Age of Sigmar: Saying Goodbye to Your Battletomes Means AoS Has Caught Up with 40K
Out with the old, and in with the new for Age of Sigmar means saying goodbye to your battletomes. Here’s what that means for AoS and 40K players.
A full edition reboot unfortunately means all the previous editions books and supplements are obsolete all at once. Here’s what GW says about that:
The New Indexes
“However, with changes this fundamental to the core building blocks of the game, it does mean that previous rules and rulebooks have been superseded. Every current Battletome will be retired when the new edition drops – but every Faction will receive a free downloadable Index on or shortly after release.
These Indexes provide a competitive and satisfying experience right from the outset. You’ll be able to buy physical Faction Packs from the outset, which contain your army rule, subfaction rules, enhancements including spell lores, and all your warscroll cards for both Spearhead and regular Warhammer Age of Sigmar. And of course, these Indexes will be replaced by new-look Battletomes for every faction as the edition matures.”
What’s Going On?
For those players who are strictly on the AoS side of things, welcome. Like 40K, this means that your game is now all grown up. Warhammer 40K is now on its 10th Edition, and in that 37-year span, it has had three complete reboots. Age of Sigmar is hitting the ten-year mark and GW feels it’s time. Normally, you will see GW take one of their mainline games and tune & tweak it from edition to edition. This normally lets the battletomes/codexes be backwards compatible. So existing players keep their rules, and aside from edition-launch FAQs are good to go. The new edition books roll out and the cycle of the ever unbalanced/balanced meta continues.
But all good things must end. Eventually, the core foundations of any game system can only be pushed and massaged so far. Over the years, fundamental changes are uncovered, and at a bigger picture level – customer’s tastes change across the entire game industry. Certain types of rules become “hot” and expected in a modern system, while other rules become antiquated and fall out of fashion.
That is where Age of Sigmar is now after ten years. It appears that GW is using the exact model used for 10th Edition Warhammer 40K’s reboot. A clean break with the previous edition’s rules, and a full set of free unit stat pdf’s for every faction, along with physical cardpacks you can purchase. This will reset the game all at once and put everyone on a level playing field. Then the cycle will reset and the new AoS Battletomes will start to flow once more.
Will AoS Lead or Follow 40K?
To me the bigger and more interesting question is what AoS’s place in the larger picture of GW games will be after the new edition. I would argue that AoS has served as a “style leader” for rules among GW’s mainline games since its creation. It was the petri dish that GW used to create a more dynamic, streamlined, and “modern” philosophy of rules. It led the way for GW’s other games to modernize, and didn’t have the thirty years of legacy rules tradition and baggage that 40K did.
But now AoS is old enough that it’s getting its own full rules reset. 40K is very modernized at this time in 10th Edition, and we will all get to discover together which game will now lead the way as a more fast-paced clean modern system. Its possible that both AoS and 40K will be stablemates and move forward more of less in parallel in the future, each borrowing the best parts of the other.
But in the meantime. find a nice place in your GW library for all those old AoS Battletomes.
They will soon be joined by new edition ones in due time, rest assured.
