Warhammer Fest is fully online this year, but that means we all get to watch the reveals in real time, every day this week! Each day we’ll be having a round table to recap our very important hot takes. Day four focused on boxed games like Necromunda and Aeronautica Imperialis, which we were surprised to find is not, in fact, dead. Neat. Anyways, you can find our previous roundtable updates here:
Anyways, just like with those days, we’ve given the Goonhammer kids table the keys to the proverbial Porsche and allowed them to vomit their opinions and hype about these releases into a Google doc, which was then painstakingly transcribed into a WordPress post for you to read.
Today’s idiot kings:
- Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones
- Greg
- SRM
- Greggles
- Neon- Tweetsavant
- “Primaris” Kevin Genson
- Brin
- Kevin “CathexisZero” Stillman
- Thundercloud
Beast Snaggas – the bigger, tougher, amputee orkz
Greg: Da boyz is back in town.
Greggles: Ok these guys are totally awesome…I mean they start out by showing them stabbing an imperial knight with spears and winning. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty fucking awesome. Lets just think about this for a minute. You’ve got spears….and you spear an imperial knight to death. These aren’t eldar spears, they don’t have fancy space elf magics. They aren’t imperial spears, with some sort of stupid energy powers. They aren’t even chaos spears…do you see any spikes? No! IT’S JUST SPEARS. KILLING AN IMPERIAL KNIGHT. This is the greatest thing since grots were introduced.
SRM: Boar Boyz are back, and this time they’re Squiggier. I feel like it took until the Jloomspite Jitz release for GW to finally realize just how great Squigs are, and I’m glad they’re leaning into it hard with this Monster Hunter cosplay Orks. I’m curious how the Squighogs will differ from Warbikerz and how the Beastnagga Boyz will differ from regular Boyz. The marketing is pointing towards them killing large targets, but the whole “good at killing big shit” idea is kind of difficult for regular Orks with choppas to really pull off.
Rob: Not gonna lie, I do kind of miss the Warboarz, but the new squigs are pretty great.
Generally, I like the new orks a lot. I agree that it’s a bit weird to put these next to warbikerz but I guess those are kind of more shooting-focused, with the exception of the Warboss on Wartrike. Looking forward to being angry at the meta impact of a bunch of 2W orks suddenly hitting tables everywhere.
Neon: Pah! New Orks? Preposterous! Everyone knows that Games Workshop only produces Imperial models now. There’s never been a new Xenos model since the start of 9th and never will be! There especially won’t be an extremely cool bunch of Kamacrazy Waaaghboys like the rumoured “Beast Snaggas”, and they won’t be extremely cool and rad as hell. Especially won’t be indicative of Games Workshop being willing to rework old areas of the Lore into way more interesting ideas. And I’m certainly not hype as hell to see the rest of the range they teased at in that first trailer.
There are only Four Buggies!
SRM: Now is the Orktober of our discontent
Rob: Honest question: How does this squig get back up after it falls over?
Legit I am getting sad imagining that.
Greg: I like that this isn’t just a rehash of Snakebites, it’s a wholly new type of Ork. There is some “30-50 feral squigs energy” to it, but they still have robot arms and motorcycle wheels. It’s a great update to the aesthetic that doesn’t make the old Boyz kit look obsolete, and the power klaw hobo in charge of these idiots is maybe my new favorite Ork model.
Thundercloud: To be fair in Ere We Go and the accompanying minis, you had Cyboarz, where Mekz and Runtherdz came together to create cybernetic boars for boarboyz. There was a specific metal boar model with it’s rear legs replaced by a monowheel. So the germ of the idea was around in Rogue Trader, but this has turned it up to 11, and ditched boars in favour of squiggly pigs.
I’m liking where this is going, and the new bigger, squiggier, ork cavalry look like great models to get a rivalry going with your Biker Boyz.
The Beast Snaggas Army Box
Brin: Wortsnagga! Heck to everything else, we need them super runts!
