The rules that were 🔥 TOO HOT 🔥 to reveal at Adepticon!  We’ve managed to get our hands on the full and detailed leaks from 4^th Edition Age of Sigmar, and we’re here today to spill the beans.

The full rulebook, along with an accompanying briefing document, were accidentally delivered early to Betoota Wargaming, an FLGS in Queensland, Australia.  Store owner Cameron Grundbuch first approached his local newspaper, but when they declined to publish Cameron’s findings, we stepped in to grab the scoop of the century!

Priority Roll

The good news is: not only is it staying, it’s ramping up to be more impactful than ever. Here at Plastic Craic, we’re big fans of Prio, and we were rapt to learn that the Matched Play module will be layering some extra hot sauce on top of the basics that were covered in the official reveals on WarCom.

In the same way that the core rules for 3rd Edition tell you to roll off for priority at the start of the game, but the GHB missions overrule that in practice (so whoever drops first has the choice):

Credit: Gee Dubya

Well, we’ve seen the first General’s Handbook as well as the full core rules, and the Priority Roll is going into overdrive in the Matched Play module. We were rapt to pick this up from the briefing document shared with us by Cameron:

“Our players told us that they enjoy the theatre and drama of rolling for Priority at the start of every battle round, so how do you improve on perfection?  It can be frustrating to wait through your own turn and your opponent’s before you get the chance to roll Prio again.  So Age of Sigmar 4^th Edition will really ramp up the excitement by making you roll for Prio every turn.  That’s right, we’re removing Battle Rounds altogether – Matched Play will operate as a series of consecutive turns, rolling for Priority before each one.

A player takes their turn, you roll for priority and you go again.  We believe that playing around the double turn is a great form of skill expression, so imagine how much more skill you can express as you get double turned, treble turned or quadruple turned – the sky’s the limit!”

Battle Tactics

If there’s one piece of feedback the dev team have received loud and clear from 3^rd Edition, it’s that people love Battle Tactics.  We just can’t get enough of them!  So the first General’s Handbook under the new edition features several missions with no objectives at all, and all of your VPs will come from Battle Tactics instead. 

Great move.  “Standing on circles” is pretty basic – we need Age of Sigmar to reward more complex play patterns, like standing on board edges instead.  Much better.

We also picked up a bit of detail on the new Battle Tactics for KO:

“We do acknowledge that Battle Tactics aren’t always a level playing field.  For example Kharadron Overlords have been awarded VPs simply for shooting off one of their opponent’s units, or for getting in and out of boats – and some people thought this wasn’t fair. 

We quite agree, and in future Kharadron players will have significantly easier victory conditions which include deploying their army on the table, opening up their Battletome or writing their own first name with a green crayon (double VPs if it’s spelled correctly).  It’s important for Age of Sigmar to have armies that are pitched directly at helping small children to win games.”

This is where our intrepid store manager “Potato Cam” Grundbuch steps in with the first leaked Index photo:

Battlescroll Updates

Sounds like the core mechanics are in good shape, but what will the index mean for your favourite units?  There are a whole bunch of underrepresented warscrolls who will catch a bump in their 4^th Edition index, but the one we’re really excited about is Gordrakk.

Let’s take another look at the briefing document shared with us by Betoota Wargaming store manager, Cam Grundbuch:

“Gordrakk hasn’t had the impact we were hoping for in matched play in 2024.  Or 2023.  Or 2022.  Or 2021.  Or 2020.  Or 2019.  Or 2018.  Or 2017.  Or 2016.  So when a Destruction unit needs support, you can count on us to take swift and decisive action,  and we’ve wasted no time in honing in on Gordrakk’s key weakness: his fragility. 

We didn’t want to make Gordrakk too strong and risk him entering the top 50 or so monsters in the game, but moving Gordrakk over to a 4+ save hasn’t really worked out – so we fixed that.  You’re welcome.”

Over to you, “Potato Cam”:

---

And that’s all we’ve got for you today!  This article was written and published in Australia on 1^st April 2024.  And if you’re reading this while it’s still March 31^st wherever you are: remember, it’s beer o’clock somewhere.

If you’d like to help us continue with our work, we’d love to have your support. We’re the Age of Sigmar specialists, publishing regular AOS articles, including Patron-only posts on that platform. Please click here to join us on Patreon.