I started playing Warhammer Fantasy back with 4th Edition in the early 90’s, so I guess this is the 3rd time in about 15 years that I am going to have to upgrade my rulebook. It has at least been over 6 years now since 6th Edition, which is a respectable length of time to wait between editions. In this review I going to not dwell upon the detail of the rules changes too much, as they have been fairly accurately reported elsewhere. Instead, I want to give everybody an idea of what they will get when shelling out $85 in early September.

The new hardcover has almost exactly the same number of pages as the previous edition, giving it a good, solid weight. The style and text is cleanly laid out (more so than the last edition), with plenty of diagrams, artwork and photos. Much of the artwork is familiar, but there are some nice new pieces, many of them focussing on the Empire, leading me to believe that it has been ‘borrowed’ from the upcoming Empire army book.

The Basic Rules section is further divided into 7 sub-sections:

• Playing the game, which basically details the Pitched Battle scenario.
• Characteristics, which explains, well, characteristics.
• Units, which details the rules for line of sight, facing, and so on.
• The Turn, which details the turn phases.
• Movement, Shooting and Close Combat, which provide rules on these phases.

These last three sections are obviously pretty important, and one of the key areas that many existing players will immediately be interested in. There is a lot of attention given to matters such as fleeing, pursuit and so on, with plenty of diagrams and examples. In a nutshell, fleeing and pursuit is now always done in a straight line. Friendly units are simply passed through (possibly causing panic tests), whilst enemy units directly in the path of fleeing units will cause them to be destroyed. Much nastier, but also much simpler. The level of attention given to these rules appears to be sufficient to unambiguously explain what should occur in most situations. Of course, that is probably what they thought about last edition…

The Advanced Rules section is divided into 19 sections:

• Psychology, which now also includes unbreakable.
• Weapons, of which there are no new ones, but much more detail and some new rules are provided. Pistols can now stand and shoot no matter how close the attacking unit is, for example, and great weapons only give +1 strength when the wielder is mounted.
• Monsters. The monster reaction table is now much more user-friendly.
• Chariots.
• Skirmishers, who are significantly less powerful.
• Flyers, which now also details flying cavalry.
• Fast cavalry.
• Unit Strength – an unusual place to find this information, but there you go.
• Characters, which is a big section and contains amongst other things lots of very useful clarifications on the effects of psychology.
• Command Groups.
• Generals and Battle Standards
• War machines – another nice, big useful sections, with lost of clarifications.
• Special Rules – all the other stuff such as breath weapons, flammable etc
• Buildings – 3 pages of useful rules about fighting in and around buildings.
• Special Features is another section that seems out of place. Basically, it lists 6 special battlefield features which have special rules. For example, the Arcane Monolith gives the players who controls it with a unit an extra power dice and dispel dice each turn. Nice.
• Victory, which has the Victory Points table.
• Magic, which is another section many people will immediately turn to. All the rumoured changes are true, and there are 6 pages devoted to clarifying how casting and dispelling spells works.
• The Lores of Magic. Every one of the eight lores has had at least one change, whether that be the casting cost of the spells, the order the spells appear in, and/or the inclusion of all new spells. Second Sign of Amul, for example, is now the second spell in the Lore of Heavens, whilst the Lore of Beasts gets a second magic missile. All in all, the lores appear to be much more even than they were.
• Finally, Magic Items lists rules for magic items and details the common ones. No changes here, however, there are no points costs, which supports the current rumour that future army books will feature different points costs for different races.

We now move out of the rules part of the book into the fluffy bits. The Warhammer World section covers 80 pages, compared to less than half that in the previous edition. There is a potted history section followed by background for all the major armies, with nice colour photos and maps. Chaos Dwarfs only get a paragraph, and there also is a very small amount of information provided on Cathay, Ind and Araby.

The penultimate section is The Warhammer Hobby, which predictably is 50 odd pages devoted to painting and other hobby aspects. There is, however, a bit of additional gaming information provided, as well as 3 scenario variations.

Finally, the Appendix contains Reference pages, basic stats for all existing troop types, and an Index (hooray!).

So, how does it all stack up? The first point to make is that there is much less gaming content in this edition than the previous, and also less than in the current 40K and LOTR rulebooks. Rules for siege and skirmish have been removed, and there are only 4 scenarios instead of 10. Another way to look at is that there is much more ‘padding’ in this new edition. On the positive side, these omissions almost certainly indicate that more expansions are planned to support the core rules – a siege expansion and a re-vamped Mordheim, perhaps. And that’s great news for Warhammer players.

There are still some annoying errors as well, such as no reference to Swarms in the index and ambiguous wording (such as the rules on slings). But such errors would appear to be much less prevalent than in the previous edition.

It will take some time to see how the rules changes affect the game. Many of them are obviously good ideas, that will help game flow and limit some of the problems that have developed over the years. Others don’t appear to be such good ideas. My personal peeve is the change from minimum 4 models to minimum 5 models for rank bonuses. This unreasonably disadvantages heavy cavalry, with the exception of Brettonian wedges, which are now immensely powerful. A unit of 9 Empire knights now cannot receive a rank bonus, whilst a unit of 9 Brettonian knights will get a rank bonus of +2. That’s a big difference.

All in all, the 7th edition rulebook is a pretty good product. Hopefully Games Workshop will now take the initiative and continue to support and expand Warhammer with new expansions and ideas in the coming years.

Craig Woodfield