By Rory Foster

Images copyright of Games Workshop, used without permission.

f you’re at all familiar with Warhammer Fantasy Battle, then in my opinion you should already know that late 7th edition was the most unbalanced book that Games Workshop has ever cobbled together. This was not due to the core rules, but rather to the more recent army books, especially Vampire Counts, Daemons of Chaos and Dark Elves. These three armies dominated most of the major tournaments, and it was actually harder to build a crap Daemons list than it was to make a top-tier competitive one.

With the arrival of 8th edition, however, we see some new rules that will radically alter the competitive scene by making a larger number of armies more viable in that environment. This is good to see from GW, because not too long ago Jervis Johnson (head of the GW developer team) was ragging on tournament gamers despite allowing rulebooks to be churned out that put some armies miles ahead of others in a competitive environment.

I can actually say for once that GW haven’t messed something up in a rulebook. This hefty tome (512 pages!) contains enough fluff to make your eyeballs bleed and – get this – balanced rules. In addition to these gifts from a higher power, it’s in full colour; a nice touch indeed (and something that other gaming companies have been doing for years while GW has been wallowing in their greyscale world).
Alright, this is going to be a long, long review, so let’s break up this wall of text a little, shall we?

Core rules
If the 8th edition rulebook is an obese neck-bearded manchild, then the core rules are the cheetos-clogged guts of his amorphous belly. At their most basic, the rules for movement, shooting and close combat are the same as before, but it’s all the extra gubbinz that make them unique.

I think the most important changes in this section of rules are those that affect magic, primarily because it will have such a drastic effect on the way tournament armies are built. Why? Because every single miscast roll will screw you over, and the most successful competitive armies in 7th edition (Daemons, Vampire Counts and Dark Elves) were heavily reliant on being able generate a lot of power dice while churning out spells at a rate of knots. If you miscast once, just once, you could blow up your valuable wizards or nullify all of your magic.

I’m not kidding. What would have once inflicted a single strength 2 hit will now almost certainly kill everyone around the unfortunate magic-user, and what would have once allowed your opponent to cast a spell of his own will now almost certainly kill the magic-user along with everyone around him. Magic is dangerous as hell now, which is a real kick in the nuts for magic-heavy armies and that will no doubt encourage diversity in competitive armies.

In addition to that, you no longer gain power dice based on the number and level of wizards in your army. Instead, you roll 2D6 (two six-sided dice) at the start of your magic phase to see how strong the Winds of Magic are blowing. The total rolled is how many power dice you have access to this turn, with the higher of the two numbers being the amount of dispel dice you get. Each wizard can also attempt to ‘channel’ the winds of magic by rolling a D6. If you roll a six on this die, then you gain an extra power die. Heavy risk, but the prize could turn the game around. You can do this with dispel dice too, meaning you don’t need ‘scroll caddies’ as much now.
You can also get an Irresistible Force result when rolling to dispel now. This is an automatic success and doesn’t cause a miscast, obviously.

There have been a fair few changes to the rules for charging, shooting and close combat that should encourage players to think more carefully about what they’re doing. First of all, you can now measure the distance between a unit and its intended target before deciding whether you want to actually charge them. This means no more newbies fudging their charges and getting their best units thrown back into the army case. Of course, if you look at this from a certain perspective, you could say that it’s merely holding the player’s hand instead of relying on their own judgement.

Next (and most importantly), drawn-out combat will be less prevalent, as units can now fight and shoot in two ranks! This can only be a good thing for horde-style armies, but will be wasted on those elite units like Black Guard, who are expensive and therefore few in number. It also means that those squishy blocks of archers and swordsmen are more of a threat to said elite units, who will be in danger of getting dragged down by sheer numbers. That should make your opponent think twice before throwing his Bloodcrushers at your thirty-man Spearman regiment!

There are a couple more rules that make large units more effective. First is the ‘Steadfast’ rule; this allows you to take a Break test with your unmodified leadership. Second is the ‘Horde’ rule; any unit at least ten models wide is classed as a ‘horde’ and the unit’s third rank can fight and shoot! That means that in a ten-wide, four-deep regiment with spears, all four ranks can fight, making for one nasty tarpit. These new rules clearly encourage the use of more infantry instead of building an army out of minimal infantry and filling the rest of your points with scary elite units like knights and monsters.

A lot of special rules have been added, but obviously there aren’t many units with them yet! Some, however, apply to specific unit types (the ‘Stomp’ rule, for instance, is only available to monsters like Giants). Some rules have also been balanced or modified (for instance, Regeneration now heals a model on a roll of 4-6 instead of just a 6). As far as I can tell, no Unique Special Rules have been removed entirely.

