Apocalypse is now!!

So just got my hands on the Apocalypse rule book today and have spent some time looking over it.

This book brings some wonderful things to the table. It starts out by mentioning that players should just bring their armies "read entire collection" and set up with some friends of roughly equal forces and play without worrying about FOC or complete balance points wise. Also allows for Armies on the Allies Matrix that cannot be played together in 40k to be used on the same team.

Afterwards the book goes into planning a Apocalypse game and how to set it up, including breaks. This seems to be really important now as Reserves come in after different scheduled breaks instead of what turn it is. IF the game is really large though the breaks might coincide with what turn it actually is. Before each break is also the time to tally strategic victory points for that "phase" of the game that can be used to purchase strategic assets.

There are 6 new apocalypse missions in the book to use for the games. None of these are mush different than anything we have seen already in the Eternal War missions, but have all the special apoc game rules in the details.

There are also new rules for:

 Divine Interventions which vary as to what race you are using and can only be used when certain criteria are meet, like half of your army is dead, or you killed more of the enemy in pts than what they have done to you.

 Finest hours are special abilities that can be used by your warlord that can do cool things like give all units in 24" relentless or feel no pain.

Sons of the Primarch are Finest Hours that are used be Chaos and Space Marines depending on what First Founding Chapter they are from (all secondary founding chapters use their first founding primarchs rules).

Unnatural Disasters are massive destructive calamities that can happen during the game, and some of them are powerful enough to kill almost everything on the table. Use is optional for this.

There are also plenty of new formations to use, but now do not cost extra points to use them, you just have to have all the models, and pay the points for those if using points to play. Many of the formations are really cool, and add tons of fluff to the game.

Overall this is a great new rule book and helps spell out how to make an apoc game run smooth for most people that havn't run a few themselves to work out everything themselves. The only issue I have about the book is that some of the units in here are copies of Forgeworld units that have current rules in 6th Ed. books. I feel this could of been space better spent on more varying formations instead of just rules for that model again. I guess there just more apocalypse formations books that we will b getting.

I would give this book a 4 out of 5 stars