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Basically as in the title, what edition(s) of 40k is generally accepted to correspond with the term 'oldhammer/retrohammer'?

Because ive heard over the last decade some people say its 1st ed. Others say its 2nd-3rd. Others 2nd-4th. Others say its anything pre5th. Others say anything pre-8th.

What is the 2025 consensus?

This really depends on a few key factors

1) The age of the person responding

2) When they first got into Warhammer

3) IF they consider Oldhammer to be a date/age mark or if they consider it in relation to their own interests



Eg someone who played in 3rd edition might consider 2 and 1 to be oldhammer but not 3 and beyond.
Meanwhile someone who played 5th edition might consider 1-4 to be Oldhammer.

Then you'll have those who put a rough date on it - say ever game 10 years older or more; or every before the last 2 or 3 editions etc....

1st and 2nd. I will reluctantly concede the possibility that 3rd might qualify as well

The main point for me is that 1st and 2nd edition were radically different from 3rd. Everything that has come since has essentially been expansions and iterations on 3rd edition, so I bundle everything from 3rd onwards as "newhammer" and 1st and 2nd are "oldhammer" not in a purely chronological definition but in the same way New Coke was different from old Coke (and Modern Coke is different to New Coke) - the formula changed.

So when someone says Oldhammer I'm imagining goblin green bases, everyone using flock, skirmish-level battles, occasionally wacky elements, no tournaments (I'm sure there probably were tournaments in 2nd edition but nowhere NEAR the prominence they rose to), a very casual game driven by narrative, Stillmania and weird conversions

Newhammer is, to me, taking itself much more seriously, and that's where the break occurs. It's about tournaments and base size restrictions and squeezing value out of every point and TLOS/Blast Marker arguments.
I reluctantly included 3rd because I know that's where some people consider the break to be, but I was around for it and there wasn't much of a distinction between 3rd and 4th, especially as 3rd had rules revisions and expansions along the way.
Also because this extends further than mere background (although it's a factor) you might have a better response in 40k general discussions than here.

I doubt we'll reach consensus though

Charax wrote:
1st and 2nd. I will reluctantly concede the possibility that 3rd might qualify as well

The main point for me is that 1st and 2nd edition were radically different from 3rd. Everything that has come since has essentially been expansions and iterations on 3rd edition, so I bundle everything from 3rd onwards as "newhammer" and 1st and 2nd are "oldhammer" not in a purely chronological definition but in the same way New Coke was different from old Coke (and Modern Coke is different to New Coke) - the formula changed.

So when someone says Oldhammer I'm imagining goblin green bases, everyone using flock, skirmish-level battles, occasionally wacky elements, no tournaments (I'm sure there probably were tournaments in 2nd edition but nowhere NEAR the prominence they rose to), a very casual game driven by narrative, Stillmania and weird conversions

Newhammer is, to me, taking itself much more seriously, and that's where the break occurs. It's about tournaments and base size restrictions and squeezing value out of every point and TLOS/Blast Marker arguments.
I reluctantly included 3rd because I know that's where some people consider the break to be, but I was around for it and there wasn't much of a distinction between 3rd and 4th, especially as 3rd had rules revisions and expansions along the way.
Also because this extends further than mere background (although it's a factor) you might have a better response in 40k general discussions than here.

I doubt we'll reach consensus though

Im gonna be weird and say i exclude 1st edition entirely purely because of how radically different it was. To me, retrohammer/oldhammer is 2nd. Posssssibly 3rd and 4th, even though the transition between 3-->3.5-->4 is much 'lighter' than 2nd -->3rd. In my opinion

According to my research the exact line was actually the change from the 3.5 Chaos codex to the 4e Chaos codex.

And that fact has nothing to do with it ruining my Alpha Legion army, I'm unbiased. There was a shift in attitude from GW throughout that time period but nowhere was it shown as starkly as with those two codices. The previous attitude was much more favorable towards customization, wargear, optional rules and army lists, conversions and even scratch-builds, ongoing campaigns, and building "fluffy" armies. The later attitude was much more about tournament lists, building models as instructed, using GW's special characters, and playing balanced symmetrical missions in isolated games.

