Speed Up Your Play – A How-To Guide

by Andrew Gonyo

I’m Andrew Gonyo (“Target” online), longtime tourney-goer, currently on the U.S. ETC Team, and in love with high model count armies. As such, I’ve developed tricks and habits to help speed up play and ensure I get my turns in during tournament games, which in 6th edition is more important than ever.

My two primary armies this year have been the Imperial Guard + Marine variant with two 50-man units of Guardsmen (Blobs), and more recently, my Tau, with what has been termed the “Kroooot paarrrttyyy” consisting of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 Kroot. Both lists take a significant amount of time to deploy, move and shoot, so here’s how I speed things up.

Come prepared: Before you show up to a match, you should have easily accessible: a copy of your army list, the mini rulebook, your codex, and a tray which has all of your models (sometimes a display board) sitting on it, out of the foam. Unpacking, digging through bags to find a list to hand your opponent and similar tasks eat up valuable time you could be using to greet him and get on with rolling for pre-game items.

General Gameplay Tips

Game plans: Spend time during your opponent’s turn or deployment determining what you’re going to do during yours. Staring off into space or pondering themeaning of life won’t speed things up when it’s your turn, and you need to start moving rather than thinking. I also don’t afford myself the luxury of pre-measuring 700 different angles like I see some folks doing―at times you have this luxury with a very low model count army, but with higher counts, in a timed game, you don’t.

clock_imageModel spacing: Don’t stress over spreading out exactly two inches if you can help it; just get it close. For blast placements there’s a fair margin of error on reducing the number of models that can be hit by a template, and you can easily fall within it via eyeballing distances rather than using a TAC to be precise. It’s often helpful to let your opponent know you’ll be doing this, and inform him that you’ll be more than happy to check and correct any coherency issues he sees once you’ve moved the unit. This also usually clears up any feelings of “He’s being sloppy!”

Rules arguments: Solve rules arguments with your opponent. I can’t stress this one enough―at the end of the day, remember that this is a game. You should be familiar with both GW and event-specific FAQs, and if the question isn’t answered and you can’t quickly resolve it with your opponent, two good options exist:
1.Make the subsequent roll (there usually is one) to see if the outcome of your argument even matters
2.D6 it and move on.

If it’s truly important, and you’re positive you’re right, by all means call a judge. But I’ve seen (and had) games absolutely destroyed time-wise by getting a judge involved in every rules question.

Specific High Model Count Advice

Moving: When I move my large units, I measure in the direction I’m moving the “goal posts” of the unit, and usually a model in the middle of the front row. This lets me precisely measure two or three models, and then move the rest of the unit without measuring. I always take care to ensure I’m not bunching up (gaining extra distance), and again, I let my opponent know I won’t be offended if he tells me that I have, and will be more than willing to fix it. I often see Horde players using their TAC to move almost every model in a unit, which wastes large amounts of time. One important note is that before you do this (or move any unit that may be charging, or is potentially getting charged), you should measure the distance before moving anything toward the units in question, so you and your opponent can agree on a potential charge distance. It saves time spent debating distances when it really matters: after a charge roll has been made and everyone is a bit more tense and prone to arguing for that 1/16th of an inch.


Rolling dice: Everyone’s favorite part of the game! During the shooting phase, especially with my guard, I have to roll large batches of dice for 50 models using First Rank Fire, Second Rank Fire. At 24 inches, I’m firing 80+ Lasgun shots per unit! Having to count these every time is obnoxious and cumbersome, so I have five sets of dice, all different colors, 20 of each (and small enough so I can roll them all at once). I count them out pre-game to show my opponent I’m on the up-and-up, and then when I need dice―for instance, let’s say no one in my Blob has died, and I’ve got the normal starting value of 44 Lasguns, firing twice, at 24 inches―I tell my opponent I’m using all of my dice except for 12 red, for a total of 88 dice. Or if the order fails, I’ll say, All right, I’m using all of my black dice (20), white dice (20) and four red dice, for 44. This lets my opponent easily see that I’ve got the correct number, and saves us both the headache of counting this out multiple times every turn.

Casualties and keeping track of morale: One of my tricks is to make sure I set my casualties in an area of the board we aren’t using, or back onto my movement tray, divided into units. So as models die, they get placed to the side and not jumbled with other casualties from other units. This does two things: 1) For the next game, you’ll already have your models half-ready on your tray/display board prior to moving, thus saving cleanup time, and 2) When you need to determine the number of models left in a large unit for a morale check, or how many models are firing, you can simply look over, see that seven guardsmen are sitting dead, and know that you now have 43 models in the unit―not enough for a morale check. You’ve done away with the need to count how many models are left each time.