Glory-seeker Missions, glorious games – An alternate set of missions for 40k 8th edition

Goals

Create a mission system that favours players that play complete games filled with memorable moments.
Have a scoring system that rewards daring plays and offers plenty of space for player narrative.
Craft a system that allows experienced and inexperienced players to face-off and still result in an engaging and exciting game for both parties.
Offer a mission package that favors a diverse array of unit types and army compositions, forcing players to spend a lot of time creating armies that balance firepower and mobility as well as burst damage and long-term sustainment. Specialized lists should face both a very favorable mission and another that puts them at a severe disadvantage. Take-all-comers lists should be able to shine on all kinds of missions.

Uncertainty of scoring, no real guarantees are given, but players are in direct control of increasing their odds of scoring high on a mission.

References: The board game War of the Ring, where players fight to corrupt or save frodo with their in-game actions. Victory is uncertain for both sides up until the very end, but player actions can increase the likeness of their victory by adding purity/corruption tokens in the shuffle bag that determines the final outcome.

Daring plays, there should be a system that takes the focus away from the main mission itself and rewards players for creating bold and high-risk, high-reward situations. Taking the players out of their comfort zones and offering multiple paths to victory.

Reference: The multiple mission system of Scythe offers a diverse path to claiming overall victory. Gaslands also offers interesting rubber-banding mechanics that allows players that perform poorly to have some handicaps with their audience vote feature.

Opponent interaction, the secondary mission system devised below aims at both forcing players to actively think about their upcoming match-up but also opens up room for some mind-games and bluffing.

Reference: In Star Wars: Armada players craft a set of objective cards to tag along with their fleets. At the beginning of each game one of the players will have to select a mission from his opponents set of choices, opening space for interactions and forcing players in the minds of their adversary.

Unique reserve and deployment rules, favoring different unit and army building types to reward well-rounded and balanced armies but also allows for deep specialization.

Each battle is composed of several factors and objectives that offers players with ways to accumulate Victory Points.

The Primary Mission defines the table set-up, how armies are deployed and each has a unique way to score victory points.
The Secondary Mission is chosen by your opponent from two options that you give them, but their decision is kept secret until the end of the third battle round!
The Glory Contest is an ongoing dispute between players to see who can score the most glory points and can earn a variable amount of extra victory points!
Killing the Warlord, as usual, also scores victory points.

On each tournament round one global Primary Mission is selected for all players.
These missions detail their unique deployment, initiative and victory conditions on their mission sheets.
These missions always have a winner, with detailed tie-breakers in their mission sheet.
The player that is declared winner of the Primary Mission earns 3 Victory Points.
The loser earns no victory points.

Before the beginning of the first battle round each player must pick two options from the Secondary Mission table and hand their choices to their opponent.

Their opponents will then secretly choose and note one of the two presented choices to be valid, the other will be ignored.
This choice is kept secret until the start of the fourth battle round, when both players reveal their choice to their opponent.
From the fourth battle round and on, any player who meets the requirements of the secondary mission at the game’s end (be it on the 4th or 5th round) are considered to have completed their secondary mission.
Those that complete their secondary mission earn 3 victory points.
Games that are not completed to end of the fourth battle round are not eligible to score secondary mission goals.

The Glory Contest allows players to accumulate glory points for meeting a varied set of conditions on each Battle Round.

At each Battle Round players may score glory points for meeting the criterion listed on the global glory list or in the current Battle Round glory list.
Each Glory can only be fulfilled once per Battle Round, but there is no limit to how many glories can be fulfilled at total.
Each Glory has an associated Glory Points keep a tally of how many Glory Points are earned by each player throughout the game.
At the end of the last Battle Round, players must add up all the glory points they scored and begin the Glory Contest. Each player sets aside a dice pool with one dice for each glory point they have.

Each player then picks up one dice from the pool and make a roll-off. The winner of the roll-off scores one Victory Point. Ties award Victory points for both players!
If one player has more dice on his pool than the other he then rolls all remaining dice and scores a Victory Point for every 4+.

Each player then adds up all their victory points (VP) to determine the final battle result.

You can find all needed documentation to play and run this mission packet on the links below: