40k 3-Person Deployment

Good day all! Having completed my Realm of Battle board, my friends and I were incredibly eager to start gaming whenever the heck we please, and it was there that we ran into our first conundrum, how do we fairly go about setting up a game for 3 people? Well after one test game that ended up being a fairly large melee slugfest (The final battle was 1 Hive Tyrant, 1 Tyranid Warrior Squad, 1 Dark Angel Tactical Marine Squad, 1 Company Master, 1 Terminator Captain, 1 Terminator Squad, 2 Small Iron Hand Squads.) and didn't really work out terribly well.

So last night, we reconvened and took another crack at it. After about a half-hours debate, we came up with this:
http://i.imgur.com/XR52GaOl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/aGPNAh9l.jpg
(Sorry about the yellow lighting)

So using the rules for Crusade in the rulebook, we decided that we could avoid one main slugfest could be avoided if we separated our 1000 point armies roughly into halves and stuck them into two separate deployment zones. We each received 2 deployment zones of 12" in 2 sections of the board not facing each other. The deployment zones were measure from 6" of each tile edge giving each army a 12" buffer from the enemy deployment zone besides them. We then placed 3 objective markers in the middle of the board at 12" from each tile edge.

We also experimented with a movement mechanic that would see a player walking off the short table edge to re-appear on the opposing short table edge. (Think going from Alaska to Kamchatka in Risk.) Leading me to call this the Mobius-Move. (I.E. The Genestealers are 2" from their board edge and move off, reappearing on my table edge and moving up 4".)

The game then started with me (Dark Angels) going last, the other Space Marines going second and the Tyranids going first. The winged Hive Tyrant was truly a scourge of the battlefield. Single handedly wiping out all of my forces in the bottom left corner. The Zoanthropes also made a deadly account of themselves during the game causing heavy damage to the opposing Space Marines. My Tactical Marines killed a couple Terminators and leveled the Ironclad Dreadnought with one solid Melta hit. (1 shot, 5&6 to Penetrate, 5 on the Pen Chart. KA-BOOM.)

Overall, I felt it was a fairly balanced match-up. The game ended with me scoring 2 objectives and the Tyranid player scored 1. The other Space Marine player opted to bring 2, 5 man squads and his objective capturing capacity was quickly blunted. (To be fair, it was his 3rd game with Space Marines. He now knows why I brought 30.) The plan is to now attempt a different objective style, likely the Relic with 2 Relics.

Hopefully, you've found this interesting. We're likely going to be attempting more different styles of missions and deployment styles, so watch this sub-forum for further developments!