There’s a small section dedicated purely to fighting team battles, which probably won’t see much use in anything other than narrative campaigns or larger games, but it’s still nice to have because it means there won’t be any confusion over homebrewed rules. The writers have even gone to the effort of integrating the fluff into these rules in the form of the ‘alliance system’. There are three sides in the system: Forces of Order, Forces of Destruction and Unaligned Forces. Order is composed of Bretonnia, Wood Elves, High Elves, Dwarves (or Dwarfs if you swing that way), Lizardmen and the Empire. Destruction is composed of Daemons, Warriors of Chaos, Beastmen, Dark Elves, Skaven and Vampire Counts, while the Unaligned Forces are Ogre Kingdoms and Tomb Kings (neither of whom are the conquering type).

Depending on who’s allied with whom, there are some variations in the rules. Forces on the same ‘side’ are Trusted Allies, which means that for gameplay purposes, they’re basically in the same army. Skaven and Dark Elves, being the backstabbing gits that they are, are regarded by everyone, even each other, as Suspicious Allies, placing some limitations on them such as not being able to benefit from allied Generals or Battle Standard Bearers. There are rules for Order and Destruction fighting alongside each other, but such situations are called Desperate Alliances and carry the heaviest restrictions.

Background
Now for the best part! A large portion of this rulebook is nothing but background material (colloquially known as ‘fluff’). That’s by no means a bad thing, however. Each army gets their own four-page section with some nice artwork (not much of John Blanche’s scribbles are shown, which is a bit of a letdown) punctuated by excellent summaries of the army in question.
Because GW don’t seem to have a favourite army in WHFB (unlike 40k, where the Spess Mahreens get an obscene amount of attention), so they’ve managed to avoid blatant fanboyism. We don’t get any more exposition on the ancient history of the Warhammer world, but I’m OK with that because it leaves plenty of room for interpretation and speculation (something I feel the Horus Heresy novels ruin for 40k).
I’m also a little miffed by the fact that the fluff section for each army only gives us its history rather than its current state; for instance, no mention is made of the Storm of Chaos or similar campaigns. I understand that GW might want to keep that more biased fluff to the individual army books, but we don’t get much exposition on characters either which is a bit of a bummer.

Miniatures Gallery
Well, it had to appear sooner or later. To be honest, I was expecting GW to use this section to push shiny new models on us, but that’s not the case. It showcases a nice variety of models for each army, but it seems to have a lot of emphasis on characters. This is all well and good, but I’d hoped to see more detail on rank-and-file units as well as some paintjobs that we haven’t seen before.
They did take a step forward by including Golden Demon models, something I haven’t seen in an army book or codex in a fair while. This input from the fans is something we haven’t seen enough of ever since White Dwarf was centralised.

Tutorials
Here’s where we learn the wonders of the hobby (again). This section is purely for newbies and doesn’t contain anything that we haven’t seen before, but I’m in the mood for some nitpicking.
There are several pages of mundane painting advice and studio models of varying quality (they can’t even keep it consistent, the lazy gits). There’s nothing here that you wouldn’t learn from a friend or the internet. There are a few pages dedicated to battlefield terrain, including the obligatory plug for the Realm of Battle board.
This section is handy if you’re lazy or lack any form of contact with the rest of the human race, but pretty much redundant.

Scenarios
I like this section. GW has given us a nice variety of fluffy scenarios to try out, from an invasion to a heroic last stand. It’s unfortunate that these probably won’t see much use in the tournament scene, which frankly makes up a large portion of the hobby.

The section is rounded off with a big, juicy narrative scenario revolving around a Chaos invasion of the Empire including creatively named units (The Crimson Reapers, woe betide us! Corny names abound!), and a few pages of fluff detailing the canon outcome of the battle. It’s fluff like this that inspired me to get into the hobby, and I have to say I’m very pleased to see its return after the bland drivel of Codex: Loyalist Space Marines With More Spikes and Warhammer Armies: Beastmen (Not Of Chaos).

Conclusion (I’m all out of whine)
Hopefully this rulebook’s release signals a brighter future for GW, as it’s clear that a lot of care went into crafting this... ah, revoltingly expensive tome. The abundance of scenario rules and fluff as well as much more balanced rules means that there’s something for everyone in here; from the up-tight ‘fluff bunnies’ like myself to the neckbearded munchkins who play tournaments obsessively.
For the full experience, drop into Area 52 for a peek at the rulebook.