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I'm sure this question or a variation of it gets asked fairly frequently but this is my version, specific to my situation.

Background: I play at home, non-competitively and fairly infrequently.

It occurred to me the other day that I don't really need to keep on the constant rules treadmill, I can choose an edition and stick with it. Problem is, I can't go back too far as some of my armies will lose units - e.g. I have an Ad Mech army that I suspect will lose a lot of units if I revert back to 6th. It pretty much means my choice is between 7th and 8th.

The question I am asking Dakka is, what is 'better', 7th Ed or 8th Ed and why? What is the best edition for the casual gamer in terms of ease to learn, ease to play, simplicity, game length etc? I appreciate 8th was held up as being an excellent refresh of a tired ruleset but now it has been out for a while, how does it actually stack up?

For reference, I have the following armies so if you think I can get by with an earlier edition, please state so:

Space Wolves
Ad Mech/Skitarii
Deathwatch
Dark Eldar
Eldar
Tyranids
Thousand Sons
DKOK

Edit: Oh, I should say, if you think I can do something oddball, like use 7th Ed codexes but 6th Ed base rules, then please say so!

Well, this is something you really need to discuss with the people you play with, not a bunch of random forum users.

My own answer would be: Whatever edition allows the most of your groups (not just your own) stuff to be used & causes the least strife.


As to what edition {I} think is better overall?
Not 8th. It's been dumbed down too far. Maybe once you add some stuff back in via house-rules....
7th - No opinion. I skipped most of 6e & all of 7th. Though a friend insists I did play 1 game of 7th near when it launched. (I didn't realize that 7th had come, much less gone, & own no 7e books)
I wasn't overly impressed with 6th (hence skipping most of it)
I liked 3rd-5th best.
RT & 2e - They were each OK in their own rights, but less so than 3rd-5th.

8th I believe is best for casual pick up games, rules are MUCH more streamlined and easier to edit for home rules and custom scenarios, which 8th's layout particularly lends itself well for!

Try 8th and don't be afraid to tailor things for maximum enjoyment, garagehammer is really the best way to play, beer is optional but highly recommended.

This'll sound weird at first, but hear me out. No edition of 40K has ever been a brilliant game....ever. The enjoyment you're going to get out of it is solely up to the people you're playing with. Playing with like-minded people you enjoy being around, any edition will do. Don't be afraid to tailor to what you feel like doing.

I would say of the editions I've played, 2nd and 8th are my favourite - but both need heavy modification and a willingness to tailor lists for fun rather than meta-math-efficiency.

5th or 6th (basically the same) is probably the best edition, though I prefer 2nd. I'd really like the addition of more of the more modern units to 2nd ed. Then followed by the current edition if I didn't have to bother with titan knights and whatever the tau thingy's are.

5th Edition. It's stupid, sleek, and simple of all the editions really. 2e is probably the most fun but you'll have to get scans/pay through the nose for the books and they're quite complex and there's obviously a lot of units not supported by 2e (although it shouldn't be hard to make your own rules).

I'm biased for 4th but I'd still say 8th is the best for casual games. The 4th little kill team mini game was lots of fun though, it functioned very differently from the current kill team game. 4th also seemed to function better in small scales.

Further clarification: there is no gaming group, it's just me and the family, using my own armies so no need to seek consensus from others.

I'm not violently opposed to using any of the older editions but as stated, I don't want to end up stripping my armies of units because the rules didn't exist for newer models nor do I want to spend time making up or house ruling stuff.

Looks like 8th is the runaway leader so far...

 Elbows wrote:
This'll sound weird at first, but hear me out. No edition of 40K has ever been a brilliant game....ever. The enjoyment you're going to get out of it is solely up to the people you're playing with. Playing with like-minded people you enjoy being around, any edition will do. Don't be afraid to tailor to what you feel like doing.

