Goatboy’s First Impressions Playing Warhammer 40K 10th Edition
Goatboy here giving some first impressions after playing 40K 10th edition at the Kansas City Open for the GW stream.
I threw down with my big ole Chaos Daemons vs Rob from Goonhammer and his well-painted Death Guard Jerks. It was a heck of a game with a lot of things dying, stratagems being used, and big monsters punching things to death. I’ve written about the biggest 10th edition rule changes, and now I want to give you some of my first impressions while playing the game and what I thought about them.
Overwatch Is a Big Deal
First of all, the biggest thing is that Overwatch is a legit thing. Rob had a ton of flamers/snot shooters/gross torrent things in his list. My poor Be’lakor got a bit too close to them, moved to get closer to kill Morty, and paid for it by losing 10 wounds. It is a legit strategy that I even used with my own Flamers into his Death Guard unit – but I didn’t kill nearly as much. It was rough as heck, and it will be a thing. Especially for those armies that can either do it quickly, free, or have even more hot flamer action.
Moving Is Speedy
Moving is also interesting in that it feels like things can move around ok, but you really need to plan how you are going to shift around the tabletop. The ability to ignore 2” of terrain is great as that keeps tanks and other stuff moving well so you can set up a cool-looking table with lots of obscuring terrain that isn’t going to stop people moving. We played on one of the new GW Event terrain designs for Matched Play on the stream, and it felt like enough terrain to hide and still be tactically playable.
Mission Cards Advice
On the missions, it really feels like doing the random draw for missions is the way to go. You get more points and you can gain CP by burning a card if needed. This can be huge as it can help you swing a teleport/move a turn earlier or some other big “reaction” to help keep your guys legit. I think as we continue playing this it will get easy to figure out how to best work te Mission Deck. You will be able to build your armies to always give you an option to quickly score a card you draw with either movement tricks or other options to get around.
Big Leaders Matter
Speaking of the units themselves – the big ole special characters feel like they are really needed to build out your army. I don’t think will see many Daemon armies without Be’Lakor and the same for Death Guard. These two big monsters give so much to their armies with rerolls, threat, and presence to help wreck shit as needed. My other bigs were ok with the Bloodthirster going wild through the Back Line but just Be’lakor’s ability to not let his army be shot outside 18” seems very powerful.
Gameplay Odds & Ends
The missions we played was a weird one that had you dropping objectives as your little warp ritual points. My army was a bit faster than Rob’s so I quickly shifted around plopping out little warp bubbles to try and hold as the game went on. I had a question on the missions due to the wording of “instead of shooting” you do this “action” and since Daemons didn’t have some shooting on units – could I do it? Turns out you can you are just doing that instead of “shooting” which everything can do just it doesn’t have a weapon that shoots. It’s a bit weird, but I think will see some clarification coming on just how to play our new obsession.
Finally, the cards and rules took a bit to wrap our heads around as again it is a ton of new rules to read. I think will all get faster moving through the 40K turns within the next few months and it just takes that initial learning bump before we are zipping thru all the games. I think when the App comes out too it will be easier as well but will have to wait and see that.
The 40K 10th Edition Verdict
But overall, I enjoyed this game, and I think we have a bright future with the upcoming matched play stuff and competitive scene. I know some things were done off in the video, such as how I was on objectives and so was Rob – you guys will just have to wait and see when Matched Play fun comes out later on.
10th Edition is a winner!
How excited are you to see all the army rules coming out soon? It’s going to be pretty crazy couple of months trying to figure out what is good in your army again.
