Open, narrative and matched play among new rules coming to Warhammer 40,000

Games Workshop has provided a look ahead at some of its plans for Warhammer 40,000, including the introduction of three new ways to play and thematic changes to army selection and combat.

One of the headline additions will take a leaf out of the General’s Handbook for fantasy sibling Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, bringing a triad of optional play formats– open, narrative and matched – to the sci-fi game.

Warhammer 40,000 will also make a number of changes to encourage and support thematic gameplay. This includes the possible introduction of command points, which will reward players who structure their forces in line with the lore of the universe with rerolls and army-specific rules.

This will be combined with revised combat rules, allowing charging units to attack first for more thematic play and providing greater benefits for tactical use of troops, overriding the reliance on initiative in specific cases.

Helping this will be the re-introduction of the move value, replacing the use of default unit types to determine movement with custom rules for each model.

Also returning will be armour save modifiers, which Games Workshop vows will mean “every weapon will have its place in your army and better represent how you imagine them working in your head”.

Finally, morale will be revised to avoid the current ‘all or nothing’ outcomes. A new system proposed by Peter Foley, head of books and boxed games for Warhammer, suggests rolling a d6, adding it to models lost that turn and subtracting leadership to calculate the additional number of casualties.