This is for people that I live with.
I don’t mean any lame team building exercises, but casual group activities. It could be something mundane like organizing a trip to the store together. Movie trips would also be fine as would showing something on the home projector, though I feel like there’d be more distractions and temptation at home.
May I recommend trying Grimdark Future, in that case. Particularly Grimdark Future: Firefight.
The 40k lore is fantastic and tons of fun. Unfortunately the rules not so much. The rules of Grimdark Future, by contrast, are very clean and well balanced.
Fortunately, you can map the lore of 40k directly onto Grimdark Future (like I suspect most people do) and end up with the best of both worlds.
Another big advantage of Grimdark Future over 40k is that it is mini agnostic. If you want to use 40k minis, go for it. If you want to use 3rd Party minis, that’s fine too. Lego people, plastic soldiers, pebbles - all good.
By contrast, the official line for playing 40k in Games Workshop Stores and GW Tournaments is that the minis need to be GW, no 3rd Party minis allowed. (It didn’t used to be this way, and many store owners will be happy to turn a blind eye, but that’s the official stance).
If you are interested in this route, Wargames Atlantic do a superb line of very affordable minis that can be used - Death Fields.
What happened with the 40k rules?
I never learned them, but I understood a few of the basic concepts. I’ve seen a few things recently that say that force organization is optional and any unit from any army can be taken, both of which I have strongly mixed feelings about.
The lack of a suppression mechanic always seemed like a huge detriment.
Something model agnostic would be desirable. The cost of models is absolutely insane.
I could certainly set up half the living room to be a gaming area and then use that for group activities.
Honestly, I think it’s just a matter of Games Workshop doing a Nokia - the company became successful focusing on creating good products then changed to focusing on making money. (Fun fact - a Nokia engineer actually created a prototype smartphone before LG or Apple, but the money guys felt sticking with the old super-profitable ones was the way to win).
The biggest advantage over 40k, from my perspective, is that Grimdark Future uses turns, I.e. ‘my unit, your unit’ instead of ‘my whole army, your whole army’. Each side moves each unit once per round, but you just take turns moving units getting there.
Grimdark Future Firefight is my favourite though - instead of huge battles, you take smaller teams. It feels more cinematic. Units don’t die as easily and you can pin a unit with suppressive fire. If you attack someone on the edge of a platform and knock them down, you can boot them over the edge. And best of all, it’s fast - games can be wrapped up in under an hour easily.
Oh, almost forgot - you don’t actually have to buy anything either. The standard version of the game, with army lists for all armies, is free. The army building app is free. You can buy advanced rules if you want more nitty gritty, but you’re literally good to go right now.
I used to watch my sister play (pre transition) and it always seemed like the fun would somehow devolve out of it. It would take forever and play style always turned into the same exact thing.
Adding a suppression mechanic seems like a huge benefit because it always seemed weird how people would play and the fact that such play styles would work out.
Smaller army sizes seems like it would be better.
I’m not sure how the turns will work, but hopefully it addresses the issues of entire armies doing everything in one turn.