The Dark Angels Return?

As near as I can figure, I have played perhaps two games of Warhammer 40,000 in the past 13 years. So why did I stop? And why am I thinking of getting back into it?

The first one is mostly due to budget constraints, but not financially, even though it is not an inexpensive game or hobby). Most tabletop wargames are designed primarily as a one-on-one experience. You can definitely split an army up into its component parts and spread out command over multiple players, and that can be a lot of fun, but in the end, 40K works better as a substitute for chess than it does for Risk.

So if I have a limited amount of gaming time, I want to maximize it by having as many of my friends involved as possible. This was a big factor in pushing us back into tabletop role-playing games after a long absence. 

But there have been two new editions of the rules since I stopped buying them in 2007 after the end of my employment with Games Workshop, the publisher and manufacturer. And each edition carries a cost of updating not only the core rules but also an army book or codex for each faction you collect. The last edition (9th) also required a deck of psychic power cards, something I was glad they had abandoned when they moved to 3rd edition in the '90s.

But in 2023, GW announced that a 10th edition was coming, and not only would the core rules be completely free of charge, but they would also make the stats and points costs for each army free to download as well.

Suddenly a number of people in my social circles (far more than whom were playing when I left GW!) were talking about getting back into Warhammer 40,000. In addition to being free, the new rules were being promoted as "simple but not simplistic," which has a lot of appeal to me as well.

Last week I started unpacking and auditing my three remaining 40K armies and exposing them to the light of day for the first time in many years. I hadn't printed off any rules or datasheets yet, so this was solely an exploratory venture. Would the models still be usable? Were the paint jobs as bad as I remembered?

I started with my chosen faction of Space Marines, the Dark Angels. This has been my army of choice since the original Space Hulk Boardgame I bought around 1991 (!), and all the subsequent lore and aesthetic has been right in my wheelhouse ever since - monastic warrior knights with a dark secret about their history, cloaked in robes and brandishing a winged sword as their icon.

Better still, while most Marine chapters limit you to a single colour for the most part, the Dark Angels actually have three separate liveries, the base version being a dark green:

Their cavalry arm, the Ravenwing, have their motorcycles and landspeeders painted black with white trim.

And my favourite element, the Deathwing, paint their Tactical Dreadnought (or Terminator) armour bone white, a change from the black shown on my Space Hulk box. This was done in memory of the squad who saved their homeworld from an alien incursion but did not think they would survive doing so, and dusted their suits in white ash during their death rites prior to battle (from a brilliant short story by William King).

The Deathwing is probably my favourite part of my Dark Angels army, as evidenced by not only their size but also the resin shoulder pads I purchased in the UK (with the embossed Deathwing icon of a winged but broken sword).

And this is fortunate because those Terminators are already on proper-size bases for the most part, unlike my tactical marines and command squads shown above, whose 25mm bases now need to be a larger 32 mm size. Thankfully some enterprising boffin has already designed a 3D printable adapter which will make things much easier once Jeff has had a chance to print some out for me!

It looks like I can field nearly 2000 pts of Deathwing as-is though, so now I need to start learning the rules. I watched an introductory video last week from a third-party gaming channel that was tremendously well-produced and very helpful, but gosh was it strange being taught this game by someone else after having done so on an almost daily basis for over a decade! 

Initial reports from my mates are that the game is as fun as GW suggests it is, which is extremely heartening. With any luck I get some more enjoyment out of these models I painted years ago, and resist the siren call of the newer, bigger and even flashier models they are producing nowadays...