The Battle of Tallarn is one of the greatest tank battles from the course of the Horus Heresy. The Iron Warriors unleashed a tank company upon the defenders of the planet, but the Solar Auxilia forces supported by loyalist Astartes elements managed to hold back the tide and earn the survivors the title of Tallarn Reborn.

The Battle of Tallarn Part 1 is the latest Journal tactica for Warhammer The Horus Heresy and tells the tale of this battle along with the usual narrative scenarios and new rules content. We’ll be checking this out in this article and exploring what exactly is contained within the book. The Journal is not alone though, as a couple of kits have also landed alongside it – the Charonite Ogryns and the Solar Auxilia Rapier Batteries! We’ll be checking out the kits, seeing how they go together and painting them up in the colours of my Traitor force! We’ll also explore their new rules and see what has changed!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us this a little early to check out on the site. If you would like to support the site then why not pick up your Horus Heresy goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We’ve also filmed a full unboxing and review of the new kits, which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So without further ado let’s check out the latest releases for Warhammer The Horus Heresy!

The Battle of Tallarn Part 1 – Journal Tactica Review

The Journal Tactica format for Warhammer The Horus Heresy continues with the latest book, this time focusing on The Battle of Tallarn. If you’ve not picked up one of these books before, then essentially this is a slimline softback 48 page book that focusses on a particular battle from The Horus Heresy and contains lore, background and maps on that particular conflict along with a selection of new gaming material, often focusing on new or alternate units.

While previously we would get less regular hard back books, the model releases from them would often be stretched over a much longer period. With this new approach there’s now a quicker release cycle as the book can include just the models coming out alongside it.

As the name suggests, this time we’re heading to the world of Tallarn where the Iron Warriors are facing off again the Solar Auxilia in one of the hugest tank battles in the history of the heresy. Unsurprisingly, the book has a focus on tank battles – and interestingly a different flavour of tank battles than we had in the previous book Mailed Fist. Where that book was about Super Heavy companies of vehicles, this time we are looking at forces made up of predominantly just tanks!

As ever, the first part of the book covers the background and we get a decent look at the background of the forces themselves – This Journal is titled as Part 1, so I fully expect we’ll be heading back here before too long and there’s lots of scope for Games Workshop to add new things here.

But what about the rules content?

The big mission addition here are Armoured Spearheads – These are games that revolve around mostly tanks. The core rule ensures that you have more vehicles than any other unit type, and you also get access to a new Apex detachment that gives you 3 vehicle slots – a nice way of squeezing in as many tanks as possible when you play these. There’s 2 standard missions in this pack, but also a Legendary Mission that reenacts the events of the narrative. I’m a big fan of tanks, and I’ve actually got a huge Sons of Horus force mostly made up of tanks, so this game mode very much appeals to me! I really like that they are introducing different game types such as this, and this leaves the door open for things such as Drop Pod Assault armies returning in future.

As you can imagine there’s bonus points in Armoured Spearhead for destroying vehicles – and in a cool touch you actually get less points for making a tank explode, you actually want to get clean kills that leave the tank intact to get the most victory points, which is a cool touch.

A surprise addition to The Battle of Tallarn is the introduction of Cohorts Vagus. This is a new detachment that consists of just Automata, allowing players to take a whole stack of robots alongside their army, or even use it as a primary detachment in small games of Horus Heresy. The Mechanicum are cool, but sometimes you just want to take all the robots without having to juggle detachments around to fit them all in! Castallax, Vorax, a Thanitar, Vulturax and a Domitar can all be taken here, and there’s a lot of slots to play with. Everything gets Expendable along with a number of other options that can be given to them such as Infiltrate, Hatred or Fear, and this opens up some fun new ways to use those Mechanicum units! Any excuse to add some robots to your army always gets a thumbs up from me!

We also get some new units starting with a pair of new Command Tanks

The Dracosan Command Tank is a new option for the Solar Aux list that allows you to take a HQ Dracosan! This has the Tank Commander (2) rule, which allows it to take 2 additional detachments of tanks rather than just one – for Solar Aux this includes their specialist detachments too, so a really nice way of freeing up more tank slots in your army. It also has the Command Vehicle (9) rule, which allows friendly models to test on a leadership of 9, which is pretty handy.

