New General's Handbook 2017!

The General's Handbook last year is perhaps what saved Age of Sigmar in many people's minds.
The biggest change was the inclusion of points values for matched play, something that had been sorely lacking in AoS up to its release. Whilst many people tried to create weird and wonderful systems (such as the Wound counting method which really favoured glass cannons), actual competitive play was very difficult.
The AoS core rules only take into account relative army sizes, again sort of meaningless when we don't know relative strengths of individual models. Bringing in points, thus fair competitive play, meant that tourney players could once again get invested in Warhammer.
The new General's Handbook, rather than being a band aid on a somewhat broken game (regardless of what you may think, competitive games without balance are never received well by players... and yes, tabletop war games are inherently competitive), this new book is going to be adding layers of complexity to existing systems.
age of sigmar generals handbook 2017
Never thought a Chocobo Knight would be the poster boy for Warhammer
Things that we know from Warhammer Community:

Open play:

  • Expanded multiplayer rules, including Triumph and Treachery

Narrative play:

  • Siege warfare rules
  • Location and realm specific rules

Matched play:

  • New battle plans
  • Updated points costs
  • Allegiance abilities for last year's release factions
 Multiplayer rules are really fun, and something that my student neophytes keep asking about. Can't wait to see those.

The Narrative play rules are undoubtedly going to be similar to what we've seen in the 8th Edition 40K release, with unique rules for the battlefield. I don't know if this is when they'll try and sneak in command points, but I doubt it's not on the game developers minds.

Everything else is as you'd expect really. This is somewhat of an experimental compromise between fully Open Source game play and the rule book system, and we've just come into our second iteration of this experiment. Since we're only into our second year of this experiment, I can't say for certain its going well. but from the upswing of interest in AoS from my students, I can at least anecdotally say things look promising.

And yes, you should probably be setting aside some money to get this. Hopefully it won't cost as much as a modern codex, but last year's Hand book was £15.

Until next time!



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