--- title: "Learn Warhammer with cage fights" subtitle: "Not real-life cage fights" author: Seth Kenlon publish_date: 2025-01-06 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: warhammer_space-marine-troops-by-games-workshop-1600x800.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: gaming tag: [gaming, tools, tip, wargame] --- Once you learn the rules to **Warhammer 40,000**, you're in for a nasty surprise. To play the game, you also have to learn the rules for your army. You need to know your army special rules, you need to know your warlord's enhancements, detachment stratagems, unit and character abilities, plus the core stratagems from the main rulebook. Not only that, but you may also need to keep in mind any variety of special rules, such as enveronmental dangers, objective traits, shipboard computer effects, and so on, specific to the mission you're playing. It's too much data to keep in your head, and it comes from too many disparate sources for you to track as you play. The answer is to simplify. Work your way up to fullscale **Warhammer 40k** so you can learn and remember its rules over time, while at the same time having a lot of fun playing the game. There are tabletop board games out there with literally one or two rules, and they're great fun. But most have at least a 10 or 20 page rulebook, while D&D and other roleplaying games often take up 100 or 200 pages. Strangely, the word count used to describe how to play a game doesn't always reflect how complex the game is. It may be that the rules writers have a bad habit of using too many words to convey simple concepts (usually, to be fair, for fear of ambiguity), or conversely that an infinitely complex concept can be conveyed in just a few words. The **Warhammer 40,000** game engine itself is surprisingly simple. It takes about 30 pages to explain (and that's not accounting for gross verbosity and graphic design), but in **White Dwarf** issue 490 there was a 1-page (front and back) cardstock rules summary, so the rules are definitely not overwhelming. Repetition is the mother of expertise, and with either the full rules or the 1-page summary, you can learn the game by playing with just the core rules initially. The more you play, the more familiar you become with the main game loop (Combat, Movement, Shoot, Charge, Fight) and the loops within each of those (such as roll to hit, roll to wound, roll to save). Once those loops are down to muscle memory, you can add in further complexity, such as stratagems, or individual model stats, and so on. Here's how I do it. ## 1. The basic cage fight Grab two miniatures. Place them on the table. Have them fight to the death using **Warhammer 40,000** rules. Don't use Combat Points, stratagems, enhancements, or any special ability. Use only the weapons listed on the miniature's datasheet. Repeat this process. Often. This is an almost reductive version of the game, but it forces you to get familiar with model datasheets and with the attack sequence. Personally, when I was doing this to learn, I didn't bother with movement distances. Models were either at range or they were in melee. The point of a cage fight is to get good at shooting (using the Ballistics Skill, or BS, stat) and fighting (using the Weapon Skill, or WS, stat). There's also the benefit that this only requires two miniatures, so if you're just testing the waters to find out whether you even enjoy **Warhammer 40,000** this requires minimal investment. It could be that you don't enjoy **Warhammer 40,000**, and that's alright because there are lots of other miniature wargames by Games Workshop, Osprey, Warlord, Snarling Badger, and so on, that you may like more. ## 2. Fight club Once you're bored with a cage fight, it's time to level up. A fight club is a formalized cage fight, using special rules from your army's index or from the core rulebook. Setup is the same. Grab two miniatures, place them on a table, and fight to the death. This time, each one starts with 1 Command Point (CP), and earns 1 CP each round as usual. Any relevant stratagem, enhancement, or special ability is fair game. Some may not apply (Deep Strike doesn't really work in a one-on-one battle, for instance), but use the ones that make sense. With all these new rules in place, the fight is likely to take longer than before, not because the fight itself lasts longer but because you're spending more time looking up rules. The fight is also liable to be unbalanced, because one miniature's special abilities may be more useful in this context than the other's. If that's the case, then add another miniature to the weaker side when you run the fight again. After a while, you'll likely have added miniatures to each side in a back-and-forth attempt to balance the combat. Once you have 3 or 4 miniatures on each side, you're essentially playing a skirmish game. A skirmish wargame is one that treats each miniature as an individual, rather than as a unit ((or "squad" or "troop") the way **Warhammer 40,000** [sort of] does. To play a skirmish battle, ignore the Unit Cohesion rule. Each miniature is its own unit, and can move independently of its team members. Continue to use all the special rules. By this point, you've probably memorised many of the general strategems, and probably many of the special abilities of each miniature. ## 3. Play the actual game Once you're playing **Warhammer 40,000** with 8 or 10 miniatures on the table, and you're using all the rules, you're basically playing **Warhammer 40,000**. At this point, you can add in actual units of miniatures as defined on the datasheets (a unit of 10 Skitarii Rangers, or a unit of 5 Space Marine Intercessors, and so on). These units respect Unit Coherency, and move around the table together, but each miniatures makes an individual attack based on the weapon it has equipped. In short, there's a cage fight embedded within every game of **Warhammer 40,000**, because ultimately it comes down to 1 miniature attacking another 1 miniature, even though you may be rolling 4 or 5 or 9 attacks (1 attack for each functionally identical miniature) at once, and the defender gets to decide which 1 miniature (or group of functionally identical miniatures) rolls to save. ## Every journey begins with a cage fight Pitting 2 miniatures against each other using the combat rules you're desperately trying to learn is a great way to engrain a game system into your memory. You might think it's no different than playing a game with 30 miniatures on the table, because after all with more miniatures you're repeating the process that many more times, right? In practise, those 30 miniatures usually have unique rules that muddle up the process. Reduce the variance, and fight it out with 2 miniatures first. Do that a lot, until the system is second nature. Then add in extra rules and extra miniatures. It works every time.

All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.