Welcome back to the second weekly Rule of the Week! This weeks RotW is about wound allocation! There have been tons of questions about the wound allocation process and the Force Choke upgrade card. Ironically, I’m a bit sick this week with a sore throat, but I still wanted to get this rule out to yall!
The majority of the rules regarding how suffering wounds works is on page 31 of the CRB. This is embedded in the attack sequence as part of the re-organization of the rules that took place earlier this year. I will also cover a couple of the important exceptions/additions to these rules such as the ones that are on page 43 with the Counterpart keyword, page 57 with the Noncombatant keyword, and an important tidbit about the attacker suffering wounds from Deflect, Djem So Mastery, or Soresu Mastery.
On page 31 we find the base information about wound allocation. This is whenever you suffer wounds, not just when defending against an attack (besides Force Choke which we will cover in the next paragraph). Basically, when a unit suffers wounds there is a hierarchy of what minis must take wounds before others. The very first minis to receive wounds are already wounded (minis that have wound tokens assigned to them) non-leader miniatures. The minis with the most amount of wound tokens assigned to them must be assigned wounds first. If there are no wounded minis, you then assign wounds to any non-leader, non-Noncombatant miniature in the unit. The second to last miniature in the unit to receive wound is a mini with the Noncombatant keyword (Page 57). The unit leader is always last to receive wounds. Straight from the rule book: “A unit leader cannot be assigned wounds unless it is the only miniature in the unit.”
Now we get to some exceptions and helpful additions. First, on this same page we have a Blue Box (BB) with important information about the Force Choke upgrade card.
Using this information in the second section of this BB, we can see that we ‘ignore’ the normal rules. The player with force choke chooses a miniature in the unit and that mini suffers one wound regardless of the hierarchy discussed above.
On page 43 we have the Counterpart keyword. We have the following quote: “When assigning wounds, to a combined unit, any miniature can be assigned wounds by the controlling player, but counterpart miniatures must be defeated first.” This means that the rule where you have to assign wounds to the unit leader last is ignored. You may assign wound tokens to the unit leader miniature so long as you do not defeat the unit leader miniature before the counterpart miniature.
Some tidbits about Deflect, Djem So, and Soresu. These effects all have abilities that cause wounds to the suffered by an attacker before the attack is complete and before the defender suffers wounds. Wounds are suffered as formal as per the BB above. The important part of this is that the attack continues even if some or all of the attacking minis are defeated and the defender may still suffer wounds.
Thank you for joining me for my Wednesday Rule of the Week. Join me next week where I… do it again!
Questions? Comments? Did I get something wrong? Let me know by heading over to my Contact page! Sending me a Discord message is probably the easiest way to get in contact with me.