It’s been 10 years since the Old World exploded, and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar arrived in its place. We’re looking back at our experiences over the last decade, and reflecting on some of our favourite moments with the game so far.
When did you get into AoS, and what attracted you to it?
Chimp: I collected, and voraciously consumed podcasts about, 8th edition Fantasy Battle – but never actually took the step of playing the game (or even painting the models). After a very brief and unfulfilling dalliance with X-Wing I got a message from a pal that he’d gone and bought the OG starter set. I’d followed the then recent launch of AoS with interest, and cobbled together the various Vampire Counts models I had into a ghoul-themed army (that would fortuitously later on become Flesh-eater Courts). The rest, as they say, is history.
I was always AoS-curious from launch – having always preferred fantasy to 40k but being pretty unenthusiastic about WFB’s fiddly ranked up movement it seemed perfect. A few pages of rules, with complications arising from the warscrolls themselves, gave us something to play that was easy and didn’t require a load of page flipping but still had a depth to the gameplay.
Cronch: Like Chimp, the X-Wing miniatures game was my route back into wargames as an adult. From there, exposure to Warmachine in my FLGS got me into that, and a 40k army followed soon after. I was vaguely aware that GW had “blown up” the Old World, and the big fancy End Times books floating around, but not really clued into AoS beyond that as it launched.
In 2018 I was settled into a new life in Coventry, having fully committed to a new job. I’d been mostly hobbying at my Worcester FLGS still, where AoS didn’t have much traction, but the repeated commuting was getting to me and I started popping into the local Warhammer store in Coventry more instead. The team of Dave and Stu (later joined by Scott and Ryan) were super welcoming and friendly, and after a few months of 40k talk they switched me on to Age of Sigmar by showing me the Start Collecting! Beastclaw Raiders box.
It seems funny to me that ultimately it was Fantasy Battle models that attracted me to AoS, but they did just that. I was very taken by the chunky Ogors and big beasties, and more generally was excited by the bombastic, larger-than-life approach of AoS compared to WHFB. Getting my first set finished coincided with the launch of Malign Portents and the store’s monthly painting competition, which I enjoyed taking part in, and that year I also got involved in a Miniatures Monthly AoS meetup (where I first met chimp, and many other great friends). From there it’s been pretty non-stop – I love the dynamic back and forth of the game, which has only improved with time, and I’ve become a keen army collector and tournament attender.
RagnarokAngel: Early in 2017. I didn’t get into wargames until later, in 2016 I picked up Warmachine and Hordes for Mark III because my friends were playing it. After that edition kind of bombed I bounced around to different games including 7th ed 40k. Someone at a local store asked if someone wanted to do a learning game of AOS. So I grabbed a PDF of the newly released Tzeentch Battletome (Which were an entirely new concept at the time) and cobbled together a list of the Tzeentch Daemons I had kicking around.
I absolutely loved it. At the time, AOS was like the joke, setup and punchline, of the wargaming community but I found a really compelling game under the crusty parts. This was still when 40k was in the 7th edition phase so comparatively AOS felt much more streamlined and sleeker, and yet had little bits of whimsy I found interesting. There was an artefact in that book called the Paradoxical Cloak which gave +2 to save but you had to reroll successful saves. Stuff like that was fun without being intrusive. I would eventually settle on Death when I saw Nagash’s warscroll and his eight spells and went “holy shit how do I run that guy?”
It took a while before I got my friends on board, but I went to the tournament for my first Adepticon and had a real blast, and 2nd edition’s launch was when the game really gained momentum for everyone in my group. Since I didn’t play Fantasy battle I didn’t much care about what it did to the Old World, I was just on board with this new setting.
Roxin: In the halcyon, blissful days of [checks notes] May 2020. As you may recall, many of us found ourselves with no regular social contact with our friendship group[s], and painting minis gives you something other than staring into the void and silently gulping from a can on Zoom (other video calling software is available). My brain was broken by TaleSpin as a kid, and as a feckless teen I’d collected some Dwarves, so the combination of sky pirates and Huge Gun offered by Kharadron Overlords was catnip to me.
While my friends were less keen, I’d been listening to the Miniatures Sometimes podcast and the stories about AoS – the sculpts, the double turn, the absolutely wild lore – had persuaded me, and I set to work persuading the rest of my painting group. So in a weird, roundabout way, it’s all chimp’s fault.
Do you have a favourite game or moment from your time with AoS?
