I Have Built a Shrine to Warhammer 40,000: Conquest the Card Game

The peace of great churches be for you,
Where the players of loft pipe organs
Practice old lovely fragments, alone.

“For You,” Carl Sandburg

Several times a year I’ll break one of my old decks out, deal out a flop of five planets and deal myself a theoretical hand. I’ll do this simulation with a particular deck over the course of several days, seeing if I can remember how the scheme for a particular build fits together. Flexing the multiple layers of situational analysis I taught myself when one of my Conquest rivals was across the table waiting to bury me in aggression and dispiriting counterplays.

Warhammer 40,000: Conquest playmats that came with collections I bought up in 2016 when the game got discontinued. Serious players were hanging it up because the game would no longer be supported by Fantasy Flight. I was just learning and wanted every piece of it I could get my hands on.

I test dealt several opening scenarios recently with my Packmaster Kith deck. She was a Khymera herder from a faction known back then as the Dark Edar. Now they’re Drukhari. By the third deal, I was remembering the synergy of the cards in the build and let a low whistle out: “This shit is mean.” This was the kind of deck I started building after I got my fill of losses incurred by my early tendency to build thematic decks full of weird, expensive, fussy bank shots instead of going for the jugular with more obvious or effective choices.

I may turn ol’ Kith loose on Rygar or The Don, who still indulge me in a game now and again. I gave them two of my most murderous builds to learn with and fielded some of my more experimental second-tier decks while they cut their teeth. They learned quickly and clobbered me. Recently they have both also touted their unbeaten record. I think it’s time to give them a new view of just how real shit can get in the Traxis Sector.

In the meantime, I have the satisfaction of having improved this long and rectangular old living room with a pleasant arrangement of artifacts from my number one game of all time. I mounted some playmats and got some card frames up, and I’m happy every time I look at it. It’s the least I can do for a game that has given me so much, and may yet provide a thrill or two before the sector falls dark.

AppleHammerBee’s 40K Fiction

Disclaimer: Like Games Workshop would have anything to do with this. Nobody is going to make money off this half-assed travesty. Come on, let's use our brains here.

Assistant Shift Sister Leader Sergeant Ashleighcus paused for a moment, isolating and quickly analyzing the all-feeds vox chatter in their helmet.

Pandemonium in the pits of the Microwave Banks. 65% already reporting in high as hell.

The squad doing a sweep of the Dumpitorium was on the verge of breaking, reporting chudsplatter that somehow reached the three-foot mark of a wall. 

"This…this shouldn't be possible!" came the Sanitation Militarum commander's voice, crackling in and out. "Who could have done this?"

"Shut it down," they barked, cold and gravelly. "Let the rest shit their pants boothside like the others."

Not losing their focus on squad comms, they sidestepped a wave of shitlings who had escaped their booth containment.

It was then that Squad Host Fetal Benjamin, with whom they doggedly had maintained line of sight through the horror of early lunch, turned grimly to face them from his station. He didn’t have to say anything. Not 20 yards away, the first waves of doughy evangelicals disembarked from their shiny transports, milling about in benign-looking patterns that belied their utter lethality.

Another Sunday. Another slaughter.

They could feel their Greater Flair Gland — implanted within them via a Sanctioned PowerPoint delivered centuries ago, but still as fresh as a grill burn — responding instantaneously, blasting precious Auxiliary Fucks into their bloodstream.

This is the kind of trial that would have splintered an Applebee's.

But Store #773 was no normal Applebee's.

This was an Applebee's Astartes.