Guide contents (1 of 10)
What you need before you start
Before you and an opponent sit down, get these together. None of it is expensive or unusual — most of it you probably already own if you've been building and painting.
The essentials
- An army you can field at an agreed points value. See Building a legal list for what "legal" means.
- A tape measure or ruler, marked in inches — nearly everything in the game is measured in inches, from movement to weapon range to how close you need to be to an objective.
- Dice — a good handful of six-sided dice. You'll rarely need just one.
- Access to the current rules for your army: the free Core Rules, your faction's Faction Pack, and the current points from the Munitorum Field Manual, all from the Warhammer Community downloads page. The 40k app bundles a lot of this in one place too.
- A way to select or agree a mission — the current Chapter Approved mission deck, or the official app. See Setup for how this fits into starting a game.
- An opponent, and somewhere to play — a table roughly the size described in Building a legal list for your points level.
- Terrain — scenery to place on the table. Doesn't need to be fancy; it needs to give both players places to hide and fight over.
- Time. Your first game will run longer than it "should" while you're both learning — treat that as normal, not a sign you're doing it wrong.
Nice to have
- A phone with this site's turn tracker open, so nothing gets missed while you're both concentrating on the game itself.
- Small tokens or spare dice to mark things like objective control, or units that have already acted this phase.
- An experienced player nearby you can ask "is this right?" — even a good written guide is faster to check against a person than a page for your first game.
You do not need every model painted, based, or even glued together to learn how to play. Playing with unpainted or proxy models while you learn is completely normal.