Greggles: The fact this box comes with a bunch of orks that stab imperial knights, AND a codex is pretty amazing. It’ll sell out faster then the GW dice sets that everyone buys even though they only seem to roll 1’s. Did you all see the grot that is stabbing the imperial knight with a nail? THERE IS DYNAMITE STRAPPED TO HIS SIDE.
Rob: I have… concerns about doing another box like this with the limited edition Codex pack-in. The contents are great, people are gonna be hype, but if the idea is to repeat the Sisters box, then this will sell out immediately and give us a situation where only like a thousand people have the new Ork Codex for 3 months. And that was in the best-case, pre-Brexit, pre-COVID times.
Kevin: Will it though? I seem to recall Lumineth hanging around for a fair bit after launch. And the sold-out boxes have had Marines and Sisters. A Xenos faction may not be as….I dunno, popular? I mean, it ain’t Marines even if it is Primaris Orks.
Rob: Yeah but no one cared about Lumineths. Buncha prissy cow elves? Pffft. Ork players are crazy. You know that shit’s gonna sell out.
Kevin: Possibly! But the folks who cause things to sell out could just be stuck painting their new plastic Thunderhawks.
Greg: Plastic Thunderhawks are cool, but let’s be real here: nobody plays Aeronautica. I’m not saying it’s a bad game – it might be, I also don’t play it so I don’t know – but if this is a repeat of the Sisters release it is absolutely going to disappear into whatever hole all the Cursed Cities fell into. The set looks amazing, and if I still had Orks I would be madly refreshing games workshop dot com on release day to make sure I got one, because otherwise it might be a long wait. As long as they sell the Codex standalone at the same time, it’ll be fine, but I’m not super confident about that happening.
Thundercloud: Aeronautica is a good game, I’ll be buying two of the new starter sets to get more marines and a viable Eldar force, then buying more boxes of marines to paint in different Space Marine Legion colours so I can do Aeronautica Heresy.
Rob: If we want to get serious about it, I’d point to Speed Freekz selling out as the indicator here. I was actually mildly surprised that one sold out, but it was pretty much gone fairly quickly and if this is under-produced I expect we’ll see the same and things might get ugly.
Neon: People like Orks. Or more pertinently, kids like Orks a whole whole lot. My beginner’s days were almost always an even three-way split between intro box Marines, ‘Nids and Orks.
Elves meanwhile, suck.
Rob: It’s true. Elves do suck. Stay tuned next week for another 5-7 posts about how spikey elves suck complete ass and are ruining the game here on Goonhammer dot com.
Kevin: OK, you have a point. Elves (dark, cow, wood, juggalo – pretty much everyone but Merrill from Dragon Age) suck. Would the box set risk be as bad if GW had electronic codexes or promised to make the Ork codex available the week after the box set?
Rob: I’m gonna sidestep the electronic Codex debate to express my revulsion at the idea that someone liked Merrill in Dragon Age 2. Like I always knew academically she was popular because Bioware said so but I didn’t think it was real. Just. What? How?
Kevin: She just had to wait until she got the Drukhari 9th Edition Codex to become awesome.
Thundercloud: GW’s plan to release a big box of cool stuff for Ork players, wait a few weeks for them to get paid again, then release a bunch more new cool stuff for Ork players is sure to backfire on them.
There’ll be a ton of performative whining from people who say they weren’t able to get a box, but at the same time didn’t bother to reserve a box with their LGS before the pre-order or get up and order it when the pre-order went on the GW website.
Rob: Ehhhh I see where you’re coming from that the whining around this is often from people who don’t pre-order but we’ve seen pre-orders sell out near instantly before. If the release strategy is “big box of cool stuff, then codex a few weeks later,” sure I’m on board. But last time they did this with Sisters of Battle there was a two-month gap between the boxed set with limited edition codex and the full release. That’s not great, and seems like a situation engineered to end in players trying to get their rules from leaks rather than being able to buy the book legit.
Considering I’m already hard on the “digital rules now” train, this does nothing for me.
