Two Tiny Old World Rules That Changed Our Games
Sometimes the biggest tabletop revelations are not new units, not spicy list tech, and not some dramatic combo — just one sentence in the rules that we somehow glossed over before.
That was exactly our mood this week while chatting about Warhammer: The Old World. We ran into two rules reminders that instantly made us stop and go: wait… that changes a lot in our games.
The first one: templates are nastier than we remembered
Michał dropped this gem into the chat and it immediately hit us:
A model whose base lies partially underneath a template is hit on a D6 roll of 4+.
That one line came from the Risk of Being Hit section, and honestly — it changes a lot about how we think about templates at the table. In our games, this kind of detail can easily swing how dangerous blasts and similar effects really are, especially in those messy edge cases where a base is only clipped.
Michał’s reaction said it all: this basically changes everything in our games.
And yes, Stas summed up the emotional side of rules rediscovery perfectly:
o kurka podwodna
Which is, frankly, the correct response when you realise you may have been handling templates a bit too casually.
The second one: attacks in combat
Later, Stas came back with another rules reminder while refreshing the basics:
this may be important for your Ironsworns, unfortunately not in their favour
That sent us to the How Many Attacks? section — another one of those rules that seems obvious until you reread it and suddenly start re-evaluating how a unit performs in actual combat.
For Michał’s Ironsworns, this one may be less of a fun discovery and more of a painfully educational one. Still, these are exactly the kinds of clarifications that are worth catching before the next game rather than in the middle of turn three after everyone has already committed.
Why we love these moments
This is one of the funnier parts of playing a game like The Old World: every now and then, a casual rules check turns into a full-on recontextualisation of previous battles. Suddenly we start mentally replaying old games and wondering how many combats, templates, and crucial decisions would have gone differently.
It is also a good reminder that even if we feel comfortable with the system already, going back to the basics is never wasted time. Sometimes the most important “advanced tech” is just rereading core rules carefully.
So yes — this week in our hobby corner was less about painting, less about list building, and more about collectively discovering that the rulebook still has ways to surprise us.
And honestly? We kind of love that.