GW: Bringing Back Movement Trays
It’s time to talk about the ironic elephant in the room – the return of movement trays from Games Workshop.
Movement trays are coming back thanks to Apocalypse and it’s not without a sense of irony. For long time veterans of GW’s games, movement trays used to be a staple for Warhammer Fantasy Battles. When the World-That-Was got nuked, and Age of Sigmar emerged, the bases shifted away from squares and movement trays as round-bases became the norm. Some folks still opted to use movement trays – at least until the battlelines closed as they did (and still do) make it easy to move lots of infantry around quickly.
At the time this was all going down, 40k was knee-deep in the previous edition. 40k Players didn’t really notice or care so much about movement trays. Fast-forward to 8th edition and the game changed. Gone were the template weapons from the game. Suddenly, you didn’t HAVE to max out your 2″ unit coherency to avoid getting nailed by a pie-plate weapon. On the Tournament Scene, home made and custom movement trays started to pop-up randomly – especially for Horde Armies. Times had changed.
Templates. Templates for days…
And now we’re standing on the cusp of a new edition of Apocalypse and Games Workshop is officially bringing back movement trays to the game. Strangely enough, these new movement trays look very promising – but not just for Apocalypse. I know a few AoS players who have been eyeing them for their armies, too. And I can’t really blame them! It’s all because all of these game systems share some common themes for movement and these trays are designed to really take advantage and streamline those systems.
With all the standardized bases in both 40k, AoS, and pretty much ALL GW games, these trays literally are a perfect fit. On top of that, each of these tray layouts is designed to where you can tessellate them and essentially create ranks for your units. For AoS, that’s actually ideal – and the irony is ripe with this one.
If only I had a way to move all these wispy models without knocking them all over while I did that. Some type of “tray” that helped with movement…
AoS is (not so) secretly still a rank-and-file system thanks to how engagement and weapon ranges work. I’m not going to go into detail here, but if you’ve spent any time at all playing the game, you might have picked-up on this “hidden” design feature.
On the 40k side of the house, for horde armies, these trays are going to be VERY popular. As a Tyranid player, I’m looking forward to “mounting-up” my ‘gaunt units and actually getting them all moving forward with these. And when I pull off a successful charge I can simply “dismount” them for greater movement accuracy. That’s all thanks to the fact that these trays obey the unit coherency rules for Apoc (which is a 1/2″).
Heck, I might even look into magnetizing the bases and the trays just to make movement that much easier and secure. But that’s a project for another time…
I don’t know about the rest of the players in my local community, but I’m already eyeing my armies and crunching some numbers to figure out exactly how many trays I’ll need. I never really thought I’d ever consider going to back to using movement trays. However, the more I stare at these and the more games I play without them, the more I’m starting to convince myself of using them. It’s the return of the movement tray – who knew!?
Everyone can use movement trays without fear of the dreaded Template Weapon now!
