I’m back in 2nd edition 40k, and this time it’s the combat phase—the bit that was genuinely a triumph of early-’90s Games Workshop design. While movement and shooting had their little “gotchas”, melee was a lovely, brutal mini-game: pick a combat, roll your Attacks, build a combat score off Weapon Skill, stack modifiers like charging or being higher up, and then watch the winner dump the difference in hits onto the loser. Add parries, initiative tie-breakers, and that tiny-but-deadly 2" follow-up move, and suddenly the table feels like two rotting stags locking antlers in a misty forest. Allegedly. I also dig into why it worked: powerful characters could blender a couple of models, but if you got surrounded you’d get mugged—because outnumbering let you choose fight order and pile on cumulative bonuses. Then I do my duty as a man of impeccable “journalistic integrity” and point out the pain points: base-to-base contact arguments (ruins cheese, anyone?), unclear sequencing assumptions, and modifier edge cases. Finally, I talk wargear variety (power swords vs fists, thunder hammers, lightning claws), the utter menace that was Jain Zar and her mask nonsense, and why the whole system didn’t scale once armies got big—sometimes the only sensible resolution was two adults negotiating casualties like it’s a cooperative hobby night, not competitive chainsaw polo.