The Ork Mega Boss SUPREME:
Greggles: I’m sorry but there wasn’t a section for this guy, and that is just wrong. I may have had a lot of fungus beer, but this is just amazing. Did you see the size of this fellow’s axe? It’s so big it proves that Magnus did nothing wrong with every swing. Tuska is jealous down in daemon land just wanting for that axe. Everyone is like “I hope he comes with a powerklaw”. Are you all serious? LOOK AT THAT AXE. IT IS AMAZING.
Rob: This could have just gone under Orks but fine. WHATEVER.
He is pretty dope. I really love the black armor, and I hope he gets a few weapon options to play with, otherwise the datasheet for this idiot is going to come with zero options.
Greg: Oh yeah, this dude goes hard as hell. The pintle-mounted Grot gunner is a lovely touch, and there isn’t anything about this model that I don’t adore.
Neon: This guy FUCKS. I don’t really have words beyond that.
SRM: I’m not wild about the Beastsnagga aesthetic as the Mad Max look has always been more my bag, and this guy absolutely delivers. I know in my heart of hearts that I’m wrong in thinking the Grot on top is too much as I think it kinda clutters up the model, but you don’t come to this website for good takes, do you?
Neon: I honestly kinda agree the lil’ guy feels a lil’ tacked on but I’m also a known idiot.
Thundercloud: A solid Warboss model when Orks actually really do need a foot warboss in Mega Armour.
Kevin: My first thought on looking at this guy and saying “I WANT HIM!” was “Hmm, maybe I could do him as a Chaos Ork?”
Rob: A “Chork,” if you will.
New Cadian Sprues
Rob: I really like these as a way to update the Cadian box. The old Cadians were like 70% just fine, with the heads being pretty much the roughest spots. Adding a bunch of new heads and fixing the weapon options injects a lot of character into these kits without overdoing the amount of detail on a bunch of 6-point models. Having more diverse heads is great as well.
Thundercloud: 25 new heads is a whole lot of heads and the extra special weapons lets them retire the finecast weapons blister. I still think Catachans will get a whole new infantry box. It also makes it look like Guard range refresh might be coming later this year.
SRM: I’m curious if adding a single sprue is going to become a regular thing for updating old kits. It’s one thing when it’s conversion bits like the GSC ones, but this hits different. Regardless, I’m thrilled to see not just special weapons, but more diverse head options as well. Under all that flak armor everybody’s gonna look pretty much the same anyway, so new heads are a great way to represent the diversity of a galaxy-spanning army. I’m also really digging the little extra details, like the playing cards tucked into the one helmet, or the camo netting on another.
Rob: Actually now that I think about it the best part is that this saves us from a replacement kit that are 20% larger and mounted on 32mm bases. Big fan of avoiding scale creep this way and it frees GW up to do a different regiment with the next boxed set that needs it more. Like the Catachans, whose plastic kit is particularly dire.
Except for maybe the Catachan Command sprue. That one still works. Also release a boxed set of all the limited edition plastic Catachan characters, cause those rule.
Greg: I’m mostly going to agree with Rob and SRM here, in that the upgrade fixes the worst parts of the Cadian kit – bad heads and not enough special weapons – while sparing us the potential of giant Cadians riding on 32s, but I want to just add in that having Lady-ians is long overdue. My initial impression was that I’d love to see something similar for Catachans, but after looking at the models again, no. That one needs to be burnt to the ground and re-started.
Greggles: I love minis. I love variation in minis. The more diversity the better. Give us all the heads and all the parts.
Rob: At the very least, it’s an interesting shot at attempting to challenge the entire industry that has shot up around doing replacement guard heads.
SRM: I really feel like they could follow this model to make some of the weirder and wilder Guard regiments out there. Ideally there’d be some new bodies with sharper details, but even going back to the old metals, the difference between Mordians and Praetorians was literally just a headswap.