I completely agree.
I like 8th edition a lot when played casually. It's probably the one that breaks down the fastest/in the worst way when you try to game the system, and many rule interactions have no easy answers. There's also dozens (hundreds?) of FAQ/Errata pages you need to read to play it by the book. But if don't mind resolving weird rule interactions by what seems like common sense or roll it off if you don't agree with the other, then you don't really need most of the FAQs. And if you're not trying to min/max, most fixes to competitive gaming have little consequence to your games.

So my advice would be to start with 8th ed. rules, and the "stepping into a new edition" document, or whatever it's called. And start playing right away. If you have a rules question mid-game, check the rulebook quickly, but don't spend hours searching through the FAQs. When you have some games under your belt, and some spare time, you can peruse all the FAQs/Erratas, but they're really not needed if you just want to have fun playing with your minis.

Personally I'd suggest you start with 8th and work from there until it aligns with your tastes. That way it's easy to get hold of the rules, they are easy to learn and all fixes are available from the official website to be used or ignored as you choose. It is also a very simple system at its core, where you rarely have to go digging for information beyond what's in front of you in the datasheets if common sense and sportsmanship are used. As a bonus this simple core means it's dead simple to try your hand in modifying any parts you find wonky. Our group changed the turn order to alternating activations, played terrain more meaningfully from the start and whatnot.

That said, RT and 2. have their charm as occasional events.

I would vote for 8th played with power levels and open war cards. They are simply the best casual gaming experience you can find, you don't need to purchase chapter approved or most of the FAQs and you can easily play WYSIWYG without bothering about the point efficency of certain choices..

For me the key factor is how often you play. If you play infrequently, I would recommend 8th edition, played simply out of the indexes (the get you buy lists released before the codexes.)

Yes, there was some wonky stuff in them, but with any measure of restraint in army building you can have a lot of fun playing two games a year with nothing but a few books. The downside is that much of the shiny rules of 8th edition are in the codexes (army specific strategems, warlord traits, relics, doctrines, etc), but for an infrequent player, the options are overwhelming. (I've played 8th regularly since it came out, and when a new codex comes out it's so dense to figure out)

The army lists in the Indexes give each army a bit of flavor, usually in a rule or two, and they still have rules for all units and most special characters. The rulebook warlord traits and strategems still add depth, and you can always add more later.

The one downside you will hear about 8th edition is how fluid it is, in that many rules have changed, or been added. Most of those are for competitive balance, and shouldn't affect a home game. The core rules of moving/shooting/assaulting have stayed the same, and are the cleanest of any edition.

I should add that I'm mostly advocating for 8th edition over trying to port your armies into 3rd or 5th. 7th edition is far too unwieldy to only play from time to time.

Was there ever and edition of w40k that could be played with 20-30 models of the not knight kind? Because if yes then that one would be the best for playing at home, if such an edition did not exist, then the one who had the closest avarge of units per army would be the next best thing.

Given the list of your armies 7th ed simply won't work for Tyranids without complete fandex rework - especially when you also have Eldar on your list. That matchup doesn't work except for few, very carefully selected builds, on any concievable casual/competetive level. Also, 7th ed work well if you are dedicated player with dozens of games played monthly, but for just couple of games a year it is unwieldy as hell. And I say this as an avid fan of sandbox nature of 7th ed. You will be far better off with either index or codex 8th ed and then tailor it for your particular needs as you go. The added bonus to 8th ed is that it is current, so any new shiny release is plug&play and everything from your list of armies is supported one way or another.

If you like large skirmish sized games with some vechicles however, then there is nothing better than 2nd ed and porting back then nonexistent armies/models shouldn't be a problem but takes some effort to do. A whole lot of sources exist on the web that can help with that task and 2nd ed experience is the most elaborate version of (small scale) 40k. The added bonus is that you can switch to Oldcromunda or Shadow War at any moment, as those three games share core mechanics and Oldcromunda is freely available to download.

