7th Edition: What we know and what I think about it.

7th Edition is right around the corner.

Unless you have been living under a rock and have not been paying attention to anything 40k for the last few weeks you will know that 7th Edition is apparently being released or will be available for pre-order on May 24th.

I at first was rather annoyed by the news.  I still feel that I have not mastered 6th yet.  I know most of my friends haven't mastered it yet.  A lot of my friends have barely even played it.

I have also been running tournaments regularly.  I feel I have a good grasp of the 6th Edition rules and now with 7th I have to learn new things.  I am putting an indefinite hold on the tournaments until I have a feeling for how the rules play and where the community is going in terms of tournaments.

My tournaments have been Bay Area Open style but with no Forgeworld and played at 1850 points. Depending on the new missions in the new rules I may or may not continue to follow the Bay Area Open format.  They may also change their format with 7th edition, who knows.

On to what we know about 7th edition:

There will be a Psychic Phase.
This is pretty big news.  This is a whole new PHASE to go along with the Move Shoot and Assault PHASES.
There hasn't been a Psychic Phase since 2nd edition in the 1990s.

This could be good or bad.  I am leaning towards good.  While adding a Phase is a big deal and it implies that it will have the same significance as the other three phases, I believe it will impact the game less than the current way Psykers and their spells influence the current game.

I have not played Fantasy Battle since 4th edition of Fantasy in the 1990s, so I don't know how the current Magic phase works in the current Fantasy battle game, but if spells are cast by using a pool of dice and anyone can dispell them by using their own dice and bad things can possibly happen.

It seems to me that having a phase may be better and it may be harder to cast psychic powers.  It may run counter to what people think.  Psychic powers even though they will have their own phase now, may not be as powerful as they are in 6th currently.

New Missions along with New Objective Cards
I am excited for this.  I can't believe my group of friends never thought about something like this before.  I don't know if this is how it will work or not but if you have a stack of cards, each one has an objective on it and you flip it over and try to accomplish it, once you do you then draw a new new card.

This is an awesome idea.  I don't know how the cards will be dealt out, if it is random or if each player selects the cards before the game or if they share or have separate decks but it sounds cool.

Grounding Checks
Flying Monstrous Creatures (FMCs) now only take one grounding check per turn.  This is a HUGE boon for FMCs.  Before you could basically kill them with lasguns, now they will probably just blow them off and not care.

FMCs, in particular Tyranids, just got a lot better and scarier.

Difficult Terrain
I heard that it is now -2 inches to movement.  If this is correct then it makes the movement part of the game less random, which is great.  It will help all units: on foot or in vehicles, unless vehicles are treated differently.

Sweeping Advance.
If the rumors are true and you are able to consolidate (or Sweep) into another unit after you wipe out one unit in CC, even if the new unit gets to over watch you, it will be huge for assault armies or just units.

Basically having a unit of assault marines in a land raider or the equivalent will be quite useful again as once they get into combat they will not be shot at as much after they initially charge.


Well these are some of my thoughts for now.

In just a few days we will have the new edition in ours hands and I can see for myself if these things are true.

Until Next Time....