Warhammer 40K: Leviathan goes up for pre-order today. In advance of the iconic tabletop game’s 10th edition — and the company’s biggest-ever product launch — it’s more important than ever to read between the lines.
Decades into producing a franchise, it’s easy to lose perspective on who your fans are and what they value. Look no further than Dungeons & Dragons’ OGL fiasco in January, where the seminal role-playing game managed to piss off just about everyone — including its most die-hard fans. Blizzard pulled off a similar feat not too many years ago, announcing a mobile installment in the iconic Diablo series that landed with a seismic thud at its own convention. As I sat in the audience at this year’s AdeptiCon, I wondered to myself: Is Games Workshop walking into the meat grinder here with its announcement of the 10th edition rules for Warhammer 40,000? Turns out, my fears were for naught.
The U.K.-based game developer and publisher has absolutely knocked it out of the park, somehow managing to fill its newest boxed set, Warhammer 40,000: Leviathan, with an incredible amount of fan service. The miniatures inside reward longtime collectors with reimagined favorites, while also managing to explore new and vital art and design choices in several of the sculpts. Meanwhile, the new 10th edition rules bundled inside that box are simpler and easier to use than ever before. And that’s why the crowd at AdeptiCon cheered so loudly and so often during an otherwise ponderous, 45-minute presentation: These are the changes they wanted to see, and I suspect that Games Workshop will be rewarded with another sold-out set as a result.
Of course, that’s what makes the company’s more subtle marketing decisions all the more curious. But we’ll get to that in due time. First, let’s talk about what’s inside this box.
Leviathan includes 72 miniatures, all of which are new to the franchise. There is a mix of both Space Marines and Tyranids, 40K’s blue-armored poster boys and their most hated Alien-like enemies, respectively. These are push-fit miniatures, meaning that they go together without any glue at all. While they’re a real pain for dedicated hobbyists and painters, trying to make their joins as seamless as possible before airbrushing, they’re perfect for newbies. Players 12 and older will have absolutely no trouble at all slapping these bad boys together in record time, even if they don’t really know what they’re doing. And that’s fine — introductory sets like this, while still attractive for veterans, are, as the term suggests, geared toward newbies. Not only does it include a well-annotated (and indexed!) 330-page rulebook; it will also include downloadable profiles (think character sheets, sort of like in D&D but for squads of soldiers) for every unit.
The only oversight, it appears, is that Leviathan doesn’t come with any dice. So be sure to pick up a boatload of d6s, or loot the other board games in the closet when the time comes.
Aside from those dice, Leviathan will be immediately playable right out of the box. It’s all thanks to the franchise’s all-new “flagship” format called Combat Patrol. It’s a faster style of play that uses smaller, preconstructed collections of miniatures that are already on store shelves all around the world — similar to Commander format in Magic: The Gathering. Games Workshop has gone on the record to say that “everything that you need to play Combat Patrol” with another 22 factions will be free to download when 10th edition launches.
