The box that kicks off 11th edition is finally on my desk, and in this video I crack it open sprue by sprue. Armageddon is the new launch set for Warhammer 40,000, and it leans hard into a single idea: it picks two specific armies, two factions with real history between them, and builds the whole thing around their grudge. Blood Angels on one side. A green tide of Goff Orks on the other. Sixty-one push-fit miniatures, all glue-free, split into two roughly 700-point forces.
If you grew up on second edition, the box art alone will do something to you. It deliberately echoes that famous early-90s Armageddon cover, and the matchup inside is the same one those of us who started in the 90s remember. That nostalgia is doing a lot of work here, and I think it works.
What’s in the Box
The Space Marine half is a Blood Angels strike force led by four characters: a Captain carrying a relic shield in a much more dynamic pose than the old plastic captains, a Librarian channelling power down a force staff, a Chaplain with a jump pack, and an Ancient holding the Armageddon banner. Backing them up are ten Intercessors, five Vanguard Veterans, three Eradicators, and a Land Speeder. The Eradicators are worth a mention because this box introduces a heavy bolter option for them, which gives you a genuinely new build straight out of the set.
A nice touch I point out in the video: almost every Marine in the box has the option of a helmet, the lone exception being the Intercessor Sergeant. If you’re someone who breaks into a cold sweat painting faces, this set is kind to you.
The Ork half answers with five heroes (a Warboss, a Weirdboy, a Painboy, plus the crew that comes with the vehicles) and a proper horde behind them. You get twenty Boyz built across two sprue layouts, which means run them as a single mob and every model is unique, including two weapon options for the Nob. Ten Gretchin round out the rank and file. The showpiece is the new Big Mek’s Dakkarig. This thing is enormous. When I lined it up against a Deff Dread I genuinely didn’t expect it to be the bigger model, but there it is. There’s also a Wartrakk for some fast, dakka-spewing mobility.
More Than Models
The book situation has changed this time, and it’s the most interesting decision in the whole set. Instead of one giant hardback tome, the rules come as an A5 softback Core Rules book, and the universe background that used to pad out launch boxes has been spun off into a separate Combat Patrol Companion aimed at newcomers.
What replaces it is the part I actually love. Operation Imperator is a codex-sized hardback that does nothing but tell the story of this specific conflict on Armageddon — the war you’re literally building toward when you assemble these two forces. Launch box lore has historically been thin and then forgotten by the time the edition matures. Giving the conflict its own sourcebook is the right call, and I hope it becomes the standard. I dug into that book more in my Operation Imperator writeup if you want the full breakdown.
You also get the Armageddon datasheet cards for every unit, a transfer sheet, and the Chapter Approved and Dominatus card decks. Having the decks in the box matters because they tend to vanish off shelves fast on their own.
Is It Worth It?
Here’s the hard part. At its price point, this is the most expensive 40K launch box yet, and that changes the calculation. If you want both armies, the math holds up well — the two Combat Patrol equivalents alone would run you most of the way to the box price before you even add the books and cards, and several units here aren’t in those patrols at all. I ran the full value breakdown in a separate post on whether the Armageddon box price actually adds up, and the short version is that it rewards people who’ll build both sides.
If you only care about the Blood Angels or only care about the Orks, the answer gets murkier, and you might be better served waiting for the standalone Combat Patrols. But the Goff-versus-Blood-Angels matchup is so thematically clean, and this is such a satisfying pile of plastic to build, that I had a hard time recommending you split it up. For more on why this specific clash is the right way to open the edition, I wrote about Orks and Armageddon as the perfect storm, and if you’re new to either faction the Blood Angels chapter highlight and the full Orks guide are good places to start before you pick a side.
Watch the full unboxing above for the sprue-by-sprue tour, and let me know in the comments which half you’d paint first.
