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I bet most of you guys are psyched abouth 6th edition and look forward to July’s WD to find out more about the new book. Let’s see what this issue will tell us about the new edition and whether players of other systems have something to enjoy too.

The Good Stuff:

26 pages of army showcases, a Tau Empire army project/paint guide. The rest is pretty meh.

What’s In There For Painters and Modellers?

For each 40k race they present you one or two small armies painted by various guys from the studio, 26 pages full of pictures in total. There is also a painting guide for various Tau units in the style of the last couple of issues. Finally there is an Armies of Parade showcase of Dave Taylor’s awesome Empire army from Nuln – the photography on his blog is of higher quality though.

Things I Didn’t Like:

First things first, this issue is purely 40k. No Fantasy or LotR articles at all. Not a big surprise, but at least a little token article would have been nice. Anyways, most people will buy this issue for the 6th edition coverage. So what do we have? There is an 8 page article with lots of pictures telling you how awesome, exciting and cinematic the new edition is and what cool new rules there are, but in the style of the last couple of issues it’s mainly shallow marketing speech. They don’t explain WHY they introduced new rules nor do interview the designers or artists. I don’t even know who wrote the new edition (though I suspect Ward). Then there are two short battle reports. They garnered them with some small blurbs here and there that highlight new game mechanics or rules, but there are no maps and they combined several turns on a page again – I think a single, more comprehensive battle report would have been a better showcase of the new edition There are more uncalled-for articles like 6 pages consisting of three full-blown pictures of Citadel terrain with the same paintjobs we’ve already seen several times in older WD issues with small text blurbs that tell you what those buildings do in the new rules. After that two pages of terrain adverts, we get it, buildings are the bomb in 6th edition, thanks that you raised the prices of all of them last month. There is also a short article where Mat Ward recommends one or two of the new psychic disciplines for each race, strange enough there is no explanation how the new psychic rules work at all.

The leading article of this issue is the army showcase. Every race is covered with one or two armies, resulting in a massive page count of 26, almost a fourth of the issue. Granted, there are some nice conversions and unusual paint schemes. However quite a few have already been shown on the blog, in older issues or in the new Citadel painting book.

The Verdict:

This issue feels just so shallow. You’re so excited about 6th edition and on the cover it reads “new edition revealed”, but they managed to put a lot of pictures but very little information in this issue. Most of the information is hidden in subordinate clauses. Great inspiring pictures are all fine and well, but the frequency in which they pull out double page spreads just screams filler to me. Such a low effort is a shame for a new edition. The WD coverage for Fantasy 8th edition wasn’t spectacular but a thousand times better than this. That they didn’t even bother to try to cram a Fantasy article in there is another disappointment. There is so little text in this issue that I finished reading everything in the 30 minutes it took the tube from the hobby shop to my station. The only saving grace are the army showcases because there is some nice inspiration there. I don’t want to sound like a grumpy old guy who says that everything was better in the old days of WD but this month I can only give a 3/10.

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