Another alternative is playing index 3rd, you need the smallest amount of books and the game is very easy and straightforward to play, but it suffers from CC imbalance and is very, very limited in model scope and gameplay experience - you can find board games that are more elaborate than index 3rd ed. But some of your armies/units would need fandex or "count as" treatment. Some people like to mix 5th ed rules with 3rd ed indexes and it is a good combination but many units do not exist in such scenario.

5th and 6th editions in home environment are pretty much the same rules wise and you won't have to deal with game breaking TFGs anyway so the only meaningfull difference is that 6th is way larger, with more units already released and some rules built in in BRB instead of supplements.

4th ed is a bit of an odd ball in 40k history, it is the only one with highly abstracted LOS and is a bit of a sidestep experiment in 3rd-7th evolution. Pretty much love it or hate it edition.

The best way to decide would be to spend a week on reading all BRBs (all can be found on the web) and check which one feels most intuitive to you and then "sell" it to your family, as you sound as the person with most dedication to the game with other family members just wanting to have fun time with you.

8th, I must concede, is pretty much the best edition I've played in.

While I do miss 5th somewhat [though there's no love lost for 6th and 7th], and don't really like HP as the abstraction for resiliency, 8th handles very well.

By far the easiest, cleanest experience you'll have is Index Only 8th. You get all the army rules for way cheaper, and taking up less room, and you get to dodge a bunch of shenanigans involving Stratagems and other rules that come with the codexes.

I'd give a shout out to one of the supplements with the "cityfighting" cover rules too. Little extras like hit modifiers for terrain, soft cover and hard cover, which boost up the effects of terrain for your game.

If I were to go lean on 40K, that's what I would do.

It's not necessarily having to go 'lean', I mean I'm already halfway down the 8th rabbithole already - I have all the relevant codexes for my armies but what I mean, if I may clarify the OP, is that as I get older, I find things tend to 'stick' a lot less memory-wise so I don't want to spend hours playing a game faffing about cross-referencing rules. But from the sounds of it, 8th is already the most streamlined and easy to play of all the versions anyway...

It's just a shame they don't produce those A5 mini rulebooks for 8th; I found those useful.

 filbert wrote:
It's not necessarily having to go 'lean', I mean I'm already halfway down the 8th rabbithole already - I have all the relevant codexes for my armies but what I mean, if I may clarify the OP, is that as I get older, I find things tend to 'stick' a lot less memory-wise so I don't want to spend hours playing a game faffing about cross-referencing rules. But from the sounds of it, 8th is already the most streamlined and easy to play of all the versions anyway...

It's just a shame they don't produce those A5 mini rulebooks for 8th; I found those useful.

Only index 3rd was more streamlined and simple than index 8th and codex 8th is far more convoluted than codex 3rd due to stratagem mechanics. And if you don't want to have troubles with cross referencing and interpreting rules then 7th is out of the question really.

 filbert wrote:
It's not necessarily having to go 'lean', I mean I'm already halfway down the 8th rabbithole already - I have all the relevant codexes for my armies but what I mean, if I may clarify the OP, is that as I get older, I find things tend to 'stick' a lot less memory-wise so I don't want to spend hours playing a game faffing about cross-referencing rules. But from the sounds of it, 8th is already the most streamlined and easy to play of all the versions anyway...

It's just a shame they don't produce those A5 mini rulebooks for 8th; I found those useful.

Weeeell ... as slim as 8E’s rules are, the boxed sets have been including a rules fold-out that I believe is A5 in size. If you pick up something like the Know No Fear set, or check the likes of eBay for the cardboard content of GW’s recent boxed offerings, you should be able to land one easily. There’s also the PDF battle primer - you could print it out in whatever size you want (2 pages per sheet on A4?)

I find that 8th hasn't cut bloat so much as it has reorganized it; the core rules are simpler than they were in 7th but there's a similar amount of very-slightly-different paragraph-long special rules to deal with scattered among different datasheets.

