Over the next week Games Workshop will be releasing the free 10th Edition rules for every faction in Warhammer 40k over on Warhammer Community! Every army will be getting a set of Index cards (That will also be available to buy later) covering the rules for each datasheet, along with the Army Rules, Detachment rules for a single detachment plus all the enhancements and stratagems!

Today it is the turn of the Tyranids, and I imagine hot on the heels of the new Leviathan box that people will be wanting to start a new army of gribbly space aliens!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for giving us access to the rules a little early, and you can download them right now off WarCom!

If you would like to support the site then why not order your Tyranids through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We also have a whole raft of 40k 10th Edition and Leviathan content up, so be sure to check it out here on the site or on YouTube!

Army Rules

So what do we see for the Tyranids from their army rules? Well there’s lots here that interacts with battleshock for both friend and foe! Synapse is back, and essentially this means that if you are within 6″ of a Synapse creature then you take battleshock on 3D6 rather than 2D6 – this is great as it means on average your creatures should always pass battleshock. Now obviously you may get unlucky, but in an edition where an unlucky battleshock test can cost you an objective this is a massive boost!

But it’s also your opponents Battleshock tests that you can toy with – with the Shadow in the Warp ability you have the ability to once per game force your opponents entire army to make battleshock tests, which could result in some amazing moments where you strip them off every objective and shut down stratagems. Add in a Neurotyrant to the mix and you force them to make this roll with a -1 modifier.

Invasion Fleet Detachment

While Codexes will be adding multiple different detachments you can select from, the free Indexes all contain a single detachment for each army, and the Tyranids get Hyper-Adaptions. This represents the way that the Hive Mind will craft a force into whatever tool it needs at the time. Basically this boils down to what type of unit do you want to specialise against?

Pick Swarming Insects against Infantry and Swarms to get any critical hit become two hits thanks to Sustained Hits

Pick Hyper Aggression if you are facing Vehicles and Monsters, as this grants lethal hits against those targets (Any critical hit automatically wounds the target)

Or Pick Hive Predators to give your army Precision hits on any critical against characters, making it easy to snipe heroes out of units.

The great thing with this is that you get to pick at the start of the game, so can tailor based on what you are fighting.

Invasion Fleet Enhancements

The Invasion fleet also gives you access to 4 enhancements – don’t forget you can pick up to 3 of these for your army to have but they do cost you points to include in your list (More on that next week)

Alien Cunning allows you to redeploy three units or even place them into reserves, which could be handy to react to your opponents deployment

Perfectly Adapted allows the character to reroll a hit, wound, damage, advance, charge or save roll once per turn. This could be handy as it does allow the flexibility of you being able to use this as and when you need it

Synaptic Linchpin extends Synapse to 9″, though the Tyranids have lots of other tricks to extending this

And finally Adaptive Biology gives you a 5+ Feel No Pain, which is increased to a 4+ Feel No Pain once you are wounded. I really like this one as feel it can make your creatures a little hardier.

Invasion Fleet Stratagems

Likewise, the Invasion Fleet gives you access to 6 Strats (And again, future detachments will swap these out for different ones)

Rapid Regeneration is used in your opponents shooting or fight phase and gives a target 6+ Feel No Pain (Or 5+ if they are in synapse range)

Death Frenzy allows you to fight on death in the fight phase, potentially allowing you to get your own back on the killer

Adrenal Surge is really nice you either select 2 units in Synapse Range or 1 that is not, and those units get critical hits on a 5+ which combos really nicely with the Hyper Adaptations to maximise those crits. Want to drown a high toughness tank in claws and teeth? Use this with Hyper Aggression to make 2 massive units of gaunts wound a tank on a hit of 5.

Overrun allows units to make a 6″ consolidation – or if they are in synapse range they can make a normal move (Dont forget you have to consolidate towards the nearest enemy model or objective marker)

Synaptic Insight is used to give up to 2 target units an additional Hyper Adaptation for a turn, which again could be combined with Adrenal Surge to maximise the critical hits

And finally Endless Swarm is used in the command phase to add D3+3 models back to 2 Endless Multitude units in Synapse range or 1 outside of range – giving you both a way of boosting your units back to full strength, but also of making sure your units dont have to take battleshock by increasing them over half strength.

Key Units

All the datasheets are now live over on WarCom, but I wanted to call out some of my favourites!

The Swarmlord is a combat monster with 8 attacks at strength 9 hitting on 2s. With him also having twin linked it means he can reroll his wounds, and with AP-2 and 3 damage he will be able to take chunks out of units and vehicles alike!

The Tyranofex is a pretty nasty gun platform, hitting on 2s if stationary at strength 18, AP -4 and 2D6 damage. The damage is very swingy, but there’s potential for some massive damage here with on average 14 damage caused if both shots wound.

The Toxicrene is also a fun one, it is able to keep units stuck in engagement with it, and also causes mortal wounds to units it is near in the movement phase

There’s lots of fun stuff here and people will be able to easily build on the units included in the Leviathan box – the big question for these and the Space Marines is how much will change in the Codex – Games Workshop have been pretty vocal in saying that datasheets will stay the same and we may only see small tweaks. The other big question will be whats added in the codex – for example different detachments and new units may mix things up massivly.

Whatever happens however, we have some awesome rules now available and the fact that they are free for everyone is brilliant. I can’t wait to try these guys out in a full game!

We’ll be back throughout the next week with more faction analysis – so stay tuned to the site!