So every year Drawbridge Games helps support the Extra Life charity: a window of 24 hours of gaming and fund-raising fun. This year I’m running an event as part of Extra Life, which will be the Eternal Battle at Drawbridge Gulf. It’s a bring-and-play event, and we’re hoping to get as many total points having hit the table as possible during the course of the very long day, to clash in one big 40k game.

Date and Time: November 2nd through 3rd is when the Extra Life game day happens in 2024. At Drawbridge we’ll be running the Eternal Battle 40k game from 8am on the 2nd to 3am on the 3rd. Not the full 24 hours but we’re old. Players can show up at any timing that is convenient to them: I’d love to have folks there for the whole stretch with me, but if you can only show for an hour, that’s of course welcome too.

Game Flow: The game will be one continuous game of Warhammer 40k, where each side’s turn is one hour exactly. We’ll stick to the clock on this pretty strongly, and there are times for a break for both lunch and dinner.

This will use the logic that the Mordian Glory Youtube channel uses for their mega battles: where there may be more points on the table than get used in any given turn, but it represents the units closest to the fighting getting involved. We’ll also have a lot of roadways that can allow models to cover more distance on a turn to place them close to the action for the following turn’s engagement. Each side will have a set of objectives they’re trying to accomplish during the day, and those objectives can change as the game progresses depending on what terrain features the sides decide to explore (to ensure that one side is not immediately just “oh we lost”).

Armies and “Eternal”: There will be two broad sides for this battle, and as players step in and out they can join the appropriate side. That might mean that at times there may be disparities in numbers between the sides, and that’s just fine. As part of the trick to this is that units are all eternal. Once they are destroyed, in their player’s next movement phase the models can be deployed again on the battlefield–and count toward our points totals for the full event. That means that players can join in and have fun whether they are bringing a huge force or just a Combat Patrol worth of models. When players arrive they’ll be placed on a side given the faction they brought and/or the balance of play. Ideally we’ll have the forces line up as follows (note the groups that can be for either side).

We encourage players to bring as many points as they wish to in order to make this a pretty damn epic game, but try to stay within one faction (with some flexibility for units from a closely-allied faction, like a couple of Imperial Knights joining with a larger Blood Angels force). We do ask that people play things as close to WYSIWYG as is possible just to keep confusion at a minimum across so many players and a long day of play. Legends models are allowed as long as they are the GW sculpts of those models.

Extra Life Effects: One of the fun things about Extra Life is that players can make donations to gain extra game benefits. As it’s about the fund-raising ultimately we wanted these to be useful in game.

Other Miscellaneous Notes: All models utilized must be painted to at least three colors, and based is strongly encouraged. Command Points are not used just to keep the battle flowing smooth as we can, so donations are the only way to use Strategems. Please have a roster sheet handy (even if on scratch paper), so when units join the battle or re-join the battle I can update the total participating points total. Also make sure you’ve got a durable source of rules (or a charger if you’re using an electronic source). If you’ve got one-use model rules those things reset if the unit is destroyed and brought back. If you have one-use army-wide rules (like Waaagh) then you can use that rule twice during the game (once in rounds one through four, and once in rounds five through eight).

• Warhammer 40k