I regard 5e as the start of the walk down the rabbit-hole of rules bloat with proliferation of wildly different unit types, mechanically distinct melee weapons, and size creep, 3e/4e represent a game that functions clearly and well with a smaller set of rules and doesn't have to resort to extra layers of complexity like random damage stats or Stratagems to remain semi-functional with overly-big models.

That said 5e-7e were also the age of a wild explosion of content; if you were to actually go back to 4e you'd find that Tyranids, Necrons, and Dark Eldar had a tiny range of models compared to what's available today, the Deathwatch were a White Dwarf article allowing you to take one Kill-Team in an Imperial army, and the Skitarii were a Guard regimental doctrine giving your infantry a 6+ Invulnerable save. In practice it's going to be easier to stick to 8th simply because you can use all your models and it'll be a lot easier to find advice or rules arbitration on the internet.

If I were to pick any edition it would be 5th, just the best overall but you would lose some stuff. I wouldn't go earlier than 5th. 8th is better than 6 and 7 and all the codexes and faqs and stuff are still around and easy to get hold of so I would have that as my second choice.

5th or 8th.

5th wont cover all the same armies and units, but does scale the game down better. Not a perfect ruleset by any means, but probably the best outside of 8th overall. The game also has a much different metagame than 8th which should make things more interesting.

8th is definitely the way to go over 7E/6E, nothing of value was lost in ditching those editions.

6th Edition Pre-Knight codex, or 8th.

I really enjoyed the limited Allies option, and 5th was too parking-lot for my taste.

In your own home? I would probably tweak 8th to include the best parts of earlier editions. The only good reason to stick "strictly" to one editions' rules is to make it easy to find other players that will be playing by the same rules.

8th is convenient for pickup play and ease of use, but the terrain rules are kind of weak. You can even tweak the point values to suit.

I started in 2nd Ed., skipped 3rd and 4th, came back in 5th, skipped 6th, played 7th and 8th.

Personally, I prefer 5th.

5th is hands down my favorite, followed by 8th, 4th, 7th, then 6th crashes at the very bottom as basically “unplayable unless you hate yourself and your friends”. I can’t comment on RT-3rd, cuz I started in 4th (barely). Since a few of your armies require 7th or higher, I’d just stick with 8th. It’s the absolute friendliest for dropping models on the tables. Ignore superheavies and use the Power Level cost for units. It won’t be totally balanced, but you can play items you like the look of without worrying how much it costs to field them within their unit.

2nd edition if you could use 8th ed CC fighting and limit overwatch (it was too strong)

8th edition if you could use cover rules from 2nd ed. and get rid of overwatch.(it is mostly too weak and a time waster)

The one thing I miss is 3rd ed where psykers would 'cast' their powers in lieu of shooting.

I play Eldar so the 2nd ed mini psychic game and the current 8th ed powers are very strong for my army. Still I think Psychics in 3rd was a good streamline, especially with 8th ed focus on faster game play.

If you only play every now and then 8th edition is the best because of how easy it is to learn the rules. At the same time it involves more tactics than 7th edition, which was bloated with rules that didn't contribute anything meaningful (tank shock, firing arcs, templates, armor values) or didn't work (psychic phase).
As others and even the designers have stated you should also see 8th for what it is: a toolbox to create your games. If the base rules seem to simple for you, add cities of death rules or play narrative games, or a campaign from urban conquest or Vigilus.

5th just change wound allocation to prevent shennagins.

5th or 8th index only.

8th ed index only is THE MOST streamlined version of 40k to date.

CP battery and codex creep on stratagem... No thanks.

I have played all editions of 40k.

I would say as a somewhat achievable complete game 8th has the most utility.
It would be possible to get all the Codex books and Index if you are so inclined for a reasonably complete game.
There are a variety of newer "cool" models that you would have to figure out something if you decided to use 3rd edition for instance.
6th and 7th seemed an impossibility to get all the various source information for the units.

For a person who has multiple faction armies, 8th has seemed to pull it all together for me and is more "manageable" in general.
My 2 cents worth of opinion.