Chimp: I’m going to be self indulgent and pick three, but being self indulgent is what this is all about, really. Plus, I think each illustrates a different kind of favourite moment.
First – AoS1. I’m in my mid-20s, I’m cycling over to my mate Tom’s house with a huge backpack stuffed with foam cases. We put the models we’d painted that week on his too-small dining table, crack open so much wine that I cannot now comprehend it, and then I would inevitably demolish him at Warhammer. Drunk as shit, I cycle home via the local burger place and collapse into bed. Eventually we even bought a battle mat, and something to sit on the table to make it bigger, and actually painted our terrain. Chat, I don’t think it gets any better than this.
Fast forward to August 2019 and to the game that truly sold me on matched play Age of Sigmar. I’d dabbled a little bit before with doubles, community events and one-dayers but this was my first proper two-day 2,000 point matched play event. Looking back, most of my games this event were pretty bad. I had a terrible army with Neferata, two Vampire Lords on Zombie Dragons, a Bloodseeker Palanquin and some dogs. In the second round I was drawn into The Owen Jackson, then rocking with a pretty meta Sylvaneth list centered around Alarielle (though at the time, I had no idea who anyone in the UK scene was). I lost this round as well, but I include the game here for the moment quite early into the game when Owen looked up and said to me “I don’t think you can win from here now”. I then got mad as hell and proceeded to play the absolute best goddamn Warhammer of my life. OK yeah I still lost, but it was incredibly close and a few dice rolls different would have had it my way. Sometimes, the best you can do it make them sweat. What makes this a highlight is what happened after the game: Owen came back to the table, apologised for what he’d said and the assumption that he’d made and then made an effort to include me with the people he’d travelled with for the rest of the weekend. It takes a big person to do that, and it really meant a lot.
Finally, the actual best game of Warhammer I’ve played: Round 1 of Blackout VII against Rich Nutter (Cronch: that’s me!). This was a tight, competitive game of AoS between two pretty comparable armies played by two good friends. In the end, it came down to me having more of a game plan that I was playing to, dictating the pace of the game. Since then, Rich has really put the effort in and gotten massively better as a player, much better than me, and it’s been awesome to see his hard work really pay off in the last year. Age of Sigmar is a game about friendship.
Cronch: I have three of my own. Up first, AoS 2nd edition in November 2018, the aforementioned Miniatures Monthly Meetup at Firestorm Games in Cardiff. This was really my first time actually playing the game with people, and we had a great Saturday where all of our individual games contributed to a megagame that the hosts were playing on a giant table. On Sunday morning, some of our plucky Destruction lads made it onto the edge of the big table to wreak havoc (it didn’t work particularly well). After that I had my first game against new friend Sam, whose Ironjawz completely bodied my Ogors in a brutal match full of laughs that still gets talked about to this day. This weekend was nothing short of formative for me. Beyond being a first dip into AoS that immediately convinced me of the camaraderie and good vibes that suffuse the community, I also met the people that would go on to be some of my best friends. I’ve laughed with them, cried with them, attended birthday parties, gone through good and bad times together, met their kids, pet their dogs, of course played countless games of Warhammer with them, and I’m so so grateful to have met them. I am a different, better person because of Age of Sigmar, as ridiculous as it sounds. That can’t really be beaten, but I did promise you three moments.
The second I can cover in brief, because it’s the game against Chimp at Blackout VII that he covered above. A brutal slog, the game really went down to the wire and we were laughing the whole way through. Matthew got the win by a few points, being much more practiced than me, but I think this might have been a formative moment in realising that, even if I wasn’t yet, I could be good at AoS. A theory I wouldn’t put into practice for quite a lot longer.
Finally for me, Brotherhood this year. This was really the first time I turned up to an event with no excuses – I had a well honed list that I’d had plenty of practice with, and was feeling ready to help my team out. I’d also been doing some coaching with Onwards AoS with a view to becoming a more competitive player, and this was going to be my first real chance to put that into practice. Unfortunately our team of six was beset by drops and issues leading up to the weekend, through no fault of anybody, to the point that captain Laura and I had agreed that if we experienced one more issue we’d take it as a sign and drop the team out of the event. Luckily that didn’t happen and we did manage to attend with a full complement of players, but accepting that we were modulating our goals to “not coming last” as we’d had some last minute substitutions and didn’t have time to do a lot of planning.
