Warlords issue tactical commands to their warriors, wizards cast destructive spells, and priests chant prayers to their deities, all while grand armies clash in the swell of churning melee. The new edition of Warhammer Age of Sigmar brings epic battles to life, but there’s more to the game than rushing your troops to the middle of the battlefield to grind each other down in a glorious death pit.*
Battlepacks and battleplans provide objectives to fight over and a framework for deeper battles, and they’re the focus of today’s article.
Battlepacks and Battleplans
Before playing any game of Warhammer Age of Sigmar, you’ll pick a battlepack – Spearhead, Path to Glory, Matched Play, etc. This will tell you which Advanced Rules Modules you’re using, and provides a selection of missions – known as battleplans – and sometimes other modifiers on top of that. The First Blood Battlepack is in the Core Rules for the new edition, and uses all the Advanced Rules modules found therein.
First Blood has a choice of three battleplans, for games that last four battle rounds. You’ll need to score more victory points than your opponent to win, and the scoring here is simple: at the end of their turn, a player scores two points for holding one objective, two further points for holding two or more objectives, another two points for holding more objectives than their opponent, and four if they scored their battle tactic.**
In the First Blood Battlepack, each battleplan comes with a different objective layout and a unique twist – a rule that can alter how you score victory points, provide the underdog (the player with fewer victory points at the start of the round) with a boon, or both. In the Stake a Claim battleplan, for example, the twist allows the underdog to choose an objective and prevent it from being controlled for a round.
First Blood is a fantastic framework for your first forays into Matched Play games, and an excellent tool for easy and balanced pick-up games, but if you’re after a knottier tactical challenge or want to start testing your mettle for tournaments, you’ll want to play games with The General’s Handbook – the first of which comes in the upcoming launch set.
For the first time ever, all of your battleplans, battle tactics, and the 2024-25 Season Rules will be included in the launch set, so you’ll have everything you need to start playing matched play games right away. Let’s find out what they look like.
The General’s Handbook
Matched Play Tournaments use the framework presented by The General’s Handbook, and it’s a great way of standardising events worldwide. It also provides extra tactical challenges in the form of Season Rules, which may alter how you approach building lists or your strategic decisions on the table.
The first of these books for the new edition of Age of Sigmar is the General’s Handbook 2024-25. It features 12 battleplans plucked from the past eight years of competitive play and reimagined for the new edition, as voted for by the Warhammer Studio, playtesters, and tournament organisers – a thrilling trip down memory lane for veterans, and a guarantee of robust battleplans for new players.
Each game in this battlepack runs for five rounds, and each battleplan explains the scoring rules and any twists that might be involved. Border War, a firm favourite from 2016, is back and gives us a glimpse at how scoring works in the new General’s Handbook.
The underdog earns a little more bite when they attempt to contest the enemy’s home objective, and caps the scoring from objectives at six per turn. Battle tactics score four victory points on every battleplan here – this new scoring split makes battle tactics very important, so taking priority for the double turn becomes an even tougher decision. For each battleplan in the General’s Handbook, your victory points each round will add up to a maximum of 10, for a total maximum score of 50 points per battle. This makes scoring easy for event organisers to keep track of.
The Vice (from 2021) shows a variation on how scoring reaches that fixed 10 per round, as its objectives converge on the centre thanks to the twist, which also gives the underdog a chance to chip away at their foe.
There are still rules for player-placed terrain, as with the current edition, but each battleplan comes with a suggested layout for terrain, and the Core Rules provide an extensive glossary of terrain features, noting which size they are classified as and exactly which rules apply to them, which will give you a foundation to create balanced battlefields and provide event organisers with extra resources.
Season Rules
The Season Rules add extra nuance and theming to your games. For the 2024-25 Season, which kicks off with the release of the new edition, the defining rule is Honour Guard. This rule lets you pick from one of three powerful abilities to give to a single 'honour guard' unit in your general's regiment. Since these abilities are chosen during the deployment phase, you can use them to adapt to your opponent's roster.
The defensive choice is Bodyguard, an ability that turns your honour guard into a human/duardin/daemon/verminous/etc shield for your general, reducing the efficacy of their assailants when they’re caught up in the brawl of melee.
The General’s Handbook 2024-25 found in the impending launch box comes in a card format, featuring season rules, battle tactics, battleplans, and scoring cards in a handy format.*** The standalone release version will contain all of this, alongside the Core Rules, Advanced Rules, the latest rules for endless spells, and a tournament organiser pack providing guidance for event organisers. Next, we’ll be taking a look at some of the Battle Tactics that you’ll be trying to score in the new edition of Age of Sigmar. Those of you itching to learn about Spearhead and Path to Glory – stay tuned in the coming weeks!
* That is also fun, but the Warhammer Studio assures us there’s more to life.
** Warhammer Age of Sigmar’s equivalent to secondary objectives. We’ll have a whole article on changes to battle tactics soon!
*** You’ll note that grand strategies are not part of this matched play season.