The GHB is incoming, and not a moment too soon. AOS has been feeling pretty flat for a lot of people lately – my own belief (with no hard data to back it up) is that it might be the first edition that has seen the game shrink rather than grow – so we’re due a kick-start. GW dropped their first set of reveals last night, and we’re moving over to Aqshy:

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/yb8viq2m/head-to-aqshy-with-the-new-generals-handbook

Today we’ll be running through what we know, speculating about what we don’t and whinging about what it means for Ironjawz. As always we aim to evaluate rather tham regurgitate, so we’ll point out a bit of nuance that you might miss on a skim through the reveals, and try to cook up some options for securing VPs that are available to every army.

Ready? Let’s go.

The Book

The print format looks to be in line with the current GHB, which is to say you get the cards and objective markers with the book:

Ah, the blind warrior-mystic who can sense and react to his surroundings.  A classic trope of science-fantasy since Luke Skywalker.

Nope, can’t think of anyone who did it before that.

Buying this is not essential-essential: you could easily just stick a little yellow dot-sticker onto a 3rd party objective marker (or your current Ghyran ones). Personally I quite like having the cards so it will be a rare purchase for me, but you could work around it if you wanted to.

What Rules Were Revealed?

There’s some finicky token-counting thing where you accrue Angry Points, and spend them on Angry Dice, and use Angry Dice to do things. Sounds like a low-key pain in the ass to keep track of but I’m sure it’ll become second nature soon enough:

The examples they gave us are an extra way to punch people, and I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Ward:

I know a few people saw that Eruption of Fury is a Fight ability and thought that means it replaces your normal combat. That’s not the case. It happens at the end of the turn, so it’s an extra set of punching after the normal punching is done. Needless to say it’s better used on high-quality attacks with multiple damage, so Monsters in general are looking good. You might be able to batter your way out from being tied down in combat, and you can do it on both player’s turns too.

Be aware that the end of turn sequence is mapped out in the core rules. You would always use this ability before scoring objectives, so in other words you can attempt to punch models off the circle with Eruption before you figure out who has most OC remaining on there.

Fight Through The Pain essentially gives you a 3+ ward against 1 pip of damage per dice spent. It’s kinda bullshit that you can get Not-Wards stacked on top of Actual Wards, but at least we can all access it (even if we can’t all benefit equally). It’ll definitely create stories, although I suspect that some of them will turn out to be horror stories.

I’ve sure there will be more ways to gain and spend Angry Points, but that’s what we know about so far.

The Mission and Tactics

Urgh, S-shaped deployment. These wonky deployments add no joy whatsoever to the game, just an extra few minutes of chores before we can start having fun. Please stop. (They will never stop).

Seems like the Tactic-card format is staying, and the one we’ve seen is really interesting. You need to damage the same enemy unit across three phases of the same turn, and I reckon the first thing a lot of us would have thought upon seeing that are:

• Hit them
• Shoot them
• Zap them with some magic

Those are The Big Three phases for damage, so having access to decent shooting gives you a clear head start.

Per the Core Rules there are actually 7 phases in each turn. If you already knew that, bravo, but I reckon a lot of people would not be aware that Start of Turn and End of Turn are officially phases of the game in their own right:

So what damage can we squeak out of each of them?

Start of Turn

There’s a handful of army-specific abilities that happen here, such as Troggoth healing or Chorfs doing their token thing, but none I’m aware of that do damage. However, Activate Place of Power can fuck you if roll a 1 on Cauterising Pollen:

Now granted that’s a current GHB thing and likely to change. But the last GHB had something similar:

So keep an eye out for that, because there’s a decent chance that the new GHB will also give your opponent the opportunity to stiff themselves at the start of your turn, and give you one phase of damage for “free”. And note that the wording of the Battle Tactic itself means that enemies self-damaging does count.

Hero Phase

Magic, Prayers, Mawpits, you get the idea.

Movement Phase

Damage in this phase is rare, as it should be, but it does exist: for example in Gloomspite, you can get fly-over damage from Squig Hoppers, and some of the Gitmob chariots can do damage by moving around too. So keep an eye out for any movement damage tech, because it just got a little boost in utility.

Shooting and Combat

Eh I won’t dwell on these other than to point out that it’s another good reason to run King Brodd’s Stomp, with its Rampage that does mortals in the shooting phase (if you needed more persuading). And maybe another reason to consider an ROR if you don’t have good shooting of your own – like the Cannonade Cogfort.

Cogfort Hobby Challenge, and General Update

Charge Phase

Charge mortals make this a thing for plenty of armies, notably Ogors, the Vulcha from Kruleboyz and everyone who takes Kragnos.

End of Turn

Buckle up, cos this is where it gets interesting.

There’s a couple of armies that natively have ways to damage you at the end of the turn:

But even without that, we all have the mighty Power Through which is often the best CP you’ll spend on any given turn:

And now with Eruption of Fury everybody can attack at the end of the turn, and pop some damage through that way:

Funnily enough, if your opponent attempts Eruption in your turn, they could fuck themselves by rolling a 1, cop some damage and gift you an extra phase of damage right at the death.

Anything else?

Sure is! There’s a campaign 😊

I love campaigns. Every year we run a global Matched Play Campaign for our Patrons – this year’s is due to launch in August. I’m rapt to see the GHB really leaning into linked games because it’s all about making memories, and I’ll definitely be giving this a try.

Nice to see them at least trying to put a bit of soul back into GHBs, rather than the purely utilitarian Matched Play pamphlet they’ve devolved into over the years.

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All in all, I’m pretty energised for this. The game could frankly use a kick up the arse and the rules we’ve seen here suggest a lot of interesting decision points, but more importantly, a lot of big, swingy, memorable moments that you’ll be talking about afterwards.

That one battle tactic alone has quite a bit going on. For one thing, you’ve got to keep damaging the same unit, so there’ll be times where you spike output or your opponent declines to use All Out Defence so you accidentally kill them too early.

Now imagine this: your Mega Gargant has done damage to an enemy unit in two phases, but that opponent really needs to kill you this turn to get you off the objective and get themselves out of combat. So they reach into their bag of tricks, spend an Angry Dice on one extra attack from Eruption of Fury…and roll a 1. They damage themselves in the End of Turn phase and hand you the Tactic.

What could be better than that?¹

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1. When it happens to a Lumineth player, that’s what. ↩︎