Getting Started With Age of Sigmar

A few weeks back, I was mentioning to my buddy that I was interested in playing Age of Sigmar, because there appears to be a good gaming scene for it here in town. He told me that he had a few Warhammer Fantasy Armies he wanted to get rid of. “I’ll take a pack of beer in exchange,” he told me.

How could I resist?

I headed over to his place a few nights ago, and we began picking through his models. There’s a substantial Dwarf army there, with two units of warriors, a unit of thunderers, a unit of miners, a couple of cannons, a bolt thrower, and the Anvil of Doom.

The Tomb King army is a lot of mounted troops, including mounted skeletons and some chariots.

The Skaven consist of just a few clan rats, a unit of stormvermin, and a sniper.

I’m diving in! Gabe (who’s nine now), is interested in playing Tomb Kings, and I love the dwarves, so we’re going to get the models painted up and start playing. So, barring a friend handing over an entire army to you, how do you get started with Age of Sigmar?

Download the rules: The great thing about Age of Sigmar is how easy it is to get involved in. The rules can be found online, with battlescrolls (stat-blocks) for each army. It’s all free, and super easy to get into. The basic rules also don’t have rules for point-based game, encouraging you to play simple pick-up games, and will be really easy for Gabe to play.

Pick up a Start Collecting box: For less than 100 bucks, you can have about 500 points worth of models ready to paint.

Find a local scene: I’ve found simply searching Facebook for Age of Sigmar (Enter Locality) tends to get you the results you need. The scene is very friendly to new players, as far as I can tell. Feel free to ask questions.

I’ve downloaded and printed the rules and the battlescrolls for the two armies, and now we’ll be painting them up. The figures are all on square bases, which they can stay as, if I want, but I’m going to be placing the minis onto round bases, mostly because I think they look better. With my new 3D printer, I’ll be cranking out a ton of bases to get all the minis printed up!

I’ve also been watching lots of videos on how to play. You can see a few here and here.

Age of Sigmar is a much simpler system than previous editions of Warhammer Fantasy, and has a much lower-priced entry point (free, if you’ve got fantasy miniatures lying around). Check your FLGS and see if there’s a local scene. If not, start one!