In a similar style, the Astartes get access to the Promethius Command Tank – This works much the same way with the same Tank Commander (2) and Command Vehicle (9) rules. Interestingly, it can only take Gravis Heavy Bolter sponsons, which is a shame as I’d love to stick laser destroyers on it – but it still fills a nice niche for people who want to run a fully tank based army.

The Battle of Tallarn also introduces 2 updated profiles for the units with new kits this weekend. First up we have the Rapier Squad – this can have between 1 and 4 crews and introduces a new weapon option, the Mole Mortar. Old School players will know the Mole Mortar from the history of 40k, but essentially this is a Mortar that fires shots underground to reach it’s targets. It’s a pretty good gun with S7 and damage 2 (3 if it stays still) and AP3 – it’s got armourbane and always hits the side of vehicles, making it an interesting addition for taking out light tanks.

There’s actually two different kits available for these – Direct and Indirect , and each box can build two models.

These are both great kits and are actually fully magnetisable. I built mine with set loadouts, but the main gun on all the builds can actually be fitted with magnets (3mm off the top of my head) to allow you to swap out the guns. You get all the extra parts you need to build up both weapons, which makes doing this really easy! The crew can be built to match the weapons – So in my examples I have built the bespoke Mole Mortar crew for example, however there’s lots of generic options too if you want to swap the guns, which is a really nice touch!

The other updated unit in The Battle of Tallarn are the Charonite Ogryns. These are bought in squads of 3 with additional models added up to a unit size of 9 of them! Interesting though the kit comes in sets of 4, so I’m surprised the max unit size is not a multiple of that.

In the previous book they all had a fixed loadout, but now there’s 4 different weapon options for them. You can take two of any weapon, but I can’t see any advantage for doing that in 3rd edition, so that seems an odd choice – but it does give you scope for equiping them with two different weapons to make them more versatile.

What’s really nice is that there’s a lot of variety across these weapons from the standard claws at S7 AP 3 with 2 damage and Breaching 5+, do the Blades that drop the strength to 5 but gives them reaping blow 2. The Shredders are only AP4 but have Shred 4+ and Rending 4+ and finally my favourite are the Crushers that only get 2 attacks rather than 4, but hit at S10 at AP2 with Armourbane and Armourbreaker 4+ to increase damage on vehicles.

Now the kit comes with 6 of the standard claws and 2 each of all the other weapons – so if you want to put together a squad all armed the same way then you’re going to need to pick up a couple of boxes, which is a bit of a shame. Mixing weapons isnt the end of the world though, and there’s something to be said for equipping these for versatility – though I think I’ll be picking up a second box so I can have a squad built for punching tanks to death and another for taking on things with a 3+ save.

Each of the 4 models in the box can be built to go into a different pose, with the piping all fitting to each build – I would be careful here though as it’s a little tricky to get the positioning of these right, so make sure to dry fit as you go. I did have a bit of a nightmare building the feet – the instructions have you build them as a separate assembly, however the front piece does not sit very easily without the context of how it attaches to the leg. I found it easier to ignore the instructions and instead build them from the hip down – once you have the legs in place its a lot easier to position the feet.

Once built they are a joy to paint up however, and I can’t wait to see what else they add to the Solar Aux range next – hopefully some aircraft in a aerial based Journal…

The Battle of Tallarn is a great addition to the books in 3rd Edition, especially if you are a fan of tanks. The new missions are fun, and the additional HQ options give you more tools to put together tank heavy forces which is really good to see! From a rules point of view we get some more options on a couple of units – but I do worry that going forward we’re going to see more of this to the point where we need updated core books for each faction before too long, which is something we saw recently in Legions Imperialis. Lots of books is the Specialist Games approach, but I really hope that those big hardback books we picked up at the launch of the edition are now made obsolete too quickly…

The Battle of Tallarn and the new Solar Aux kits are all up for pre order now and are released on Saturday 16th May

Games Workshop provided Sprues & Brews with free copies for review purposes.