Well they seem to put out the rules at such a pace I don’t think they actually have the time to get them playtested (other than using a small in-house team), some rules leave me thinking they were never playtested and just “theory hammered” out.

But for new players, there’s no easy way in (even the hardback rulebooks are hard to get (although you can still pay out for an very expensive eBook version). I didn’t get into the new Blood Bowl (that came out before Necromunda) BECAUSE I missed that launch and subsequent “limited” release schedule. I’ve no idea “why” GW decided to do it this way for the specialist games range, but lets face things, GW are not the best rules authors out there and nearly all their games are a bit of a messy, bloated, disjointed system with continual “power creep” for whichever Codex has just been released.

If I had my time again, I would have bought the minis and just stuck with the 90s version of the rules. My mistake was buying the starter set and playing games with others with the new rules (and thus ending up on this rollercoaster). It would have been more difficult finding opponents for the old rules perhaps (but it would have been a lot cheaper and perhaps left me less PO’d as GW’s marketing department and whoever though that “limited” was a good thing and wouldn’t annoy the hell out of the playerbase).

It IS crazy that a game system costs over £500 in rules alone before you’ve even spent a penny on the miniatures, and I don’t think anyone would go near it “if” it was presented that way. But GW do it by dribs and drabs (and has always done so), perhaps things have been accelerated with Necromunda when it came to “codex” releases (15 rulebooks since the launch in 2018) and prices (£30 for a rulebook for an ARMY isn’t that bad when you’re spending a couple of hundred for the figures, but for Necromunda it’s £30 for a box of ten figures…..you’re spending as much on the rules as you are on the figures). They really have seemed to want to “push it to the limits” with Necromunda with just how far they can take things before the playerbase rebels (perhaps testing the way for their more popular game systems). And we’re starting to see similar with Warcry and Kill Team (a rulebook for each faction coming your way, and a “team” being about 10 figures), again you “could” stick with the older rules, but it’s finding the opponents that starts to get trickier (as the majority always wants to play with the latest rules).