Games Workshop’s 2025 Big Summer Preview Roundtable

The Summer Preview is the longest preview we’ve had from Games Workshop in a long time, and covered releases for seven of the company’s game systems, including all of the major lines. There were a ton of new models and kits revealed, and our usual crew of degenerates have been champing at the bit to talk about them and their plans for converting them. So strap in and follow along with this week’s roundtable as we talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Games Workshop’s big summer preview.

Warhammer 40K: Leagues of Votann Wave 2

Thundercloud: Votann were a very anemic Codex on release, and did badly need a second wave. We had the Guild infantry as the Hernkyn Yaegirs Kill Team release, but as an army they still needed a lot more. 

And they’ve got it. Artillery, a light vehicle, robot heavy infantry and three more characters. This means you can actually have some real variety in Votann forces, and go with either a Guild or Brotherhood force, or a mixed force, and you have a variety of vehicles and support options to play with. The new combat patrol is very ‘here are three units and a character you expect to see in every Votann force’ so it’s very much a no brainer as the start of an army. 

Emma: Impossible to begrudge (geddit) the Votann players for this one; the fabled second wave has finally been real for a faction and this one absolutely slaps. I cannot stress enough how good it is that GW didn’t just slap another character on and call it a day, which felt like a very real possibility, and I’m so glad I was wrong to predict it. The dual-kit light vehicle is a really good idea, and is the sort of thing I’d love to see for more small factions as a way to get more rules for less model design effort.

However, the highlight for me absolutely has to be Buri Aegnirssen, He of the Blatant Enjoyment Of Being Vored. I absolutely love the Tyrannic War look in his design; it was really cool to see on the Lieutenant from Leviathan and I’ve been hoping for more ever since. While I understand that the lifespan of model manufacture and the lifespan of the edition’s lore focus are two very different things, it’s still cool to see a nod to what’s currently going on in the galaxy, and it definitely helps that the model overall owns.

Rob: The Votann range was very impressive on release but it definitely felt incomplete, so it’s good to see them finally getting a second wave of releases to flesh them out into a full army. Three new characters, a dual-build vehicle kit that includes a transport, some artillery/mortars and the unit of big robots gives them a lot of new options to work with and the models themselves look great. Having a five-model transport for Yaegirs is likely to make them even more valuable in the list and having a light transport that isn’t quite as expensive as a Saggitaur will be a big help.

Saffgor: I feel it necessary to highlight: The amount of dual-builds here is going to make Votann feel closer to a complete range than any second release has for an army, before. Not only do the gun vs melee loadouts on Steeljacks wildly affect their role on the battlefield, the difference in posing and armor (I noticed that big left shoulder plate, GW) makes me hope this is two Datasheets. To that end, the Kapricus comes in both shooty and scooty modes, which even let you split up Hernkyn Yaegirs; it’s obvious there’ll be a Hernkyn detachment, and I fully expect this to be the reason that works. I feel as though we see fewer ‘true’ dual kits now than in years past, but this wave has me thinking Votann has rapidly approached ‘real range’ with only 3 years under its belt.

Old World: New Tomb Kings

Thundercloud: It’s good to see two more multipart plastic characters for Tomb Kings, Royal Heralds and Liche Priests, and two more Arcane Journals, one specifically for Tomb Kings and one to bring Cathay over to the Chaos Invasion into the Empire and let you mix Cathay units into your Empire army.

While it’s nothing for an army I collect, it’s good to see further support and new kits for the Old World, and hopefully there’s a wave 2 for Cathay brewing further down the line.

Age of Sigmar – Armies of Death

Saffgor: I appreciate how hard the modelers work for every AoS release, when the new kits are just so-called ‘pity heroes’. While not every faction can receive a massive release each edition, it’s incredibly dynamic kits like these that continue to wow players in spite of their…singular nature. That being said, I almost wish that High Falconer Felgryn was generic, as it would be great to get more of a development for the ‘royal huntsmen’ archetype in FEC that started with the Royal Beastflayers. It’s a gorgeous kit, but you can only really buy, build, and paint it once. The Lord Vitriolic meanwhile is an absolute monstrosity, with a backwards-facing second set of arms that gives ‘Igor’ vibes, mixing away while the primary set hacks and cleaves.

Saffgor: It was mentioned in the stream that Nighthaunt will be able to access Commands like All-Out Defense in the new book, if I heard correctly, and perhaps that implies they’ll be shifting how static the defensive profiles on ghosts have been. Nighthaunt, with universal fly and static saves, ignores a decent chunk of the game at present, and it might be time to shift those design priorities.

Thundercloud: If the falconer got Warcry rules, I would absolutely buy it to run with my Beastflayers. 

