180mm by 250mm. That’s the new 11th edition codex. The one on my shelf is 220mm by 285mm, and I only know that because I went and found a tape measure instead of finishing the Cadian squad I’d sat down to paint.
Games Workshop put the full contents page of Codex: Orks online this week, which is a genuinely useful thing to do and something they hardly ever bother with. Lore of the Orks starts on page 14. Collecting Orks starts on page 102. Everything between those two is background material. That’s 88 pages.
The claim in the article is that the lore section has gone “from about 40 pages in 2024 to nearly 100 in 2026.” Eighty-eight is nearly 100 if you’re being generous. It’s also nearly 100 if you’re counting the fourteen-page collecting guide as lore, which I don’t think you should. That section is four themed collections at two pages each, a painting spread, and a couple of pages on battlefields.
The page got smaller while the section got bigger
An old codex page is 62,700 square millimetres. A new one is 45,000. The new page holds about 72 percent of what the old one held, before you account for margins, so those 88 pages come out somewhere around 63 pages at the size I’m used to.
Forty to sixty-three. That’s a real increase, roughly half again as much lore. “Over 50% more background” reads like a cereal box, so I do understand why the marketing went with the bigger pair of numbers.
So yeah. Eighty-eight pages. Which is a lot, genuinely. I keep going back and forth on whether the shrink actually matters. Probably it doesn’t? If the body text stayed the same size you lose about a quarter of the words. If they’ve dropped it a point, which they might have done, you lose nothing at all and the book just fits in a bag better. I can’t tell that from a photograph of a contents page and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
The physical thing is a softback in a slipcase now, the same treatment as the 500 Worlds campaign books. There’s a hardback Collector’s Edition if you want one. I saw the 500 Worlds books on the shelf at my local store back in spring and picked one up expecting it to feel cheap, and it doesn’t, the slipcase does most of the work of making it feel like an object. It’s the Toblerone approach to book design. The old one’s still on my shelf, so I did stand them side by side, and the gap is about four centimetres across and three and a half down.
Forty-six pages of unit entries
The section called Forces of the Orks runs from page 56 to page 101. Forty-six pages, and it’s a bestiary, meaning every unit in the range gets its own written entry with a couple of hundred words behind it.
GW previewed one of the spreads. Hunta Rigs and Kill Rigs, two paragraphs each, describing what a Butcha Boy gunner does and why the Wurrboy strapped to the top of a Kill Rig gives everyone around him headaches. That’s the format. It’s also the format 3rd and 4th edition codexes used, back when a unit’s background sat on the same spread as its rules.
The Kill Rig datasheet gives you a Wurrtower and a ten-inch move. The entry beside it adds that the Wurrboy strapped up there is half-blind and gibbering, pointing at monstrous quarry, and that the Beast Snaggas riding with him treat him as a danger-loving loon who happens to find the good prey. Same kit, same points cost. I’ve bought models off the back of a paragraph like that more than once, which GW is obviously aware of.
The contents page breaks the rest of it down properly. Six pages on what an Ork is and how Gork and Mork work, including a page on Ork glyphs. Twenty-two pages of warzones. Fourteen pages on the clans, two apiece for Goffs, Evil Sunz, Bad Moons, Deathskulls, Snakebites, Blood Axes and Freebooterz. Then the bestiary.
Something else drops out of that contents page if you keep reading down the right-hand column. The rules start on 116. Army rules get two pages, detachments run 122 to 137, and the datasheets go from Ghazghkull on 138 to the Wazbom Blastajet on 175. That’s about sixty pages of rules against 88 of background, and the background wins before you’ve even counted the collecting guide. I’ve got 10th edition codexes on the shelf where the split runs heavily the opposite way, and I had to go and check two of them because I didn’t believe the ratio I was looking at.
Two pages per clan isn’t very much. Goffs and Evil Sunz will be fine, they’re the ones every Ork player can already describe from memory. I’m more curious about Snakebites and Freebooterz, which have spent most of my time in the hobby getting a paragraph and a suggested colour scheme. Snakebites have had a strange decade of it, going from a running joke about backward Orks who ride squigs to an actual pillar of the range now that Beast Snaggas exist. Page 50, apparently.
The warzone section is the part I keep looking at. Armageddon: War Horde. Octarius: Might Makes Right. Plains of Anthrand: Speedwaaagh. Ryza: Mekwaaagh. Syph: Snagga Stampede. Alaric Prime: Dread Mobs. Every warzone in the lore section is named after a detachment you can build. The background and the army building are the same document now. I’ve decided I like it, after two days of assuming I wouldn’t.
The one I left on the roof of the car
I’ve been buying these books since 5th edition. The Codex: Space Marines I started with came out in 2008, which is eight years before my daughter was born and about four house moves ago, and I don’t have it anymore because of something entirely my own fault.
I put it on the roof of the car outside the store while I dug for my keys, and then I drove home. Found it about a week later, in the hedge at the end of the road, having been rained on for six days. The pages had swollen and fused into a sort of brick. And I kept using it. For two more years I used that book, prising the Assault Squad entry apart with a thumbnail every time someone asked what my Imperial Fists could do, because £20 was £20 and I’d already spent that month’s hobby money on a Land Raider I still haven’t finished painting.
That’s the thing about codexes that the page-count argument misses a bit. They’re objects you own for years. Which is why GW telling everyone in 2023 that their obsolete 9th edition books were “still bursting with the lore, history, and short stories that define each faction” landed as badly as it did. The 10th edition books that followed that statement shipped with about forty pages of background in them.
What it means for the ones after this
Codex: Orks is the first 11th edition codex out of the gate, so it’s the template. If the release schedule holds the way I think it will, Marines are next and Custodes are somewhere in late 2026, and both of those books will presumably follow this structure. Eighty-odd pages of background, a bestiary in the middle, a collecting guide, and then the rules.
The Marine book is where the format gets its real test, because Codex: Space Marines has to cover a faction with a thousand chapters and a book’s worth of history behind each one. Forty pages of that was always going to read thin. Eighty-eight might be enough room to give the Imperial Fists something past a colour swatch and a line about Rogal Dorn being stubborn, though I’ve been hoping for that since roughly 2011 and I know better by now.
That’s good news for anyone who reads these things more than they play. I’m mostly that person now. My gaming has dropped to maybe a game a fortnight in the garage with Pete, who has painted two full armies in the time it’s taken me to base a squad, and a fair bit of my 40K consumption is just reading. A codex with 88 pages of background in it is a better product for me than a codex with 40, even if I never field a single Ork.
There’s a version of this I’m less happy about, which is the digital code in the back. It unlocks the rules on the app and then keeps adding things across the edition, including what GW describes as new lore excerpts. Lore that lives in an app goes away when the app changes, and I’ve watched that happen to enough rules content to be twitchy about it. Though if the alternative is no extra lore at all, I’ll take the app…
Whether the Gretchin entry is any good is the actual test, for me. The preview mentions the lore section covers “the pitiable life of the humble Gretchin,” and Grots are the unit where you can tell instantly whether the writer cared. What I want is the bit where a Runtherd counts his mob before a battle and again after it, and the number going down isn’t a problem, it’s just Tuesday. Forty-six pages is enough room for that. Ghazghkull’s entry opens the datasheet section on page 138 and I’d bet the man himself gets a decent write-up regardless, because he always does.
Pre-orders go up Saturday. I don’t play Orks, and I’m going to buy it anyway.