For me though, this event was a huge success – I had five super close games, all of which were good fun versus some great opponents, and I managed to win them all! My first (and to date, only) 5-0, which I was and remain immensely proud of. Of course being a team event it’s not going to secure us the win, and arguably a 5-0 at teams is a touch easier because you can control your matchups, but even that knowledge didn’t really take the shine off. I went up against some lists I was really scared of, stuck to my game plan, made and read notes, and came away successful. This was definitely the moment that I realised that I was a confident and capable player, and it’s really changed how I think about tournaments for the better.
RagnarokAngel: Two real moments always stick out. The first was the first GT I went to, Adepticon in 2018. It wasn’t very big and I didn’t have the resources to research how to make a good list so I basically ran Nagash, a Necromancer, 2 40 man units of Skeleton Warriors and one unit of black Knights. It did better than it had any right to though, since most people didn’t have a centralized location to trade lists at the time so a lot of people just did not know how to handle Nagash. I remember playing a Gitz player who had a very magic heavy list realize he couldn’t outcast Nagash and going “oh no”. And a Nurgle player who beat me at Knife to the Heart. The mission had 3 diagonal objectives and you won if you held all 3.I pushed up and didn’t leave something on the back objective so he won when he absolutely should not have because a fly snagged the objective. Completely unforced error on my part.
The other game that stuck out was the beginning of 3rd edition in 2021 at Ironweld in Boston. I was playing my Ossiarchs into Cities of Sigmar and he managed to cut me down to a total of 3 models (Arkhan, a Morghast and a stalker if I recall) and I eeked out a win when his Gotrek failed a charge they probably should have made anyway.
Roxin: Two for me as well. The first was August 2021, when I ran a round robin tournament for my friendship group. We’d chosen armies together, painted together, badly learned the rules together, and now it was time to put it to the test. To be clear, we had not suddenly become well-drilled wargaming veterans: we’re talking grey plastic, semi-random bits of terrain, and masking tape on the floor to mark out a 6” x 4” rectangle. And it was absolutely fucking brilliant. Laughs, beers, cheers, and conspiring to drag down anyone who looked like they might be trying to win. Of course, some of the magic is just drinking with your friends and throwing some dice around, but I do think there’s some secret AoS sauce that lends itself to dramatic swings and underdogs clawing their way back from the bottom of the pile.
My second moment is more recent, and involves a one-dayer with Cronch. By third edition I’d become more competitive (if not actually more skilled) and had started to dip my toe into playing tournaments. I’d been persuaded by the lovely, warm, welcoming online community where Chimp, Cronch and others had been proselytizing the competitive scene for some time. Finding a bunch of lovely people who are excited to play games with fucking rules. I’m definitely not one of the ones that made Cronch a better person though; if anything, I’ve made him worse.
Anyway, mainly due to incompetence on my part my first two games had been a wash. I’d been up far too late hanging with Cronch the night before, magnetising his Orruks (ooh-er) and felt a little like I’d been through the wringer. Round three announcements are made and I’m paired into Cronch: immediately big smiles break out across both our faces and we give each other a massive hug. By the end of turn 1 he managed to smash his Maw-Krusha into my Ironclad and they took each other out, leading to a very funny game as we squared off with what was left of our armies for four more cagey rounds. I can’t pretend that I played especially well, but again, sometimes the best thing in life is just to hang out with the people you care about while you sling some dice, and by that metric this game absolutely delivered.
This story also has a delightful coda: although Cronch beat me fairly handily, the scores were transcribed wrong by the TO and by the time they had corrected the mistake they’d already written the trophies and put his name on them. So not only did I lose all my games, but I even managed to lose the wooden spoon.
Any particular favourite/most amusing rules interactions of years gone by?
Chimp: Shout out to some forgotten favourites: 9 Stormfiends all armed with warpfire projectors teleporting around with Sayl the Faithless, and Vanguard Wing deploying 30 Liberators snaked through your opponents entire army. This was truly hideous stuff that sprouted from the looser approach to rules writing earlier in the game’s history.
What really sticks in my mind for AoS’ truly maddest rule moments is the original Engine of the Gods. In your hero phase it got to roll 3 dice at top bracket (with a Slann nearby giving you 4-dice-drop-1) and gave an effect based on what you rolled. With the 18 result straight up being you get to take another turn immediately after finishing the turn you were in. Combined with the prio roll, it was possible (but pretty statistically unlikely) for Seraphon players to get a triple turn on their opponents.