Age of Sigmar: Chaos Dwarves

Norman: Hell fucking yes. The Chorfs are back and they’re everything I ever wanted. All of these dudes are a hit and are nice references to the old fantasy range. I was particularly happy to see the Bale Taurus, Deathshrieker, and Bull Centaurs make a return since that was all stuff that could easily be left by the wayside for newer themes. But no, the gangs all here and it looks better than ever. This is the dwarf army I’ve always wanted in Age of Sigmar, a sturdy front line with backline shooting support and elite fast movers I can use to hit my opponent’s flanks. As a really nice bonus there seems to be a bunch of gender diversity in the range, which would have been an easy miss considering the sick as hell beards.

Greg: I was set to not care about these guys but then I saw that they got a huge bull mech, and an even more huge flying bull mech. The studio paint jobs are doing a lot of work here, but the Gundam powered by compressed daemons is indescribably sick. The one complaint I have about the army is that anyone with a bare head looks like a complete doofus, but this is easily remedied by every helmet being perfect, so you never have to look at their faces if you don’t want to. It says a lot that the other AoS/tOW armies were skeletons, draculas, and ghosts, but that against all odds the one that rocks the hardest is the chorfs.

Jake: The bull mech with the two cannon arms looks great. You’d think “large bipedal robot with two cannon arms” would look similar across 40K or AOS but it’s so visually distinct here compared to the various flavors of dreadnaughts. Very cool.

Saffgor: I started playing Warhammer at age 10, and growing up, the Chaos Dwarfs’ Forgeworld release was the army for me that sat at the unreachable resin zenith—my white whale of Warhammer, expensive and distant. I’ve been looking for an AoS army to get back into, following Beasts’ unfortunate departure, and the Chorfs make a solid case…for someone else. The lack of a big choo choo & elementals, coupled with no hero for the Bull Centaurs (gorgeous as they are) make me worried about how much I’d like the range, but make no mistake: These are a fantastic addition to the game. Having another ranged-focused army is perhaps an annoyance, but the aesthetics are an undeniable victory, with bulky metal panelling and green fire striking of Warma/Hordes or even WoW’s Legion. All that’s to say, while I don’t think this satisfies the kid in me, I guarantee this will leap to the top of the popularity charts for AoS players worldwide.

Thundercloud: Good news everyone, we’ve been promised Warcry rules for these guys.

Warhammer Underworlds – Spitewood

Emma: I’m chipping in on this not because of any chance I’ll play Underworlds, but because I know this release will have made my boy Jake happy, and you should all be pleased about that. You should also read his articles, dude works really hard on them and is a font of passion for his game.

Anyway, I should talk about the models. The Chaos Dwarfs have some… interesting faces, but that’s nothing a swap to helmeted heads won’t fix. Meanwhile, Kurnothi warbands continue their 100% success rate at looking dope as hell, and all-cavalry that plays defence is a cool concept I’m excited to see full rules for. Well. I’m excited for Jake to talk about the rules for them, because he understands them and is better at it. READ JAKE’S STUFF.

Jake: Well dang, I need Emma to introduce me everywhere I go from now on. Thanks, friend! 

Spitewood looks pretty great. Not only do we get some awesome Kurnothi models, but the core gameplay loop will get a shake up due to a new board and the introduction of new feature hexes (sounds like one is placeable by the players and will heal and give glory, while the other looks to be in fixed locations of the board and offers re-rolls on offense and defense). I dig the art direction on these boards, too — there’s one that gives off lush vibes with a deep green and vines along the edges. From what we can see of the opposite side, it’s more of a dried yellow-green with briars. Two more decks as well, which I’m all for. More variety is more fun. There are also some chaos dwarves too, which some people seem really excited about. I am glad to see GW continues to put ladies in charge of new warbands. Good trend.

I also liked how the presenters almost moved on to the next subject before realizing they had just a teensy bit more to announce for Underworlds — 16 whole dang warbands, in fact. Holy hell, this is a lot. They’re all from the previous edition of the game but didn’t get (organized play legal) rules ported over to the new edition, but this will fix that. It’ll also bring the total number of legal warbands to 46 which is massive. The previous edition ended with 58 and it had seven (?) years to build up to that amount.

Saffgor: As one of the many Beast players with more than a few thousand points wiped off the map, I plead, GW, please give the Kurnoth a proper AoS release. This woodland aesthetic is perfect to represent the fury of the wild hunt without leaning into Chaos’ spiky aesthetics, and manages to be rightfully menacing while remaining lithe and classically aelven. I’ll take any cloven options going forward, so long as it’s enough to build around at 2k.

Horus Heresy – Legions Imperialis

Thundercloud: We finally get Whirlwinds and Vindicators, the standard support tanks of the Space Marines and units I had expected to be in the core set given how iconic they are. 

It’s ‘All tanks all the time’ again which finishes off the Astartes tanks apart from the Fellblade hulls, which I imagine we’ll see at some point. 

