This is the most balanced start to a Warhammer 40K edition that I can remember, but there's still room for improvement

They say a change is as good as a rest, and by the end of Warhammer 40,000 10th Edition, I was in dire need of either.

Not that 10th Edition wasn't great – it had just gotten a little samey. Well, that's all out the window now because Warhammer 40K 11th Edition is here and I've smashed my way through a tournament's worth of games over the past two weeks to get the lowdown on the new version of the wargame.

We didn't get a full rules overhaul this time around – which means all our 10th edition Codexes still work and most of the core rules remain relatively familiar – but that doesn't mean that there haven't been some significant changes to the way we play Warhammer 40,000.

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The good

Off the bat, I'll say this: I like Warhammer 40,000 11th Edition. It feels like a refined version of the game that we've all been playing for the past three years, with a lot of quality-of-life upgrades baked into it.

The overhauls to both terrain and objectives – which resulted in terrain becoming the objectives – have massively shaken up what a 40K board looks like, while the new army dispositions and asymmetric primary missions have given a similarly seismic shuffle to how we build our lists and play the game itself.

Secondary missions feel fairer too, because you can stockpile them, so you're never punished for drawing "Behind Enemy Lines" in the early game or pulling "Assassinate" when all your opponent's characters are hidden.

Getting to build your army towards a specific goal instead of generic missions adds a ton of flavour; my Necrons don't care much for reconnaissance, but they do love to stand in a place and proudly declare dibs, and I can build a list almost exclusively with that in mind now. I love the new detachment system, which lets you glue multiple detachments together to buff different unit types. It helps massively in the flavour department, something that was often lacking in 10th.

Battleshock is more impactful; attached characters no longer forget half of their rules when their unit dies; flying units can actually fly over buildings again… the list of improvements goes on and on.

To top it all off, this feels like the most balanced start to an edition of Warhammer 40K that I can remember, and, most importantly, the game is fun to play. I'm having a great time, and so are my opponents. What more could you want?

The bad

OK, now for all the "more you could want".

I said this is the most balanced start to an edition of Warhammer 40K that we've ever had, and while I stand by that, some balance issues are creeping up already, specifically around the five dispositions. Take & Hold, Priority Assets, and Reconnaissance all seem to be broadly in line with each other, but the other two have some issues.

Purge the Foe is just too strong and too singularly focused as it stands. While other dispositions need to vary up their game plan a little, Purge the Foe just needs to kill you stone dead. There's a danger it pushes the game into a "who can table who first" competition, which is rarely a fun time for Warhammer.

Disruption has the opposite issue; it asks too much of players, and the rewards are just a bit weaker than those in other detachments. You need an ungodly number of trash units to make it work, which means you can find yourself bleeding resources just to keep up, while your opponent has a much simpler and less costly objective to achieve. The missions can be tweaked, so I'm not too worried here long term, but it's an issue to acknowledge.

Some matchups also feel a tad noninteractive – games where players can avoid getting into a serious brawl with each other and still score 80+ points each. This can lead to some boring-ass games of 40K, so I'd like to see tweaks to these mission combos to force some engagement.

Another elephant in the room is that "toeing into terrain" is back. In 10th edition, if you touched a unit (like a tank) partially into a building, you could see into it, but not out the other side – you needed to be entirely within that terrain piece to shoot out the other side. That's no longer the case in 11th, and when combined with the new terrain layouts, it results in some frighteningly long sight lines across the board.

Fast guns are always strong in 40K, but this rule change is stacking the deck further in their direction. 10th Edition was smart enough to avoid this mistake. Again, this is an easy fix, and I suspect 11th will eventually revert to the old ways, but for now, prepare to get blasted from downtown.

The unknown

We're less than a month into the lifespan of Warhammer 40K 11th edition, and we have no idea what's in store for us as the edition progresses.

The codexes remain a mystery, beyond a brief glance at the contents page for the debut book – Codex Orks – from the Big Summer Preview, and they're certainly going to shake up the foundations of the game in a big way. We've seen a taster of how they'll work with the swathe of 1DP detachments that were added to the game alongside the Armageddon launch box, but these are bolt-ons to make the 10th Edition books work with 11th Edition.

The codexes will be built with this new edition in mind, and that offers a lot of opportunities for great (and terrible) things. GW are no strangers to releasing an overpowered codex at the best of times, but now they need to balance books built for 11th against a bunch of hangers-on from the previous iteration.

Hell, even some of the 1DP detachments they've already added are a little too strong, with the Librarius Conclave and Sekhetar Cohort both springing to mind. We've got our first balance pass due any day now, and I'm sure they'll get some appropriate nerfs, but it's a constant game of whack-a-mole that we've seen before.

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