Yesterday was the Mortal Realms Reforged Preview Event at Warhammer World to showcase the 4th edition of Warhammer Age of Sigmar and the Skaventide launch box, and team Sprues & Brews were lucky enough to be there to try out the new edition of the game, check out Spearhead and look at the gorgeous Skaven and Stormcast models from the Skaventide set – We’ll be sharing our thoughts on Spearhead later in the week, but I just wanted to do a bit of a post with our immediate thoughts and first impressions after the demo game that we had.

Nearer to launch we’ll have our full review of Skaventide the new rules, but this is our experience with the new edition so far.

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Few caveats here, firstly this was just an hour long demo so we didn’t get through an entire game, though most of the new mechanics were showed off to us, and we were also not allowed to take any detailed photos of any of the turn summary sheets or warscrolls – if you squint you might be able to see some fuzzy info from the overhead shots, but we wanted to respect GWs wishes of detailed high resolution images of the warscrolls not appearing on the internet!

Age of Sigmar Games Designer Sam Pearson led us through the game as the Stormcast Eternals took on the Skaven, with us commanding the loathsome ratmen!

The first thing that jumped out to us all was how good the new colour coded warscrolls and summary sheets are. In the majority of games, I have to print myself a “cheat sheet” in order to make sure I remember everything that my units do in each turn of the game. In the new edition of Age of Sigmar however, each of the phases is given it’s own colour (Sam also pointed out that for anyone that is colour blind, each is also assigned a unique symbol too) so it’s very easy to scan through warscrolls on the table looking for any Blue boxes if you are in the shooting phase for example. This also extends to all of the traits, command abilities, artifacts, spells and the new battle formation abilities. All of these have a colour coded banner that matches the phase colours signalling when you can use them. This makes life so much easier, and I hope it is something that we see used in future GW games.

For those worried about drowning in universal special rules, there are not that many and will be easily remembered after a couple of games – the quick reference sheets on the table listed just 7

Anti X (+1 Rend) – This gives additional Rend against a specific keyword such as HERO or against a specific action like CHARGE

Charge (+1 Damage) – Increases weapon damage on the charge

Companion – This is a keyword that identifies things like mounts and critters that have attack profiles, but that GW do not want to be affected by buffs

Crit (2 Hits) – a hit of 6 generates 2 hits

Crit (Auto Wound) – a hit of 6 wounds automatically

Crit (Mortal) – a hit of 6 causes Mortal Damage and the attack sequence ends

Shoot in Combat – The ranged weapon can be shot while in combat (Units cannot do this unless the weapon has this rule)

I was worried about us having too many of these, but this is a nice manageable number that will be easy to remember over time.

Warscrolls themselves are easy to follow too due to the bigger footprint and the colour coding I mentioned earlier, these are by far the most user friendly warscrolls they have done, and can see the warscroll card packs being super popular to use as quick reference in the middle of a battle.

Being guided through the game we saw a lot of the new mechanics in action – Command Abilities in particular are a lot more reactive now and work somewhat like the reactions in Horus Heresy, giving players something to do during their opponents turn. Essentially, once the active player has finished a phase, the other player has the option of spending command points to do something in that phase too – so for example you can spend a command point to cast a spell at the end of the hero phase (At -1 to cast), move a unit D6 inches at the end of the movement phase (Doesn’t have to be triggered by a unit getting close – so lots of play here for shuffling onto an objective to contest an objective the opponent is trying to take), shoot at the closest unit at -1 to hit at the end of the shooting phase (This is much less oppressive than unleash hell, and with clever play you can make sure your key units are not a valid target), or for 2 command points one of your units can attempt a charge at the end of the opponents charge phase – This is a massive change and opens up lots of play for having a decent unit lurking in position ready to sally forth and charge in the opponent’s turn, and the fact it costs 2 command points makes using it an important decision too.

The new edition is very clear about sequencing and with very clear declare and effect steps, and reactions to these happening at a defined point – this stops any instance of a game of chicken in when to use command abilities as there’s a clear order when these happen

Some of the faction rules also lean into these reactionary abilities too – For example in our demo game we were able to more our Grey Seer in the Command Phase to get him just within 13″ to cast a spell, but just out of 12″ in order to avoid the anti magic effects of the enemy priest. We then popped a command point to cast a spell and deal 3 Mortal Damage to the Priest, putting a decent chunk off his health.