Bigger news is that Legions Imperialis is getting a soft reboot into a 1.5 edition. I made no secret that I had major issues with some of the rules and points values – you can see the spreadsheets in previous LI articles on this very site where I moan about things like the Knight rules. I’m not saying these things because I’m a super competitive player, but I don’t want people to find out they built their Leman Russes wrong because they went with a version that has a significantly lower damage output but costs the same as the version with the biggest damage output. 

LI has a great deal of potential, but I think the mistake was about seeing 1st and 2nd edition as the inspiration to take from, given 1st edition was a big mess and 2nd edition collapsed under the weight of it’s crunchiness. A version of Armageddon with the simplicity of army creation taken from 2nd edition would have been perfect to my mind, with the caveats of making Titans more interesting given we have an incredibly good epic scale game in Titanicus to draw from. 

It will be interesting to see where LI goes. There’s certainly people buying the kits and some events happening, but whether a 1.5 edition is enough to turn it around I don’t know. I hope this has been playtested by the meanest playtesters GW could find mugging 40k codexes in a back alley, because Epic means too much to have the same thing that happened with Epic 40,000 happen again. It needs to be a game where people play it and enjoy doing so, without imbalances in the rules meaning that players can severely disadvantage themselves in the choose army stage. 

If they can rebalance infantry vs vehicles (and the cards in the Warhammer Community article you can see indicate infantry is getting pricier), fix the legion rules so they don’t go from terrible to incredible, make Knights viable as a force and make titans interesting, then it will deliver basically everything I want. It also updates everything and clears the decks for them to add something else to the game, whether it’s Custodes or another faction, or adding Fellblades and another load of infantry to the rules (there’s rules for snipers but no snipers in the game so far for instance). 

Horus Heresy/Age of Darkness – MkII Assault Squad

Thundercloud: I’ve been waiting on newly scaled plastic chainaxes for a while and this kit will apparently deliver in droves. The old forgeworld ones were tiny even by smol marine standards as well as being out of production.

The armour also looks fantastic, and I really like the old Rogue Trader style jump packs. 

Black Library – The Scouring

Greg: They’re calling it the most predictable series of books ever commissioned. I do not think they should have done this. Compared to the Horus Heresy, it lacks even the hook of promising to flesh out part of the setting that gamers have always wanted to know more about. Even if it did, we saw with that brick of novels that doing so isn’t always a good idea. I don’t think anyone out there was clamoring to know more about Imperial logistics or what the Traitor Legions did while getting their butts kicked back to the Eye of Terror. I suspect this is going to be a 45 novel series where every 5th book is a Primarch snuff film – get ready to learn more about how Dorn got lost on a boat – and the rest will be filler.

Emma: I understand Greg’s point here, but I personally am looking forward to the lore we’ll get from this. Firstly, I want details of who did Guilliman’s eyebrows for that cover art. Bro is serving fierceness. Secondly, Dorn’s hair is somehow perfect even though his armour is still all messed up from the Siege, and I want to know what products he’s using. Thirdly, and more seriously, Era of Ruin didn’t give me nearly enough in terms of post-Siege content, with only the latter half of the book really hitting the spot on that front, so the opportunity to see more of an absolutely shattered Imperium (and some sad Space Marines, my favourite kind; give me more Saturnine-style Sadbaddon) does actually appeal. As much as this was an inevitability and perhaps not something that people really wanted in the same way as when the Heresy series first started, I feel there’s enough brand loyalty and storyline investment built up to carry through a decent series, maybe 8-10 books tops. If they try to make it a huge saga, my take may be more in line with Greg’s by the end, but I’m optimistic.

Thundercloud: Five or even 10 books I can handle, given I tried slogging through War of the Beast which featured some interesting ideas but also some terrible writing, but if it’s another Heresy series worth of books with even more polyfilla brick sized novels then I just can’t. 

The Heresy series had some incredible highs, but it also had some incredible lows, and I don’t think we can slog through it again, especially since at least a book for every loyalist and traitor legion seems inevitable.

Maybe I’ll feel different if it’s like one or two a year.

Warhammer 40K: New Space Marine Heroes

Emma: It was at this point that the reveals chat in the Goonhammer Discord (which you can be in too, if you have a poster’s soul and a patreon’s wallet) started getting incredibly hype, and with good reason. These are five absolute banger models, with two legitimately out-the-park hits for White Scars and Raven Guard. Aethon Shann might be one of the best Space Marine sculpts I’ve ever seen, especially with the hooded head, and frankly I feel Shrike’s demotion was due to lacking Shann’s sheer swag level rather than any matter of suitability. I was fully bouncing in my seat for each of these reveals, and for me at least, it was the high point of a stream that was already extremely hyped.