There's still a tension between those two philosophies to this day but there was a definite pivot to favoring the latter in the middle of 4e.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
According to my research the exact line was actually the change from the 3.5 Chaos codex to the 4e Chaos codex.

And that fact has nothing to do with it ruining my Alpha Legion army, I'm unbiased. There was a shift in attitude from GW throughout that time period but nowhere was it shown as starkly as with those two codices. The previous attitude was much more favorable towards customization, wargear, optional rules and army lists, conversions and even scratch-builds, ongoing campaigns, and building "fluffy" armies. The later attitude was much more about tournament lists, building models as instructed, using GW's special characters, and playing balanced symmetrical missions in isolated games.

There's still a tension between those two philosophies to this day but there was a definite pivot to favoring the latter in the middle of 4e.

The 3.5 to 4.0 is a range ive heard. A lot. I do believe 5th marked the 'end of a era'

See whilst I can understand that divide I still recall the 3rd edition Tyranid codex that had a whole custom fleet builder in the back where you could change almost every stat and ability. It was - well - yes you could do fluffy things. You could also do insanely broken things.


I guess I've always approached the game/hobby in that the rules should be or always work best when they provide an even level playing field and then if you want ot homebrew a load of stuff you do it yourself; you don't need a book to tell you you can do it.

I personally split it from Oldhammer (1e and 2e), Middlehammer (3e to 7e) and Newhammer (8e onwards). I started at the end of 2e and 3e to 5e were my heyday in the hobby. I tailed off hard for 6e and 7e due to disliking the shifting scale of the game already clear in late 5e. So when I think of the 'good old days' it's that time I am thinking of.

 Da Boss wrote:
I personally split it from Oldhammer (1e and 2e), Middlehammer (3e to 7e) and Newhammer (8e onwards). I started at the end of 2e and 3e to 5e were my heyday in the hobby. I tailed off hard for 6e and 7e due to disliking the shifting scale of the game already clear in late 5e. So when I think of the 'good old days' it's that time I am thinking of.

I honestly felt there's a wee bit of a jump between 4th and 5th edition. 5th felt very different to 2nd, and third for that matter. I didnt even play 6th🤣

Not being there obviously, i've found that when reading other's comments on this here forum for a long time, the pivots are 2nd edition and 5th edition. Both moments when the game changed direction. It has seemed to me that these are the treshholds people will define old hammer with, that is, oldhammer end either with 2nd or 5th.

That's nothing but the impression I've got navigating this forum though, so take it with the whole tetrapack of salt.

 Da Boss wrote:
I personally split it from Oldhammer (1e and 2e), Middlehammer (3e to 7e) and Newhammer (8e onwards). I started at the end of 2e and 3e to 5e were my heyday in the hobby. I tailed off hard for 6e and 7e due to disliking the shifting scale of the game already clear in late 5e. So when I think of the 'good old days' it's that time I am thinking of.

That seems pretty apt to me.

For me I think it’s more a time period than a game edition.

I just missed the end of Rogue Trader, to the point we’d gone to Brighton to buy it, and were told it’s out of stock, as a new edition is releasing soon. And so it was 2nd Ed 40K I got started with.

But there was also 2nd Ed Epic, Tyranid Attack, Man’o’War, Necromunda, WHFB 4th Ed, Warhammer Quest to occupy my friends an I’s time.

All to the back drop of what’s widely considered White Dwarf’s heyday under Paul Sawyer and Robin Dews.

That whole period (probably 1992-1998) is, for me, the classic period.

Then came the dark times, then came The Empire 3rd Ed. Witness its bland, uninteresting rules. Behold its skinny, largely uninspiring Codexes. Regard the overall banality.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
Not being there obviously, i've found that when reading other's comments on this here forum for a long time, the pivots are 2nd edition and 5th edition. Both moments when the game changed direction. It has seemed to me that these are the treshholds people will define old hammer with, that is, oldhammer end either with 2nd or 5th.

That's nothing but the impression I've got navigating this forum though, so take it with the whole tetrapack of salt.

I concur.

1st/2nd are solidly oldhammer. Can’t see many arguments against 2nd in the category.

Is 3rd? Maybe. I’d say so. And if you include 3rd, spiritually 4th and 5th are refinements of the same core.

