Take a look back at the best Warhammer 40,000 starter sets, and ahead to Armageddon; we rank every box by value, models, and nostalgia.
Another Long War Two-Fer is here: Keep those hobby muscles strong with this week’s webcast and the latest exciting podcast of table-top wargaming awesomeness, mostly centered around Warhammer 40k.
The Long War: Episode 510
Show Summary:
This week, the crew covers a new rules change and its implications with a special guest! Here are the key takeaways, section by section:
- (00:02) Rob Baer and Kenny Boucher kick things off with hobby chatter, missing co-hosts, Wyatt’s convention win at San Diego Classic, and a detour into Will Ferrell movie trivia chaos.
- (05:10) The news starts with Terror on Develin and the new Red Terror model, which brings back the classic Tyranid “eat a model” flavor in bigger, meaner plastic form.
- (08:16) They dig into the messy Starcraft tabletop game rollout, arguing the optics look rough because some buyers saw product sold at Adepticon while backers and online buyers may still wait weeks or months.
- (19:37) Rob points out that Games Workshop has anti-AI training language embedded in the Warhammer Community page source code, which he finds funny given how AI-ish some official article copy can feel.
- (21:50) The big meat of the episode is the new Armageddon box set, which Rob estimates could carry around $1,100 in theoretical GW MSRP value, including Marines, Orks, books, cards, and campaign materials. The crew thinks the Orks are doing a lot of heavy lifting in the box’s appeal.
- (26:11) Rob highlights the hardcover mini rulebook, Armageddon lore book, and card decks as a huge chunk of the box’s claimed value, though Kenny notes books and cards can bloat the “value” if rules get invalidated fast.
- (32:04) They discuss possible 11th edition rules changes spotted in official preview footage, including no stratagem stacking, Crushing Impact replacing or expanding Tank Shock, Overwatch and Heroic Intervention moving to end-of-phase timing, Smoke changing, and Cleave becoming a melee answer to Blast.
- (39:09) Kenny frames the new direction as a pullback from 8th edition’s wild stratagem-stack era, where cards and tricks dominated the game, toward stratagems feeling more like tactical bonuses than the whole engine.
- (45:16) Viewer Q&A turns into a nostalgia tour of 40k starter sets: third edition gets love for terrain, Marines, and Dark Eldar, Assault on Black Reach gets praise for Marines, Orks, and Deffkoptas, and Dark Imperium gets credit for bringing players back with Primaris Marines and Death Guard.
- (51:17) Rob picks Indomitus as his favorite starter-style box because its Primaris Marines felt genuinely grimdark and intimidating, while Kenny has a strong hobby-memory attachment to Dark Vengeance and its Dark Angels/Chaos contents.
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