Talking of Priests, the new mechanics for them are really good – Each prayer has a target in order for them to work, but they also have a higher value for a more powerful effect. You roll a dice, and if you hit the target then it goes off – however if you fail to trigger the prayer the value you have rolled remains as a “charge” that you can then increase with another roll next turn – this means that even if you manage to roll the value needed, you can instead bank that roll in order to get the bigger effect off next turn. This is a much more fun system that last seasons Prayer mechanics, and I’m looking forward to seeing what other abilities exist.

Sam was telling us that with the 4th edition of Age of Sigmar, they wanted each unit to feel like it had a unique role and that they have rules that capture the lore and how you would expect them to act – so for example, the Prosecutors have a special rule that allows them to charge 3D6 inches the turn they come down from the heavens, capturing the feeling of these winged Stormcast swooping down from the skies and hurtling into the enemy. Meanwhile the Skaven characters have a special rule that means that they get a ward save when they are near a friendly unit, but for each ward save made then a damage point is caused on the nearby unit – representing the characters throwing a poor clanrat in the way of the incoming attack to save their own skin!

Damage allocation is much slicker in the new edition. Previously, you picked a model and allocated wounds to that model – leading to instances when you could end up breaking coherency because of the model you picked. Now damage is allocated to the unit, and once you reach the wounds characteristic of the unit you remove a model of your choice. This is a great change and something that makes for a quicker game too without having to worry about the “best” model to allocate damage to – you only have to worry about that when enough damage is taken to remove a model.

Units themselves have also been tweaked – with a 1/2 inch coherency units move more like a block of infantry rather than a larger cloud of models or a daisy chain, something that took away from the aesthetics of the game for me – closely ranked movement trays may be the way to go for quick and easy play. There’s some clever use of keywords too – for example the CHAMPION keyword means that one model is a champion and gets an extra attack, so that this doesnt need to be spelled out on the warscroll itself. There’s also more range of values – in AOS 3 there was a lot of units that hit on 3s and wound on 3s, where as now we see a bigger spread and some that interact with the new special rules – Clanrats for example hit on 5s, but any hit of a 6 automatically wounds in order to represent the fact that in numbers they can be quite dangerous.

Combat has changed quite a bit with weapon ranges removed and every model within 3″ being able to fight – This makes piling in much simpler as all but the biggest units will probably be able to bring all of their models into range to fight – Battleshock may be gone, but with more models fighting it’s going to make close combat a much more brutal affair, and ranged units that cannot shoot into combat are going to need screening or support in order to help them out.

While in the past it was often too easy to simply move a unit out of combat, now there is a big risk since any unit that falls back takes D3 mortal damage as they push their way past the attacking enemy. You’re going to have to weigh up the risks when your almost dead support hero wants to scarper out of harms way.

While characters do not attach to units in the same way as 40k, there is still a feeling of heroes leading units into battles with quite a few synergistic abilities that makes them feel as if they should be in the thick of things. Sam told us that a lot of pure combat characters have the ability to make a nearby unit fight immediately after them, which captures the feeling of the hero leading a unit into a fight with him.

The underdog mechanic is also interesting as it gives the player who is in second place an additional command point, which is a valuable resource as there’s now no warscroll abilities that can grant additional ones.

Before we wrap things up, I just wanted to chat a little about the new models too. Both the Stormcast and the Skaven have some absolutely gorgeous models in the new box and I think people are going to be really impressed when they see them in the flesh. The silver scheme for the Stormcast looks brilliant and certainly makes a change from the Hammers of Sigmar (Though I think I’m going to keep mine gold, though perhaps a more beaten and worn gold to represent how many times the members of the Ruination Chamber have been reforged).

The Skaven however are the real stars of the show and I can see these being super popular for both Age of Sigmar and The Old World – Skaven have not had much in the way of support for AOS, and this box breathes some fresh life into the range with some excellent new models that still capture the feel of the older range.

So what did we think of the new edition of Age of Sigmar? While we only had a short introduction, everything we saw made us super excited to roll some dice and dive into the Skaventide box. I had a lot of worries when 4th edition was announced, especially given some of the changes that happened with 10th edition 40k, but everything we have seen has put those concerns to rest and we can’t wait to play some full games ourselves

I also want to give a massive shout out to the Warhammer World Events Team who have put on one of the best launch events in recent years, they had great organisation making sure as many people got to play both Age of Sigmar and Spearhead with fully painted armies and excellent reference materials to make picking up the game in the demo slot as easy as possible

Stay tuned to the website, as our thoughts on Spearhead will be coming soon too!

Published by Matt Crowther

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