Neon: A greater range of options is always cool, especially diversity-wise. This seems like an unexpectedly neat compromise to updating an old infantry kit that GW doesn’t see fit to put out to pasture yet. Though I do have premonitions of them updating Guard to be on the new 28mm rather than 25mm, which would be especially annoying as GW hasn’t seen fit to make those or the 50mm monster rounds available in any way outside of updated kits that use them, let alone updating their sculpted base kits to include the new sizes.
What I’m saying is give us 28mm base packs GW, my Drukhari yearn for foot-room and to be utterly tournament illegal.
Fire and Magic Teaser
Rob: Hell yeah. I am extremely excited about getting new anything for Thousand Sons. That army is straight dog shit and I’m hoping that dude on the left is some kind of awesome new psyker unit. The Thousand Sons very much need more units and while I would love to see them get some kind of cool new daemon engine, I know that the realistic scenario is “here’s one new plastic HQ unit for your army in a blister pack.” Which is better than nothing though the army is already loaded with solid psyker HQs. Also apparently that’s Castellan Crowe on the right which, cool I guess. He needs a plastic model, I suppose.
Greg: Something about Games Workshop’s Noun and Noun naming convention always comes off incredibly goofy to me, in the best possible way. Hammer and Bolter struck me because a bolter is not what you usually see paired with a hammer, and because shoving a made-up genre word into normal language reminds me of when authors will make up new words for common items to remind you that you are reading Science Fiction, so you have someone at the space bodega being like “eyy can I bum a lho stick off ya, space man”. It’s just jarring, and Fire and Magic is such a strange combination of words that I can’t get it out of my head.
Anyway, there’s not a lot else to comment on here – they could just as easily have made a video that was rotating 3d word art of “Grey Knights and Thousand Sons coming soon” and we’d have learned just as much. What I’m curious about is whether Crowe ends up being Primaris or not. If he is, we can expect a range refresh of Primaris Grey Knights, and he isn’t, he’s probably the only new GK sculpt we’ll be seeing for a while. Either way I’m excited to see the model, and the rules.
Rob: Yeah, the “Will Castellan Crowe be Primaris” question is very interesting – he’ll be the first non-special edition loyalist non-Primaris marine they’ve done since 8th, and that’s a pretty big tell for both the future of Grey Knights and the game. I mean, obviously Primaris are the future, but there’s an option question as to whether we’ve seen the last regular-run plastic smolmarines.
My hope is that there’s some kind of future for them but I suspect they’ll eventually just be relegated to limited/specialist games releases.
SRM: I had the sound off and thought this was an Emperor’s Text to Speech Device video
Thundercloud: That’s what this reminds me of. Oh well, at least we’re lining up the Thousand Sons and Grey Knights for Codexes with a battlebox giving them a new character each.
Greggles: I would have liked some minis revealed here. Leading off with the baby transportation device is never a strong selling point. That being said, bunch of peeps mental fighting everyone while we all bet who makes their 3rd and 4th smite rolls seems like a good time for everyone watching. Oh wait I think they are actually reaching into the warp, which probably feels like sticking your hand into a gallon of gelato. You could have eaten it, but instead you decided to put your hand in it, and mentally assault someone else. Everyone could have just eaten gelato, but magnus. I mean the emperor really just has been begging for an ice cream truck for the last 10,000 years.
Neon: I’m looking forward to a box set that comes down to one massive nerd fight. And lo there was much spilled Dew and thrown Cheetos, and the sound of furious whisper shouting filled the grim darkness of yer mam’s basement.
Kevin: Nerdfight it may be, but it would be cool to get an Imperium Marines vs. Chaos Marine box for 9th edition. I mean, sure, that’s what 8th edition was all about. But we haven’t actually had that in 9th.
That’s it for the second 40k preview, which was surprisingly packed with new models. From looking at these comments it’s pretty clear that at least 50% of Gregs are completely HYPE for these announcements. Later today though (6 BST), is the final preview and our round table for it will follow on Sunday! See you then!
In the meantime, let us know what you thought of this one. What were your favorite reveals? Are you as mad as we are about the No Titans Zone? Let us know below or at contact@goonhammer.com.