While 6-7th share the same framework, they felt different. Like the management had taken over from the gamers. They looked largely similar, but the soul was changed.

8th+ are right out for consideration as old. Or even middle hammer.

If you are just binary new/old hammer, I could see up to 5th.
If you include middle hammer as a concept, you might draw a harder line at 2nd.

I’m honestly having a hard time pinning my feelings down to vote.

I could get behind 3-5th being Middlehammer with a hard line after 2nd for Oldhammer

End of 1st (call it 1.5 - Battle Manual & Vehicle Manual era and everyone's on lovely clean Goblin Green bases) and most of 2nd, along with Epic.

Because that's what I played as nipper. By 3rd I was chasing girls (not literally)... of course, then I came back sometime during 7th, so you can imagine my surprise..

There is now twice as much time between 3rd edition release and today than between Rogue Trader and 3rd ed, I feel like not including it in oldhammer is more down to personal bias only.

Charax wrote:
I could get behind 3-5th being Middlehammer with a hard line after 2nd for Oldhammer

Im inclined to say Middlehammer is 5th edition to 7th edition.

I suppose one could place 4th in there as well.

Interestingly ive heard some say 7th should be considered newhammer purely because of all the new changes circa 7.5

the-gentleman-ranker wrote:
Basically as in the title, what edition(s) of 40k is generally accepted to correspond with the term 'oldhammer/retrohammer'?

Because ive heard over the last decade some people say its 1st ed. Others say its 2nd-3rd. Others 2nd-4th. Others say its anything pre5th. Others say anything pre-8th.

What is the 2025 consensus?

Given we're in the 40k Background forum, are you meaning from a background perspective or a mechanics perspective? I'm seeing responses for both so far.

And if you're meaning mechanics, this should probably be in a different bit of t'forum.

I propose a different definition for the eras. I belive (although someone may know better), that what I think of as the 40k "Golden Era" is roughly commesurate with Andy Chambers being near to or at the helm of the design team. I think that's about late RT through the middle or end of 4th edition. Late Rogue Trader saw a lot of things fall into place for 40k, and then late 4th seems to be when a different flavor of design began to take hold. That's when options started being culled from codexes and the sense of balance started to waver considerably. You might call that 2nd through 4th time "The Chambers Years".

I think of "oldhammer" as being a catch-all for 40k up through and including 5th ed only because the 3-5 systems were fairly compatable even if the codex styles and balance fluctuated quite a bit, but late 4th itself is the end of a sort of "golden era". Early Rogue Trader is so different than late Rogue Trader that I think of early RT as "proto-40k", really.

Another personality that can't be ignored from those early days is Jes Goodwyn. By late RT his designs for Space Marines and Eldar had taken hold and set the stage for the next two decades.

It's clearly RT And 2nd.

Third edition was a massive change in aesthetics and mechanics of the game.

We're far enough along that people who started in 3-5th might be getting nostalgic for those editions but that doesn't make them "Oldhammer".

^Heh. I was getting nostalgic for 4th ed during 6th.

1st and 2nd definitely fall under the term, 3rd is reasonably under the term but there's more of a greyzone there because 3rd ed's aesthetics is the foundation for by now most of 40K's lifespan.

If you want to, you can make a distinction between early 3rd ed and late 3rd ed. The style did shift as new codexes were published.

to me its 1st edition, without a doubt. 2nd edition is basically just a cleanup of the last 1st edition rules introduced in WH40K Battle Manual (1992), so to me it doesn't even count as its own edition, if we use the current convention of describing major and minor editions.

I suppose the larger cutoff point is somewhere around 3rd edition, when the game size upped radically and focus went from a couple squads duking it out into more larger forces we know today. But in the same way some people today consider 9th edition a cleanup of 8th edition, I consider 2nd edition a cleanup of 1st edition (larger paradigm shift in 2nd edition than the rules themselves being the elimination of GM and RPG narrative elements from the game, rules notsomuch)

RT-2nd.

In my opinion 40k is marked by 4 game paradigms representing the way the game was presented, written and sold.

87-98 1st and 2nd
98-2012 3rd to 5th
2012-2017 6th to 7th
2017-2023 8th to 9th

10th is now arguably a new paradigm, but could slot into the previous.


