The Third Warhammer Preview

Hey everybody,
Today has seen the third online preview from Games Workshop, these online previews taking place instead of the usual seminars that would have taken place at the various events and tournaments if we weren’t in these crazy times. The previous two such previews didn’t honestly excite me all that much, though in the intervening days since we saw all that stuff, I have come to realise that there are some really cool things in there.

This preview, however, has been pretty good, if I’m honest, and I’m fairly excited about a lot of this stuff!

To start with, we’ve got the new Giants for Age of Sigmar, the Sons of Behemat, which have been a name for a couple of months now, but we’ve finally seen the new kit in all its massive glory! I’m not about to rush out to start a Giants army, but the multi-part kit does look like a lot of fun. And huge. Very, very huge.

Looking forward to seeing these come out, and I’m intrigued as to whether any more is going to come out for the army…

Now, this next one is a bittersweet one. The “last expansion” for Blackstone Fortress, Ascension. It looks like the expansion is giving us Mummy and Daddy spindle drones, which do look really great! It’s just… the last expansion? It makes me quite sad.

I think that my one main hope is that this is merely the last expansion of this ’round’ of the game, and we’ll see effectively a new core set, or a set much like Escalation, which brought us new explorers as well as new enemies. Blackstone Fortress is a setting that is too good to leave – the possibility of having all manner of weird and wonderful denizens of the 40k universe.

Here’s hoping.

Keeping to the skirmish games, Warcry is getting a new warband, and it isn’t Chaos related. The Dark Elves are coming to the Eightpoints, and they look… cool! When I first saw these, I thought they looked a bit weird, as though there was some kind of spell-effect moulded onto the sculpted, but now I’m not so sure. At any rate, they look great in my opinion, and I’m hoping that we might see some more in the way of these kinds of bespoke warbands for the game, rather than the repurposed stuff that we saw for Nighthaunt and Stormcast.

There is a new team coming for Blood Bowl, and we’re getting another Horus Heresy character in the shape of none other than Saul Tarvitz. He doesn’t quite look as I’d imagined him, but even so, he does look good!

Finally, though – new Necrons!! We had rumours of Illuminor Szeras being a new model way back, but seeing the final rendition is actually really lovely. Sure, he’s a bit busy in the way that many other new models are, but I think it’s really cool to see us getting a new centerpiece kit, and even though I’ve not finished painting the finecast version, I think I’ll be picking this bad boy up as soon as possible!!

Also accompanying Szeras is a new Inquisitor model, which looks really quite wonderful! I’m always intrigued to see these things come out, because the Inquisition seems to be a forgotten faction. But yeah, we get a new Inquisitor model. Cool!

All in all, I’m quite chuffed with the models that we’ve seen here. Looking ahead, it seems as though this might be the way we get these previews for the foreseeable future…