Cronch: I really love a good meaty “step through the rules and see how something really works” question, of which there have obviously been a lot throughout the years. Special shout-out to the old Bastilodon’s 1+ save – the wording of modified vs unmodified dice meaning this bastard was basically always saving on a 2+ on the dice (natural 1’s always failing), because rend would modify the dice roll to 1, and no lower, which would then pass the 1+ save as a “modified 1”. Classic. Stupid, painful to play against, and arguably unintended by the designers, and yet I can’t help but love silly interactions like this.
People love to make jokes about the old “mustache rule” from the launch edition, where the player with the most profuse facial hair would win a challenge on one of the repurposed Empire units’ warscrolls. This stuff still comes up now 10 years later, mostly in the dank basements of reddit and Facebook comments (the internet was largely a mistake). Obviously the game itself isn’t like that anymore, and never really was – those rules were few and far between and mostly ignored. What has persisted, though, is an inventive approach to rules. There’s only so many ways to give out a +1 to hit, but I still find Battletomes and Warscrolls surprising me with the inventiveness of what some units can do and the niches they can fill.
RagnarokAngel: Relentless Discipline in OBR is arguably one of the funniest design errors. In 2nd Edition OBR didn’t get command points, they got Relentless Discipline points, which were basically a special resource to get more CP than your opponent but they could only use their special command abilities. The thing was this was mostly fine because generic command abilities were a very small list and frankly, pretty bad, so it was mostly all up side (especially because since they weren’t command points, they couldn’t be stolen by abilities that did that). It turns out that they were pretty much a prototype for what would happen in third.
Then 3rd edition hits and command points suddenly matter, but OBR were still written to not be able to use them. The generic abilities like All Out Attack/Defense and Forward to Victory were really good and essential to play the game and OBR were simply locked out of them for some arbitrary reason. Their Battletome also took a really long time to come out so OBR players were stuck playing a different game from their opponents. When the tome did hit, it’s like GW went “uh i don’t know, they’re command points now?” so you got to sit on your dragon’s hoard of like 10 command points every turn. It fucking rocked.
Roxin: I came to the game towards the tail end of 2nd ed and the tourney scene much later, so most of the truly cracked stuff had been remedied by then. That said, because we didn’t know any better we used to roll for which realm the battle was taking place in and then also the Realmscape Features. Randomly throwing in extra monsters, anyone? What about ignoring the Rend characteristic of all weapons for the duration of the battle? God, this is making me want to do some narrative games so badly.
What about lore? Any favourite lore snippets?
Cronch: You write any bit of engaging writing about a Stormcast smashing down out of the sky in a bolt of azure lightning and I am there. The novels Plague Garden and Black Pyramid by Josh Reynolds sold me on Stormcast where prior attempts had failed, and convinced me to paint them as Hallowed Knights too. Who shall prevail?
Only The Faithful!
RagnarokAngel: I love how many of the game’s villains are just kinda dickheads. While I understand why some Warhammer Fantasy fans don’t get along with Sigmar. Aside from it blowing up their game, it’s a very different type of fantasy. It’s a Greek style epic, of Gods and Demigods duking it out on the field of battle, and I love how amplified it all is, Nagash is unrepentant in his dickery and Morathi’s scheming has come a very long way since Fantasy Battle. I think the lore of AOS doesn’t always get enough attention compared to the much older and more famous 40k, but the fact the characters are more front and center makes it very compelling.
Roxin: Spear of Shadows! The realms have come a long way since 2017 but it’s a banging sword’n’sorcery novel that does a great job of introducing you to the key movers and shakers back before anyone really had the setting nailed down. Godsbane is a slightly trickier sell. I have a lot of fondness for it because it’s generally well written and touches on some extremely cool concepts, but also has the classic Warhammer problem of making the villain too reasonable so they have to do a big heel turn. Still, worth giving a go. Finally, look at this image of Sigmar beating the hell out of Ymnog, Father of Gargants. It absolutely nails the mythopoetic space that the lore is playing in, and also goes fucking hard.
Models – any favourite old kits that have been lost to the aether?
Chimp: RIP Bonesplitterz, you were too beautiful and too problematic for this world.
Cronch: I’m a real sucker for the original Stormcast Paladins – mostly Retributors. Although Annihilators have replaced them, I really think their over-wrought, heavily detailed and very chunky armour holds up as a separate aesthetic. I’ve got a unit waiting for paint for my archive of forgotten Stormcast models.
