So a little word of warning before you sit down with your morning espresso to peruse my words. I am not a games workshop fanboy. My first wargaming experience was not 40K like most, so this review will be from my eyes as someone who has spent a lot more time playing a variety of different games than this single, yet market dominant system.
My first experience of 8th edition was pretty fun. 1,000 points of Death Guard v Adeptus Mechanicus, pint of craft beer in hand, and another mate across the table who also hadn’t played 8e before either. We went through the 4 double sided pages of rules quickly and easily enough, and started rolling for deployment (we didn’t do an objective for our first few games). We had a decent laugh destroying a horde of each other’s miniatures every turn, whilst shovelling pretzels down our gobs during our opponents turn. 8th felt streamlined with no tables to navigate through like in older editions I’ve played, and a tiny ruleset that took minutes to understand and apply.
But then the first hurdle was met. We had questions that the rulebook didn’t seem to answer. The problem with these streamlined rules is that some of the wording is vague, leading to ambiguities and time at the table wasted googling up faqs, Reddit threads and the like. Yes, you can agree with your opponent what to do and continue with the game quickly, having a dice off on any disagreement. However, I’d argue that this should be only required rarely, and that what ought to be a quick 30 second glance at a rulebook should always be the first port of call.
Sadly, this was not possible.
Nevertheless we continued to play and have fun regardless. This lead to my army growing and a hunger to play other people.
My local gaming group, the Sons of War in Cambridge, is dominated by 40k. I go weekly to play a wide variety of systems, but without fail there are usually at least 6 tables dedicated to this wargame, so finding opponents was always going to be easy.
And so I started my journey on what has eventually led me to have a fairly negative l of this system. I found, more often than not, the game was determined on the very first roll off of the game - who gets first turn. 80% of my games were determined this way, with half of the second player’s army being wiped off before they could even move a miniature. Do you know how heartbreaking it is to take 20 minutes carefully placing your fully painted army on the table just to have to immediately pull off half of it? It was frustrating when I was the second player, and I always felt a bit dirty whenever I went first. With the long range of all the guns, the poor cover system, and the general squishiness of all troopers, there’s few things that can survive the turn one barrage.
I then noticed another issue. This game did not feel social. There’s very little interaction with your opponent other than calling out the rolls you need, and then telling them what armour penetration your successes have so they can roll their saves.
‘24 shots hitting on threes’, ‘6 fail, you’re toughness 4 right?’, ‘yeh’, ‘wounding on fours’, ‘ok that’s nine saves to make at no AP’, ‘I make 5 of my three-ups, 4 die’.
It’s not the most stimulating conversation, and when you only have three hours at the club to play a game that lasts three hours at least, it’s hard to interrupt your gameplay to actually discuss and chat with your opponent. I may as well be playing Dawn of War and save myself having to carry around a bucket of dice and two KR cases filled with minis that will last all of 20 minutes on the table.
The minis.
Well, I can’t lie to you. Games Workshop plastics are the best of the market. They’re not my favourite miniatures available, that honour lies with a different system, but they are close. These miniatures are beautifully detailed with instructions that are clear and understandable. These sculpts are stunning and more often than not, there will be something that tickles the taste for everyone. If we ignore price per army and look at price per mini, GW provides some of the best value. I will likely continue to buy the odd 40k kit, but more to fulfil my hobbying obsession that to actually put on a table.
Sadly, I will unlikely be playing much more of 8th edition. The game really doesn’t click with me, but as always I highly recommend getting a demo or dusting off your old collection to give it a smash and see for yourself.