See that giant ominous shadow blocking out the sun? That’s a towering pile of Skaventide boxes, all ready to be delivered to eager Warhammer Age of Sigmar fans in just a few weeks. This launch box heralds the new edition – and will be very shortly followed by the new Core Book and General’s Handbook which contain all of the new rules.
With such an extensive overhaul of the game, we just had to sit down with the Warhammer Studio and pick their brains over some of the changes that you might have read about in the last few weeks.
Warhammer Community: Can you tell us a little bit about the shift to the new rules, from your perspective?
Matt, Warhammer Age of Sigmar Lead Rules Writer: From a rules perspective, this is the first ground-up overhaul of Warhammer Age of Sigmar since it launched. This is the first time we’ve gone through all the Core Rules line by line, paragraph by paragraph, system by system.
From my perspective on the background – and I’d love to hear Phil’s thoughts – it also feels like this is the biggest narrative shift since the beginning of the setting.
Phil, Warhammer Age of Sigmar Creative Lead: Absolutely – one of the things Warhammer Age of Sigmar does really well is to evolve the story over time. We’re able to alter the course of the Mortal Realms – often via catastrophe – and see new factions coming to light or old factions returning from the depths. It creates a narrative which is exciting to follow, and provides a great background to your games. For this edition, we’ve made a seismic change with the Vermindoom, which has shaken up the map and promises to have a heavy impact on the future..
WarCom: A ground up rewrite of the rules sounds like a monumental task – what was the reasoning behind it?
Matt: A huge revamp wasn’t always the plan, but we did realise early on that we wanted to focus on making it easier for new players to get into this game which we love. With any game that runs for multiple editions, there’s inevitable feature creep, with new layers of rules adding more complexity over time. This provides great depth and engagement for existing players, but inevitably makes it harder for new players to jump on board.
With that in mind, we hit a wall early on: if the first thing you need to do to play is look at all your faction’s rules and errata, then multiple layers of errata to the Core Rules, then the floor for accessibility becomes quite high. There was only so far we could go with accessibility if we planned to make all of those rules compatible with a new edition, when we realised that, we started looking at how far we could take it if we didn’t have that constraint.
Ben – Age of Sigmar Product Developer: Matt said something illuminating early on, which is that the game is always going to be as complicated as the most complex army. No matter what we do with the Core Rules, the game will always be as complicated as the most complex rules that interact with it.
Matt: People don’t always collect an army based on their rules – it’s a broad hobby. You or your friend might decide that Disciples of Tzeentch and Lumineth Realm-lords are your favourite factions, both collect your respective armies, and then end up playing with a higher-complexity army as your first experience with Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
No matter what we did with the Core Rules, we were always going to hit that wall if we didn’t take a comprehensive look at the whole game. As soon as we moved past that we started doing a lot of research and development and exploring new concepts with new concepts, taking out phases, or creating entirely new mechanics. That’s also when we started digging into the Core Rules as heavily as we did – we initially rewrote the rules into a four-page document like the original game, stripping it right back before re-adding each element until we felt it provided a rich and tactical experience for players.
WarCom: With all that in mind, what are some of the biggest changes that have been made?
Matt: The change to the overall structure of the rules is huge. In particular, abilities are structured in order to be very explicit in how you declare them and what the effects are. Each ability has a box with a very clear colour-coded timing bar that’s useful for quick reference – it becomes very easy to scan through all of your rules and say “Ok, it’s the Movement Phase, let’s look for Movement Phase abilities”, without needing to remember their names or where they are on the warscroll.
For the first time, the way abilities work is also universally applied to everything you can do in the game right down to a normal move. There’s no separation between a core ability and a command ability, a rampage, or a warscroll ability – they all follow the same rule structure, making things a lot more consistent.
We also reintroduced universal special rules, albeit in a very controlled manner. They’re great for accessibility, up to a point. It’s great when you can read a handful of familiar terms and know what that rule does – like the CHAMPION keyword, for example. There’s no need to repeat that rule on every warscroll once you have a universal rule, but if you have too many universal rules it becomes difficult to remember them all, so we’ve tried to have a controlled number which are really impactful, with self-explanatory names.
Sam, Warhammer Age of Sigmar Rules Writer: Every rule does exactly what it says, and you’re not going to be caught off guard by odd variants here and there. Charge (+1 Damage) is simple. You get +1 Damage when you charge – there are no caveats or complications!
Matt: This means that warscrolls are now really easy to follow. Each unit has at least one impactful ability which makes them cool and unique – maybe a few if they’re elite or special – and then everything else, including keywords like CHAMPION, WARD, WIZARD, and PRIEST, are easy to remember mechanics applied via a universal special rule.
