been updated here or just reprinted in one place, but because I don't own any of the Arks of Omen books, I'm happy to have a compendium.

You might think that missions are pretty easy to come up with yourself, and you'd basically be right. Build a maze, declare some objectives, and play. Having played through a lot of the missions in this book however, I have to say that there are a bunch of clever scenarios that go way beyond just drawing out a maze for you. It's amazing how much extra design you can do when you have a structured, sometimes even linear, game board.

The Furnace features control panels for an incinerator room, which of course is where most of the objectives are.

Empyric Erosion has a mechanic that removes entire bulkheads in late game rounds.

The board in The Red Angel's Wake splits in half under certain conditions, as the ship is torn apart.

The story of each mission is a lot of fun, and the mechanics that go along with the story are almost always a surprise.

Accessories not included

It may sound like Boarding Actions is a self-contained game book but, unlike Kill Team, it's not. Boarding Actions is absolutely an expansion of 40k. For the book to make any sense at all, you must own the 10th edition rules (which are $0 online) and you must have miniature data cards (which are not $0), and you need miniatures.

You also need some kind of modular wall kit so you can build the mazes for each mission. Without walls and doors, the Boarding Actions game mode is meaningless. A few missions feature special walls with removable sections so you can represent breaches that go straight through a bulkhead. I don't have any, and anyway it's basically just as effective to remove the entire wall.

Boarding actions

Boarding Actions is an impressive wargame. It's a fun way to play the game, and in some ways it feels like it has more structure. It literally has more structures (like walls and towers and doors), and I guess it suggests a linear game because it's a maze that you must traverse. In reality, there's as much creativity in Board Actions as in a standard 40k game, but with a lot of built-in obstacles (like walls and doors). This helps (or forces) you to focus your tactics around what you can't do. Very often there are basically only 2 choices. You can stay where you are and wait for your enemy to find you, or you can traverse the maze to hunt down your foe. Because there are limited avenues in both cases, you have clear decisions to make along the way. Do you turn right at that crossing ahead and engage the enemy, or do you turn left and go for the objective? Do you charge into battle, or take a circuitous route around your enemy's position to force them into a better position?

It's an excellent example of how constraints can be a valuable game mechanic. Get the book, assemble a boarding patrol, and go to battle.