Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Dominion Review - IGN (2024)

Age of Sigmar has a checkered history. First released as a simplified alternative to Games Workshop’s flagship miniatures game Warhammer Fantasy Battle, it left fans infuriated by the sudden scrapping of that entire line. The second edition was a big improvement, refining and solidifying an overly simplistic concept into a fast, fun but more competitive game.

Dominion is the introductory box for the new third edition (see it on Amazon). While the core rules are free and you can buy whatever figures you want for your army, these starter boxes represent a great value for your money. Third edition promises to be backwards compatible with existing forces from the previous edition, so let’s take a look at what’s changed.

The Box and What's Inside

Waiting to greet you when you open Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Dominion is a bright mural of battle. Beneath it is sprue after sprue of plastic waiting to be clipped out, trimmed and glued together. When you’re done, you’ll have 58 of the finest plastic miniatures imaginable, enough to make two starter armies.

The Stormcast Eternals are divine warriors, encased in massive suits of armor. Older Stormcast models have been detailed but a little on the static side. These are big step up, featuring much bolder and more fluid poses. Their leader, Yndrasta, framed by her angelic wings and mounted atop a stone staircase, is magnificent.

Against them are the wicked Kruelboyz, a new faction in what Games Workshop calls “Orruks”. If anything, these are even better than the Stormcast. Their snarling, sinister shapes are a throwback to the old-school orcs of more traditional fantasy. But they’re still bristling with the detail and movement we’ve come to expect. Their companion hobgrotz are the only weak item in the box, odd-looking little goblinoids with weird proportions.

Beneath the figures is a huge hardback rulebook. This looks very daunting until you realize that the vast majority of it is a mixture of lore, art, and stunning photos of painted figures. The core rules of play are about 40 pages, punctuated with sidebars and diagrams and examples. There are more pages of rules on how to pick armies and set up battles, but they can be ignored for your first few games.

It’s important to note that building and painting these kinds of models is a time-consuming task. This isn’t a box you can just break open and play. But that’s to be expected since Age of Sigmar is more of a hobby unto itself than a game to add to your collection.

Age of Sigmar: Dominion Rules and How to Play

If you’ve played a miniatures wargame before, particularly a Games Workshop one, you’ll find Age of Sigmar: Dominion follows a familiar rhythm. You dice off to see who goes first each turn. Units then move, measured on the table with a tape measure. They can run for extra distance or retreat to leave combat but doing so disallows them from an extra charge move to get into melee.

Units with missile weapons can then fire, and units in melee can then attack, with players taking alternating activations to decide what order fights get resolved in. You roll dice to see if models hit, to see if they cause a wound and then to see if their armor protects them, all against single numbers printed on the units’ "warscroll" alongside its special abilities.

Basically, you roll a lot of dice, and they often rule the day. There’s an even more critical roll following combat where you add the number of slain models to the dice to see if the unit takes additional casualties from fleeing. It’s a similar story for magic, which involves rolling dice to cast spells and more dice if your opponent tries to counter. Spells are powerful so these can be critical, although the limited number of counter chances means you have to choose your moments with care.

And this is where Age of Sigmar begins to become more than just a lot of random roll-offs to see who wins. There’s a broad sense of rock, paper, scissors about the units in the game, where particular types do better against some enemies than others. You don’t really want your elite Stormcast Annihilators stuck in a grinding fight against Orruk Gutrippaz, for example. Especially not when the latter have poison weapons that can bypass their sturdy armour.

So, movement and positioning become crucial. All the more so because leader figures can spend from a pool of command points each turn to buy cool abilities like resurrecting dead models or buffing units in attack and defense. But these can only be used on figures within a certain range of the leader. Good use of these commands is important for victory.

Leaders and heroes are powerhouses compared to rank-and-file units, sometimes to an almost ridiculous degree. The Stormcast leader, Yndestra, costs almost twice as much to add to your army as any of the other Stormcast units in the box. And with good reason: in addition to her flurry of ranged and melee attacks, she has a raft of special abilities. Nearby friendly units, for example, not only don’t flee but can re-add slain models.

Again, positioning and timing is critical if you want to make best use of these powers. The Kruelboyz equivalent leader is mounted on a huge monster, and monsters have gotten a big boost in this edition. Now they have access to abilities like smashing terrain or terrifying enemy units into inactivity with a furious roar.

However cool the "Great Gnashtoof" is to play with, it can’t hold a candle to Yndestra. Indeed, more broadly, the Kruelboyz in the box struggle to keep up with their Stormcast opponents. And when you break it down, it’s not hard to see why: in the game's points system used to ensure two forces are roughly balanced, the included Stormcast models are worth almost a third more than the Orruks.

As a result, battles fought solely with the Dominion box contents will favor the Stormcast unless you take some of the models out. This might seem odd until you remember that this isn’t supposed to be a stand-alone game. It’s an introductory set for the wider Age of Sigmar universe. Based on these foundations, it’ll be fascinating to see how Games Workshop redevelops other existing factions with these new rules.

Want more like this? Check out our roundup of tabletop game alternatives to Warhammer.

Where to Buy

Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Dominion has a list price of $199.99 and can be purchased at the following retailers.