Ben: The end result was quite interesting to watch in the external play tests. The way the book has been structured, with Core Rules and then modular Advanced Rules you can use altogether or learn as you go, means that it’s still the same game existing players love – albeit with some really great tweaks – and it’s also far more accessible to newer players.
Phil: You essentially get to the same place, which is this epic, cinematic game of clashing battle lines, with tactical parries and ripostes and the tussle of capturing objectives, but you get there in a simpler manner. The rules get out of the way of telling the story and having these showdowns between generals on the tabletop. There’s less unnecessary friction.
WarCom: One of the biggest changes is the increase in interactive elements in the game. Can you talk about the thought process behind this?
Matt: If you’re a veteran Warhammer Age of Sigmar player, the two things that will probably feel most different are interactivity and counterplay.
The interactivity builds on one of the core strengths of the previous edition, where you had reactive commands like Redeploy and Unleash Hell that you could perform during the game. In the new edition there’s a more even distribution of opportunities for you to have reactive play during your opponent’s turn.
Every single phase in the game follows the same pattern: the active player performs all the cool actions that they can do in any order they want to, and then at the end of each phase, their opponent has the chance to do the same kind of action but with a penalty or cost. So, in the Movement Phase, the active player moves and retreats and so on, then their opponent can Redeploy a unit to react to all the positioning that has happened.
That will be familiar to players of the last edition, although the timing is a bit different, making it a lot easier to keep track of when you can make these choices.
Ben: It removes a lot of odd interactions, where you were waiting for your opponent to react to every movement with a Redeploy. There are no more pregnant pauses, no take backs and missed opportunities. Now, these abilities just happen at the end of the turn. I do my stuff, and you do yours. It’s very consistent, and keeps you thinking.
Sam: These interactive elements are all command abilities which cost command points, and each phase has at least one – from Magical Intervention in the Hero Phase, to the particularly powerful Counter-charge in the Charge Phase, which lets a unit make a retaliatory charge. We’re also keeping the same interactivity that’s been key to melee and shooting with All-out Attack and All-out Defence, and the goal is that you’ll always be thinking about how best to spend your command points to get the edge.
Matt: The other really big change which you’ll feel on the table is the shift in counterplay. This is made up of many specific examples, but a big one is the change to shooting. The first really significant change to shooting is that a unit which is engaged in combat can now no longer shoot, unless you have the self-explanatory Shoot in Combat ability.
A lot of ranged weapons have also had their range reduced a little bit, which forces you to get into a position where that risk of being shut down is greater, and that then introduces the tactical element of being able to get behind enemy lines and shut down a war machine or massed shooting – shooting is still good, but it’s something that you can now respond to more broadly.
Another large change is to endless spells, manifestations, and faction terrain. The majority of these now be fought in melee and shot at, which means you’ll always have a way to respond to them even if you haven’t taken a wizard. Priests also now greatly benefit from chanting their prayers over multiple turns, which means killing them is a viable counter strategy to someone chanting a powerful ritual.
WarCom: There are dozens of changes to the game which we’ve covered right here, but which are your personal favourites?
Ben: The combat range of 3" has a lot of wide-reaching effects across the game. In the Combat Phase it reduces the amount of fiddly piling that you need to do, but on top of that it is now a measurement that can be easily used for buffs and debuffs, character protection, and objective control. It’s great, you just get your combat gauge out, and you’re good. It stops you from repeating measurements multiple times per game, and speeds things up substantially.
Matt: It is so fast to sweep over a unit in combat and just go, “Yep, they can fight” rather than needing to go in and start measuring individual 1" ranges. It also helps reduce the prevalence of these quite technical and bizarre formations that felt alien to the fiction of the game. I would often look at optimal unit arrangements and think, is this how a Stormcast Eternal general would send a unit into combat?
Phil: In terms of accessibility, changing wounds to Health and damage points is a big one for me. Wounds is a term that has been used in Warhammer for a long, long time but quite often if you told a new player that a unit has 16 wounds they'd ask, “Why is he on the battlefield? Get him to the hospital!” For veterans it was accepted, but it wasn’t intuitive to many. It’s just one place where we’ve looked at the language and how we put across concepts, and made it more accessible.
