If you have been playing 40K for a while you know the frustration of easing into a new edition. Here’s some of the favorite memories of switching editions over the decades.
If you have been playing 40K for a while you know the frustration of a game that feels familiar enough but has a decent amount of teensy changes to frustrate the heck out of you. The old tricks you used to remember don’t work and what do you mean your WS doesn’t make someone hit you worse. It can be such a weird time trying to forget old rules and embrace the new game that still lives off the bones of the old version.
Here are some of the things I find frustrating as a player that has been playing since the end of 2nd Edition. The fondness of older editions can be such a weird thing to break as we play and live in a new world of rules, tweaked options, and hopefully decent models. Let’s talk about some of the bigger shifts I remember from back in the day.
Changing Base Sizes
Base sizes are always a weird one. I remember when we had Khorne Daemonkin book coming out and the Flesh Hound base size shifted from a small bike base, to a 50mm base, and finally now back to a Cavalry base. It is such a crazy shift to go from 6th, to 7th, 8th, and finally 9th edition with our new cleaner Flesh Hounds. I ended up using my old Flesh Hounds that were converted off of Vampiric dogs into weird bloody Chaos Spawn.
WS Does What NOW?
The biggest shift I remember is shifting how WS works in close combat. I think it was 7th edition where we would compare stats and whoever had the higher WS would hit better. If your WS was double the size of your opponents you would hit on a 2+. It was a wild time with the shift to 8th edition and a flat Hit roll instead of comparing things. I think it was always for the better but there was a time when you would roll in with a WS 9+ and was a murder machine in close combat.
Old School Game Aids
Think about all the random tools we have lost in the different editions. We had 6 inch rulers, 9 inch rulers, and now 8 inch rulers. We are losing our Neoprene objectives but back in the past we used Poker Chips. What about blast markers and blown up vehicles? How about those old scatter dice? Do you remember when we had deployment screens we had to hide behind as we set up armies? Or just printed army lists?
Holdover Edition Codexes
The most frustrating thing I can remember is having to wait for a new army codex for years after a new edition launched. You would have to play your weird old edition codex rules and hope they worked in the new edition. That Dark Eldar codex up there from 3rd Edition held on for 12 years till the 5th Edition one replaced it! We didn’t have the digital releases we get now and hoped some weird Forge World book would power us up with cool new toys like the Dark Eldar Raven below. Or we would get a nice release showing up somewhere. We didn’t get campaign books to give us new shiny things. We had to hope our old rules worked and maybe we found something brutal. Heck we didn’t even get updated points that often.
~What old stuff do you remember? Or what do you try to forget when playing the newest game? What are you excited about with 11th edition coming out?
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Thomas Reidy, aka Goatboy, the ever-evil member of BoLS. I do arts, play 40k, and even paint a lot of stuff. I have been playing Warhammer 40K since the 1990s, and have won multiple national events including Adepticon and GW GTs. I’ve been writing for BoLS for 15 years. Look at my Instagram to see what I am working on – or working on for someone. I am always doing something hobby related.
Source: Bell of Lost Souls
