The vertical lanes represent each team's progress in boarding the space hulk. Progress is determined by games played and wins for each team's players - teams with more players will require more total games (two games per player at 1 point each, extra point for a win). Comms and archaeotech are tracked separately.
Phase 1 scoring is split across primary, secondary, and tertiary objectives that shape resources, rankings, and Phase 2 advantages.
Team standing in Phase 1 is not just about winning isolated games. Boarding progress, recovered resources, and mission control all feed into what each alliance unlocks for the next phase of the campaign. Only each player's first two games count toward team scoring totals.
The primary objective of Phase 1 is for players to get their games in. Each team's Boarding Routes score is tabulated as 1 point per game played and a bonus point for winning. Final rankings of the teams will be based on their total versus the potential. The team with the most success in boarding Malik's Damnation will decide the course of the story for Phase 2 and unlock goodies.
For example, a team of 5 players has a total potential Boarding Routes score of 20 points - two games per player and a potential two wins per player.
Each Boarding Actions map will have designated Resource Cache markers. These are sometimes on objectives and sometimes not. As per the mission rule Search Resource Cache, these caches can yield communications devices and unknown archaeotech. Teams will accumulate these resources and unlock army abilities to be used in Phase 2.
Our two missions in Phase 1 are Control Centre, representing the bridge, and Death in the Dark, representing control of the decks. The team with the highest win rate on a given mission will be considered controlling that mission. This unlocks advantages in-game for Phase 2.
The alliances entering Malik's Damnation are temporary, dangerous, and likely to shape the wider war beyond the hulk.
Malik's Damnation has returned from the warp and now drifts once more within the Stygian System, its vast and broken mass slowly but inexorably drawing nearer to Stygian Prime. Long-range augurs, fragmentary vox echoes, and impossible energy harmonics confirm that the hulk is no inert graveyard. Its corridors shift. Systems flicker to life without explanation. Entire sections appear to phase in and out of reality. At its heart lies the ancient Gloriana-class battleship Traitors Damnation, bound within the fused carcass of countless lost vessels and wrapped in mysteries no force in the system fully understands.
With no certainty as to the hulk's nature, course, or intent, the opening phase of the campaign begins not with line warfare but with infiltration. Boarding parties are dispatched into the dark to seize comms arrays, recover fragments of data, secure archaeotech, and uncover whatever truth can still be wrested from the hulk's interior before rival forces do the same. Every sealed hatch, broken chapel, reactor vault, and vox relay may hold answers. Every corridor may also hold death. What is learned during these first incursions will shape the course of the wider war to come.
There are three teams represented in the corridors of the dread space hulk:
Each team will gather resources from Malik's Damnation throughout the boarding actions games they play. At the end of Phase 1, the results will be tabulated and benefits granted to teams that get their games in, paint their forces, gather resources, and win their matchups in Phase 2. The teams themselves may or may not have the strength or willpower to retain their bonds in the subsequent phases. Only time - and fate - will tell.
Read on for details of each of these alliances.
Aegis Imperatoris is the foremost Imperial response to the crisis: a coalition of Adeptus Astartes forces drawn primarily from First Founding Chapters, reinforced by successor elements and other Imperial strike assets deemed suitable for void assault and close-quarters combat. Their mission is clear even if the situation is not. Malik's Damnation cannot be permitted to reach Stygian Prime, and whatever lies dormant within it must either be secured in the Emperor's name or destroyed before it can threaten the wider system. For these warriors, the boarding actions phase is a matter of strategic necessity. Every recovered signal, every sealed vault opened, and every command deck purged may reveal how the hulk can be halted.
Though united in purpose, Aegis Imperatoris is not a single Chapter force but a martial compact forged under urgent conditions. Ancient heraldry marches side by side, old rivalries suppressed beneath common oath. Some among them seek simply to defend the system. Others suspect darker truths buried within the hulk's depths: relics of the Heresy, evidence of ancient betrayal, or xenos corruption woven into the bones of the ship itself. Whatever the motive of individual commanders, they enter the hulk as disciplined wardens of the Imperium, intent on restoring order in a place where order has long since died.
Null Harmonic is the most enigmatic force converging on Malik's Damnation: a collision of Adeptus Mechanicus expeditions, Necron presences, and tightly controlled Imperial elements dispatched under opaque authority. The Mechanicus detects sacred pattern, nonhuman symmetry, and machine logic beyond orthodox explanation. The Necrons sense the dormant pulse of ancient latticework, phase resonance, and forgotten design. Alongside them move Adeptus Custodes and Deathwatch kill teams, seemingly committed under unknown directives - presumably by the High Lords to ensure the Astartes do not interfere with the Mechanicus mission, and by the Ordo Xenos in response to the suspected Necron connection buried within the hulk.
Their composition reflects that divided purpose. Tech-priests, servitors, and heavily augmented retrieval cohorts move to recover nodes, interfaces, and data fragments, while silent Necron constructs emerge where buried systems awaken in answer. The Custodes and Deathwatch bring a harder edge: containment, oversight, and the implicit threat of sanction should the mission deviate from whatever hidden brief guides them. The boarding actions phase is, for Null Harmonic, an act of excavation as much as war. They do not enter the hulk merely to conquer rooms, but to reconnect patterns, align dormant systems, and control whatever truths emerge before rival Imperial hands - or alien ones - can seize them.
Predators and Pirates encompasses the many lesser-represented but no less dangerous forces drawn to Malik's Damnation by hunger, greed, curiosity, vengeance, or opportunity. Aeldari seekers, T'au reconnaissance elements, Votann prospectors, Tyranid organisms, mercenary raiders, Chaos Space Marines, and daemonic manifestations all have reasons to brave the hulk's interior. Some seek lost technology. Some pursue ancient enemies. Some come to complete acts of profanation or predation in the name of darker powers. Unlike the more formally organized teams, this grouping is defined not by alliance, but by shared circumstance: they are all outsiders circling a carcass large enough to feed many ambitions.
As a result, their composition is wildly varied and often fluid. Some elements move with surgical precision, striking only when valuable resources can be extracted. Others prowl and stalk, turning the close confines of the hulk into hunting grounds, while warp-corrupted raiders exploit panic and fragmentation wherever the veil grows thin. The boarding actions phase favors them because it breaks the war into fragments - small fights, sudden encounters, isolated objectives, and narrow windows in which a fast-moving force can snatch prize or prey and vanish again. Predators and Pirates do not need to control Malik's Damnation in its entirety. They need only find the right chamber, the right relic, or the right victim before the larger powers close their grip.