Matt: You used to make a “wound roll” to “allocate wounds” to compare against the “Wound characteristic” of a unit. I passed those old rules by my kids and some of my friends who don’t play wargames, just to see how they would approach it, and it was an immediate sticking point. Health is much clearer. The change to damage allocation is also much better now, with damage applying to the unit and the controlling player removing miniatures every time the Health characteristic is passed – much easier to track than having a token follow around a specific miniature in the grand melee.
Sam: The removal of Bravery was one that we thought long and hard about, but were ultimately happy with. In the narrative of Warhammer Age of Sigmar, when a force breaks, that’s typically the end of the battle. Stormcast Eternals or Lumineth Realm-lords don’t slink away from their comrades one-by-one as casualties mount – they hold the line until the bitter end, because if the line breaks, that’s it for them. Even Clanrats know that there’s safety in numbers!
Matt: We were also trying to reflect those desperate stakes. If you have whole units retreating or armies falling back, it is usually a tactical choice. Kruleboyz Gutrippaz are still likely to back away from a terrifying monster, if only to open it up for a volley of beast-skewer bolts while they find softer targets. A force of Stormcast pulling out of a battle is a strategic decision – which comes with expected costs and losses. Because the stakes are so high across the Mortal Realms at this point in the conflict, you don’t often have armies running away just for the sake of survival – there’s seldom anywhere to run to! They’re in it to the end.
Phil: These armies are fighting for the survival of the Mortal Realms, and so they push through – or they get ground to dust or scattered to the winds. Having a faction with chronically low Bravery like Skaven always led to rules that let you circumvent it, anyway, which undermined the whole system.
Matt: Even if it isn’t the goal, a morale system creates a clear division of haves and have-nots, essentially. We stressed out about it a lot because it’s been part of Warhammer games for years, it’s a mechanic that tries to emulate how historical battles happened, and we thought taking it out would be a big deal. In the end, when we showed off the new turn structure to our playtesters, the change was well received and sped up play.
Sam: I play a lot of Khorne Bloodbound, and previously, Blood Warriors would take a few deaths and the rest would just run away. That’s just not what Khorne worshippers do! Now, big units of infantry are a lot more attritional. Infantry such as Clanrats and Freeguild Steelhelms having two attacks, and the new combat range increasing the offensive capability of larger units, are offset by the lack of battleshock, which creates this attritional feel to combat where units grind each other down over multiple turns.
Matt: Units are now more differentiated in the game, which makes them feel like they do what they are supposed to. Hordes of infantry have a specific place – they’re tough to shift and can dominate objectives, but you can run them down with cavalry units on the charge. Shooting units can output damage relatively safely, but are equally shut down by flanking and being drawn into melee.
We really wanted every unit type to have its place on the battlefield – monsters can now take advantage of abilities like Power Through to trample over a unit and onto an objective. All of these tools present you with an army building puzzle, as much as a tactical puzzle in moment-to-moment gameplay.
WarCom: With the new edition on the horizon, and with its focus on accessibility, what would you say to encourage newcomers to set foot in the Mortal Realms?
Ben: What on earth have you been doing? We’ve been creating a great game for three editions!
Phil: Since the first edition, we’ve focussed on how to make this a better game. This is a step change from the current edition: it plays smooth as silk, there’s loads you can do with your army, and we’ve opened lots of doors for player and narrative expression. Even though you get to that same game – a great cinematic battle with fantastic moments on the tabletop – it’s easier than ever to get there.
For anyone who didn't know where to start, the door is now wide open to help you get to those fun places really easily. Not only that, but the actual setting has matured like a fine wine, consolidating over the years into something that has great depth. When you get the miniatures, artwork, background, and rules, all working in sync, you get this special alchemy that creates something fantastic. Characters and stories and moments that resonate through time.
Matt: It’s so much easier to try out. You can play a game of Spearhead in an hour and really get a sense of how much the game has changed, and how easy it is to start playing and begin your journey into the Mortal Realms.
Ben: This is also the first time we’ve examined the game in its entirety – not just the Core Rules but we’ve tackled every miniature, every unit, spell, warscroll, and faction ability from the ground up. For anyone who hasn’t examined the game since its conception, it's a real reassessment.
Matt: We’ve benefited from the spectacular array of miniatures, new factions, great new background writing, and all of the learning from the balance passes and Battlescrolls that we’ve released during the previous edition. The new edition is the result of nearly a decade's worth of learning distilled into one new edition – I’m incredibly excited to finally see people play it at events and tournaments, and hear what they have to say.
Thanks, all! We’ve got a few more behind the scenes chats to unveil, including a thorough treatise on the key principles and appeals of Spearhead, as well as the warpstone dust covered design notes that speak to the creation of the new Skaven miniatures.