So what's a fan to do? It's been over a month since I aired some of my grievances in this post. A month and a half of staring at cabinets full of 40K miniatures. Each shelf reminding me of a particular project unfinished. They're always unfinished. Grand thoughts of collecting 2,000 pt. armies turned into buying sprees, then assembled models, then partially painted armies. Even the models weren't the full 2,000 points most of the time, due mostly to the changing editions and codices. Changes of those magnitudes meant portions of my already assembled/painted armies were less viable, and sudden additions to codices meant new models, keeping me in a constant state of consumption just to keep up. Like a Warhammer 40K version of the Red Queen Hypothesis, haha.
I had mentioned before a thought that had occurred to me as a possible solution to this. I was going to watch and see how GW handles this rules edition. Will they update all the codices before shifting editions? If so, I could snatch up the various 6th ed codices and just play 6th ed, regardless of future updates. Remove the constantly changing environment, as it were, so that progress made in various armies actually felt like progress. It would be foolish of me to put all my eggs in that basket, though, so let's look at an alternative...
The M42 Project
SandWyrm of The Back 40K started this project a while ago, out of a desire to not sit idly by while GW runs Warhammer 40K into the ground. The idea is open-source, in a way, and so far freely available. He's working on developing a full alternative rule-set to this type of platoon-level war gaming, drawing inspiration from several different systems in order to make one cohesive and competitive set. There's a sizable collection of pdf's detailing the available rules as they currently stand. Click here for a synopsis on what M42 is all about.
This is definitely something I'm keeping an eye on, as it would arrive at a similar solution to my above GW-reliant scenario, but with the added benefit of not relying on GW. ;) Bonus that the rules here seem much more well thought-out.