I also miss the Swifthawk Agents (aka High Elves) having a place in AoS. Sure, they’re not gone, they’re back in Warhammer: The Old World, and I actually have Chimp’s old force on my shelf waiting to be rebased onto squares. I do wish they’d stuck around though.
RagnarokAngel: I don’t miss a ton of old stuff compared to the new, but it’s a shame that The Blue Scribes didn’t get an update and got sent into the void. It’s a cute model and I think could really shine with a new plastic kit.
Roxin: They’re still around for now, but the mono-human nature of new Cities of Sigmar stuff makes me think that the duardin and aelves are not long for this world. I would love to be wrong though!
And who has had the best glow-up across the course of AoS?
Cronch: Visually, I think it’s Morathi. Imagine showing the original sculptor the paired models of Morathi-Khaine and the Shadow Queen and telling them that this was a future incarnation of their small metal elf queen.
More broadly, I think Orruks have done really well out of AoS. The armoured Black Orcs they inherited from WHFB were fleshed out well with the Ironjawz, with that circle being closed with a new Ardboyz kit in a more modern style last year. On top of that there has been an entire extra range added in the Kruleboyz, with their own unique design sensibilities. It’s not without sacrifice though – the Bonesplitterz have said their final farewells, and some people still yearn for the classic Warhammer Orcs and Goblins aesthetic.
Chimp: as a Grand Alliance, Death have made out like bandits from AoS – with one brand new range and all three older ranges getting expansive and gorgeous refreshers and expansions. If I had to pick one, I’d say Flesh-eater Courts. The new stuff all fits perfectly in with the older sculpts, whilst still being incredible looking modern kits, and gave the army everything it needed.
RagnarokAngel: Gotta give it to Flesh-eater courts as well. They had some of the coolest lore in the game with a model line not at all designed to reflect that (since they came from another time, place, and story). Now that new kits are hitting that actually reflect that whole “Insane people cosplaying as Arthurian Knights” vibe they’re really kicking and stuff like Ushoran and Justice Goremayne really kick.
If I had to pick another, probably stormcast. The changes are more subtle, but the way they’ve shifted from the boxy “hard not to compare to Space Marines” vibe to a more sleek design has been neat to see.
Roxin: not Fyreslayers, I’ll tell you that much. Jokes aside, the increasing amount of gender and body diversity across factions like Cities of Sigmar, Kharadron Overlords and Fyreslayers has been great to see. Despite my grumbling about the mono-human nature of the new models the Cities of Sigmar redesign has been absolutely fantastic, they really smashed it with that one. Steelhelms and Cavaliers feel way more AoS-y than Greatswords and Pistoliers ever did.
Finally, what are your hopes for the future of AoS?
Chimp: more cool minis. Really, I’d like the design team to find a bit of the spark of fun that earlier editions had. They can write a pretty tight ruleset, but I feel like somewhere there have been arbitrary limits set on what a 4th edition battletome can look like, and the design space feels the most restricted it’s ever been. I’m hoping that as we ease into the edition they’ll loosen up a bit and bring back some of AoS’ wild side. Scourge of Ghyran gives me hope that they’ll get there.
Oh and uh like a major expansion of foot ogors and then break those two armies apart like Warclans, that would be nice I think.
Cronch: For myself, I hope to win a tournament! For the game at large, I’d really like the design team to capitalise on the good work they’ve done with modularising everything and formalising abilities, and build on that to make a truly smooth game as they iron out the kinks. I’ve been mourning the loss of some of the more mixed armies (e.g. old Cities of Sigmar being able to add Stormcast Eternals as well as sometimes a third faction), but I do feel like some of the more thematic Armies and Regiments of Renown are pulling back in that direction in a more structured way.
At the time of typing we’ve just seen the reveal of the Helsmiths of Hashut, so I’m currently really looking forward to seeing how they tie into the wider realms and what their arrival will mean for some of our current favourites.
RagnarokAngel: I’d like for more armies to get units to fill out their roster. Stuff like Idoneth Deepkin and Fyreslayers particularly feel barren and when they get another foot hero as the only release this edition it starts to feel a bit much. Aside from that, probably for Malerion to finally get his own Model (or army) because I figure it’ll look dope as hell
Roxin: More narrative bits please! Ravaged Coast was a step in the right direction and I’d like to see more confident moves from the design team, it’s clear from how tight the AoS 4th ruleset is that they’ve got the chops for it. I’m also excited to see what the next iteration of Spearhead looks like. For my money it’s the best game GW have ever made, and I’m glad they’re continuing to support it
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