Rob: There are some really solid choices here between existing characters like Lysander and He’Stan and new characters like Suboden Khan and Caanok Var. The new models all look absolutely great, and I’m excited both for the new rules and the new release strategy – having these drop as free datasheets online means no putzing around with half a dozen new supplements and an easier time making changes as needed. They also give the also-ran chapters some much-needed support when it comes to “finding reasons to take this chapter instead of Ultramarines” in competitive play.

Thundercloud: Some really good character models for the ‘other’ codex compliant chapters, but there’s some strange choices in the Combat Patrol boxes – I really don’t think two weapon platforms and ten heavy intercessors is going to get anyone excited, and taking out a weapon platform and five heavy intercessors and replacing them with virtually any other marine kits – the EZ build Redemptor, Aggressors, Helblasters, would have given a really interesting combat patrol. 

On the positive side I’m now considering converting up a techmarine terminator for my Blood Angels and wondering what I’d need to do to the Caanok Var model. Or a tetsubo armed Terminator chief head basher?

Greg: Whenever they do one of these, a fun exercise for me is to identify the worst thing in it. Mostly this is because I’m a hater, but it’s also instructive in terms of seeing how GW is batting lately. Usually I can find something easy to rag on but this time it’s wall-to-wall heaters. Even the Iron Hands CompTrol here, which is stupid and bad to the point of being insulting, actually rules. It wraps all the way back around to being hilarious. No I don’t care what the Iron Hands players think about it.  

Rob: Are we looking at the same box? Those turrets are absolute dog shit and the heavy intercessors are only playable in Deathwatch. Also this box doesn’t even have the new Iron Hands model.

That’s the most baffling part to me – I get it if you put the new guy in the patrols. I get if you leave him out. But I don’t get having the new guy in some and not others. Why do that?

Props? Space Marine Hat

Greg: I love this goofy thing.

Rob: I really hope this can fit a human child’s head because I’m 100% going to buy one for my son, Bryce.

If this is out before the 2025 WCW/Grand Narrative, he’ll be running around wearing it.

Kill Team – Tomb World Terrain

Thundercloud: GW seem to have taken on board the secret sauce of 3rd edition, solo and co-operative play, and built a big beautiful boxed set around it. Returning to a killzone where you can’t argue about vantage points, we get the Necron version of the Gallowdark that seems to have learnt from the problems of assembling and disassembling the Gallowdark terrain. I would bet that the curves on the connections are a response to the issues of setting up and taking down the Gallowdark terrain, and the removal of opening doors to saves sprue space while removing something breakable and a bit fiddly. 

The Deathwatch Kill Team, which appears to be a Gravis body, a Phobos body and three intercessor bodies per sprue, gives you a five man kill team (so the top end of elite) but armed to the teeth, with power weapons, big guns and special ammo sloshing around. 

The Necron team follows the same pattern as the previous one, with a big leader, two beefy guys, some pets and some stooges, but looks visually more interesting.

The horde mode play style, and explicitly making this box one that can be played co-operatively, signals GW moving even further towards embracing Kill Team as a game that can be played not just competitively, but solo at home. Typhon opened the door and Tomb World is stepping through it. 

I’m looking at the terrain and wondering if we’ll get enough over the season to play boarding actions, though no doubt I’ll be able to pick a second set of the terrain up later. It looks a lot less fiddly to paint than the Gallowdark terrain, which I was trudging through for months and I’ve still not painted the extra bits from the expansions. 

Greg: I love the terrain in this set. I’m not sure if anyone but me remembers the last time they tried making Kill Team Necron Terrain, but this is, uh, a mild improvement. 

Rob: I really, really like this, and I’m looking forward to combining it with my Monolith Seeds terrain. Since the day the gallowdark terrain first released, I’ve been hoping they’d release differently themed kits for it, and this was the obvious next step. So great job there.

From a more logistical standpoint, I think doing a new release of Gallowdark/ITD terrain for Kill Team is a good call. You can easily just use this as an identical terrain/map type to the existing ITD terrain without too much trouble, and it’ll give tables more variety and TOs an easier time getting multiple ITD layouts set up.

Also, on the subject of the first Deathwatch Kill Team in Kill Team: It’s about damn time!

Thundercloud: I painted up all of that terrain (the original Kill Team Necron terrain from Kill Team: Pariah Nexus) and still have it. 

Swiftblade: I was really worried that going into next season, ITD would be cycled out with nothing to replace it. Fortunately for me, it looks like I’ve got nothing to worry about. At first glance, this seems like a straight upgrade from ITD- even the minor addition of some scatter terrain means that operatives will have something to take cover behind without needing to take barricades. Plus, teleporters. Who doesn’t love a good teleporter?

Saffgor: Finally, a plastic way to reenact Mechanicus. Absolutely ready to blast Noosphere and blunder my lead Tech-Priest.

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