People don't remember that 1st ed was turning into 2nd ed in WD and supplement releases years before 2nd ed was released. The only time 1st ed was truly the crazy GM led edition it was, was in the first year after it released. It quickly changed after that.

although the game used the same core from 3 to 7, they did some internal tweaking at 6th that changed it quite a lot (melee weapons with AP for example). 3-5 was relatively minimalist in size and detail. 6th dumped a whole bunch of rules and detail into that core that changed it greatly.


I say this because 'oldhammer' to me is tied to paradigms as well as years. The core of 3rd was the same as 5th, but there's a 14 year gap between when 3rd ed began and 5th ended and the 3rd ed core survived up until the mid 2010s when 8th came in.

I can't see you playing 3rd ed as oldhammer when you're playing effectively the same game as someone playing 5th in 2012 (6th came out in June 2012), making that paradigm only 13 years old. If you keep 6-7 as part of the same paradigm given they used the same core, it's even more recent (8 years ago).

2nd ed ceased in 1998, which is now 27 years ago and no later paradigm is like it.

Basically, if the end of the paradigm is recent, the earliest point of the paradigm is cancelled out for old hammer. There are generations between the end of 2nd and now, there aren't for the end of 3-5/6/7.

A 12 year old in 2012 playing 5th along side a 24 year old and a 36 year old, means the younger is now 25 and the elder is 49, while only the elder would be able to have encountered 2nd ed at all (the 24 year old might have experienced 2nd ed when they were 10?).

Having started in late 5th/early 7th, I can't speak to the 5th to 6th changeover. I was under the impression that the basics were the same.

Though with 9th to 10th, I would class that as a large but not fundamental revision. There were lots of little changes, but functionally, the main change was just letting Characters lead squads again. A lot else was just numerical tweaking and cleaning up.

Simple answer, Rogue Trader and 2nd edition, and as a true simple answer, I have so many exceptions to that rule that it's useless. It's a frustratingly nebulous mix of monopose plastic rank fillers and metal characters, five pages of rules for the Shokk Attack Gun, and lore of a galaxy lit only by fire where the heroes all failed millennia ago and all that's left is ignorance and superstition raging against a slowly encroaching defeat they don't understand was set in stone before they were born. It's anything that makes me think 'oh yeah, I remember that', except the ones that don't quite seem to fit with the 'old' stuff - it's the boxnoughts, even the Venerable Dreadnought that's still available (if it would ever move out of 'temporarily out of stock' so I could buy one), but not the Tacticals that came in the 3rd edition box (no matter how much I love them too). It's 'the way things were' even though they never quite were that, I'm just looking back and interpolating everything I like in the modern game and products into the frame that used to be. It's based on feels, or as that old judge said, "I know it when I see it."

There is also the relativity of the concept. I was discussing it in an abstract objective perspective, while from an individual perspective oldhammer will be whatever edition/paradigm gives you that nostalgia feel.

everyone will have that first encounter nostalgia feel regardless of the edition. That feeling will be the same across all people. A 12 year old in 2014 is 23 now and will be getting that old hammer feel from 7th ed.

Agreed, Hellebore, as I am in that very situation: started in 2013 with 6 at 13 and now I'm 25 and it's been a lot of years and what I started for. I can't classify it into oldhammer for sake of objectivity but it feels like it to me.

Maybe we can group 40K into eras by edition?

I don’t think anyone can dispute 1st and 2nd would be Early Era. But I can and will make an argument that 3rd Ed belongs there.

All three were pretty experimental, and each is a refinement of the last. Not just rules, but background and model range.

3rd Ed, much as I loathe its bland uninteresting rules, was when GW, rather than the game, really hit its stride. Lots more plastic tanks and kits for everyone, the scale of battles increased. The company itself went from nutters in Nottingham, to a pretty slick, professional operation. Whatever you might think of the end of the Kirby Era, he still transformed GW, and with massive success for a decent number of years.

Middle Era is a period of refinement without drastic changes. I’d say 4th-7th, where the underlying rules remained pretty stable, with only minor changes.

8th-10th is Current Era. Significant overhauls, greater unit diversity etc, and very, very few non-plastic kits, and getting fewer every year. Not to mention the setting being right on the verge of going genuinely mainstream thanks to licensing and visibility.