Hello everyone, I am Zak Ludick and this is Warhammer 40,000.

Games Workshop has announced its 3 new Codex rollouts for 2025... Astra Militarum, Aeldari and Imperial Knights. But let's back up a bit.

Background

Warhammer 40k is a tabletop miniatures strategy game that has been around for 30-40 years already. You build and paint miniature armies set in the grim dark future of the 41st millennium.

The game has rules for deploying your armies and terrain. How the units move on the board and how shots are fired and close combat fought by rolling dice.

Every couple of years or so, the main rulebook for the game changes. I started playing the game in 3rd Edition through to 5th and one game of 6th edition. I then put the hobby down for a stretch and came back in 9th edition.

We are now in 10th edition.

When this edition was launched 1st June 2023, the game underwent a dramatic change. Every unit needed a new profile, called a Datasheet. Armies had new Army rules and you also had Detachment rules.

So generally, each faction was released in 10th edition with their Army Rule, One Detachment and a collection of Datasheets for the models that you put into your army. This is called the Index.

When an Army got a new stand alone book, called a Codex the Rules for that Faction and Datasheets would be updated and that faction would get multiple Detachments to choose from. Sometimes you also got new Datasheets/Models/Units and sometimes you would lose some of the older kit.

Right, so let's fast forward to today.

Warhammer Review Library

I started doing a blog series where I review Datasheets and then later Army Rules and Detachments as well.

I currently have done 139 Datasheets, 3 Army Rules and 1 Detachment Rule.

At the start, I did not mind the Codex Rollouts because I started this process in between releases and then I realized: Units are going to change and some units are going to be removed and some factions might even get brand new units! 😱😱😱😱

So when Imperial Agents were getting a new Codex, and they announced that the Deathwatch Index is being absorbed into it... I decided that instead of rolling randomly through all the Datasheets, that I would review those Factions first. That way, I would catch Legends units, new units and changed units.

Imperial Agents had a total of 17 Datasheets and Deathwatch had 11... no big deal.

Then they announced a new Blood Angels Codex... 19 Datasheets... OK then...

I need to do another 6 Blood Angels Datasheets and then I am up to date...

And then the Announcement above came.