Battle Report Note Cards
If you've been playing along at home, you'll have noticed a few things that I've been having problems with. For a long time, I've noticed that my battle report notes get increasingly crappy as the game progresses, and are usually nonexistant by the last couple of turns of the game. This is because I tend to get caught up playing the game and forget to actually take notes. In addition, I also tend to lose sight of the mission objective as the game goes along. I get caught up killing the enemy army, a tendency I ascribe to years of playing primarily Tyranids. More recently, I've also noticed a tendency to try to keep the whole army together (which was very beneficial to my Tyranids, but can be very bad for my DeathWing.) I knew I needed to fix all of these things, and I tried to figure out the best way to do them.

Battle Reports
I do tend to get caught up in playing the game and forget to take notes. In addition, I usually don't have a lot of space for notes, since I usually write them on the back of whatever I wrote my army list on. I also don't want the note-taking to interrupt the game, so I just jot things down quickly. Most of the time, between the jotted notes and the pictures I take, I can reconstruct what happened and when it happened. ("Did I kill that Vindicator on turn 3 or 4? Let's go to the pictures..." This doesn't always work, especially if more than a few days pass before I write up the battle report. The quickly jotted notes also don't let me take a look at individual unit performance, since I tend to lump all of my kills together. I have been meaning to take better notes for a while, but I've never quite figured out how to get past my limitations.

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Mission, what Mission?
On quite a few occasions, I've forgotten about the mission objective (you know, that pesky little thing that determines whether or not you actually win the game?) It's very easy to get caught up killing the enemy army or trying to keep your units from dying. I remember reading online about another player's frustration with this. His solution was to write down the mission objective on a piece of paper, and look at the paper at the beginning of each of his turns. I thought this was a great idea, but I never managed to actually remember to do it.

Sticking Together
While my Tyranid and Tau armies (and even my old Dark Eldar army, for that matter) worked best when sticking together, that is not true for my DeathWing army. Each unit in the DeathWing army is designed to operate on it's own (being able to move, shoot and assault is very handy in this regard.) In fact, the whole idea behind the army is to let each unit make it's own choice as to what actions will serve it or the whole army the best. It's hard to break old habits, however, and I started out playing it like I played my Tau and Tyranids. I wanted to do something to help me break out of that behavior, and I thought I should probably make some sort of note about it, like the note about mission objectives, then look at them both every turn. I think that's when the idea hit me to try to combine all of these things together.

Building a Better Note Card
I decided to put together a coherent battle report card that would give me an area at the top of each turn to make note of the mission objective. I thought it would also help me take more detailed notes (and be quick about it) if I made a separate line for each unit. That way I have an area to detail the movement, shooting and assault of each unit as it happens. This should also help me remember that each unit can stand on it's own, instead of being forced to stick together. Each turn has a section for the mission objective, the opponent turn and my turn. My turn is also broken down by individual units. I then decided it would be handy to have a place to jot down the usual information that I sort of quickly scrawl at the top of my old battle report notes. I usually write down the mission objective and the deployment style, who took first turn and a tiny bit about my opponent's army. The first page now has space for all of this (including a larger space than I used to use for the opposing army.) It's also got a slot for my opponent's name, since I've forgotten names a few times when I've had a few days or a week between the game and writing the report. (Very embarrassing!) Finally, I decided that I could fit each turn on a half-page, so I printed the 1st page as the game notes (opponent, opposing army, point totals, mission objective and deployment) and the first turn. I made the next page with two areas for turns. You can use it normally, or fold it in half and turn it over when going to the next turn. You could even print it double-sided. That would give you Game Notes and Turn 1 on the front of page one, with turns 2 and 3 on the back. Page 2 front would be turns 4 and 5, while the back would be turns 6 and 7. The two pages are the Batrep Mission Page and the Batrep Turn Tracker.

Click for larger image.

I made the pages using the Open Office program, which is available for free online. Even if you don't want to download it, you should be able to open them with most word processing programs. You might have to fiddle with the settings to get them fit correctly. For those that can't open them that way, I've also included some screencaps that you could use. The larger images are set to 75% size, so if you want to use them that way, you'll need to scale them up a little bit. Alternately, you could simply make your own. If you do so, and you add something to them that I've left out, please let me know so that I can consider adding it to mine as well. Just because something is good doesn't mean it can't be better!

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