Praise Nurgle, the wait is over! Today we finally get to hold the hallowed Codex in our pox-ridden hands!

It seems like we’ve been waiting for Codex: Death Guard to drop forever. It’s been a long time coming; since the first teasers about 8th Edition early in 2017 we’ve known that Death Guard were going to be one of the prominent armies featured heavily in this edition. That’s pretty exciting for followers of an army that’s never had it’s own Codex before.

It was worth the wait though! The Codex is packed full of juicy new Death Guard units. I’m sure anyone avid enough to be reading this has already read every tidbit about the new units, so I won’t bother going into detail about them. Suffice to say, there’s plenty that I’m excited about!

Personally, I’m not as drawn to most of the big, flashy models as I expected to be. The things that I’m most eager for are the various infantry options being released. I’ve been loving painting up my first squad of Plague Marines, so I can’t wait to get the proper, multi-part, poseable Plague Marine kit. I’ve invested in a pile of tiny neodymium magnets so that my Plague Marines can be fully modular and interchangeable, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with the magnetisation in general. I’m also hanging out to get my hands on the Blightlord Terminators and the various new infantry characters such as the Biologis Putrifier and Tallyman.

I went to my local Games Workshop store this morning to get the Codex as soon as it opened, but I held off on buying Mortarian, the only new Death Guard models that also got released today. It’s not that I’m not keen on the Primarch; I think the model looks amazing, and the abilities seem incredibly lethal on the tabletop. But a lot of the games played in my local area are currently using very small points level, sometimes as low as 40 power level, making it difficult to field such a large, dominating figure. Coupled with the high price in Australian dollars, I think I’ll wait until I can reasonably hope to play Mortarian before I buy him. That, plus I’ve still got loads of modeling and painting of other Death Guard minis to do still.

On top of all the new stuff that’s about to be released, the Codex release opens the hobby floodgates for me with the models that have already been released. I’ve been holding off on building many of the models I already have, because I wanted to see how they turned out in the final, official release. For example, I have a Nurgle Daemon Prince that I haven’t put together yet, because I was planning to give him wings from a Plague Drone. Now that the Daemon Prince in the Codex doesn’t have access to the wings upgrade, I’ll have to reconsider that. I’m glad I didn’t glue anything yet! That said, I know that we will still be able to use the Daemon Prince with wings from the Index: Chaos book, so I might still do it, but I’ll probably magnetise the wings so I can remove them if necessary.

The other exciting part about the Codex release for me is that I can start theorycrafting my army structure. Strategy and force design are my favourite part of the gaming aspect of the hobby, but I’ve been forcing myself not to think about it too much, basically ever since Index: Chaos released with 8th Edition. I didn’t want to get overly attached to any particular style of play for Death Guard, in case the Codex obsoleted it or made it less impressive than it was in the Index. I’ve only had the Codex for a couple of hours so far, so I haven’t settled on anything yet, but I’m looking forward to the process of strategic exploration.

So far I’m a bit torn about the strategic direction I want to take my army in. The Rule of Cool is propelling me towards a mainly infantry foot slogging force, just because I love Plague Marines so much. The miniatures look great, and they’re a blast to paint, base, and convert. Some of the bigger models look really interesting too though. I’d like to try adding a trio of Myphitic Blight-Haulers to shroud my infantry with the Putrescent Fog. The Haulers also provide solid gun platforms, especially at full three-model unit strength for the +1 ballistic skill. But again, I don’t see that working until I can find larger point level games.

For now, it’s back to modeling and painting for me. And of course, singing the praises of Papa Nurgle!