Three years ago Pete and I split a Leviathan box on his kitchen table. £150 between us, seventy-five quid each, for what was frankly an absurd amount of plastic. The actual splitting took about an hour, because we kept arguing over the Ultramarines Captain, who is one model and cannot be sawn down the middle. I won him in the end. He’s still grey. Splitting the launch box is the oldest money-saving move in the hobby, and the Armageddon box going up for pre-order today at $295 is about to send a lot of people back to that same kitchen-table calculation.
The number doing the rounds is $842. That’s how much Spikey Bits reckons you “save” buying the box instead of the contents separately, off a total sticker value of about $1,137. It’s a big, satisfying figure and it gets quoted everywhere on pre-order day. I want to poke at it a bit, because I’ve done the split-the-box dance enough times to know the savings number is always a little bit of a fairy tale.
What’s actually in the Armageddon box
Sixty-one miniatures. Twenty-three Space Marines, thirty-eight Orks, across twelve new push-fit kits. On the Marine side that’s a Captain with a relic shield, a Librarian, a jump-pack Chaplain, an Ancient, ten Intercessors, five Vanguard Veterans, three Eradicators with heavy bolters, and a Land Speeder. The Orks bring a Warboss, a Bigboss, a Bannernob, a Painboy with his Grot, a Weirdboy, twenty Boyz, ten Gretchin, a Wartrakk, and the new Big Mek Dakkarig walker. Then the books: the Operation Imperator lore book, the core rules, a narrative campaign deck, a mission deck, datasheet cards, a transfer sheet. GW says it’s roughly 1,600 points, with the Orks coming in around 800.
So it’s a lot. Nobody’s arguing it isn’t a lot. The question is what the lot is worth, and that’s where the $1,137 starts wobbling.
The Armageddon box and the $842 you’re “saving”
Here’s how that tally gets built. Each character gets valued at about $43.50, because that’s what a clamshell character costs GW these days. There are eight-ish characters in the box. So right away, before a single troop, the math is leaning on roughly $350 of “value” that exists only because GW prices single models like they’re made of saffron. The twenty Boyz get counted at $120. The Dakkarig gets pegged at $73.50 off a comparable kit. The lore book at $60, the decks at $35 each.
The trouble is that half of these things aren’t sold separately. The Captain with the relic shield, the new Dakkarig, the Operation Imperator book, the specific Land Speeder configuration, you cannot currently walk into a store and buy them on their own at those prices. The “value” assigned to them is a guess based on what GW would probably charge if they ever released them solo, which is not the same as money you’d otherwise spend. Several of those line items are prices that don’t exist anywhere yet.
And the character pricing is doing an enormous amount of the heavy lifting. Strip the box down to what you’d genuinely have bought anyway, a couple of troop boxes, a vehicle, the rules, and the honest comparison shrinks a long way from $1,137. The box is decent value. The savings figure, though, is marketing arithmetic: the gap between $295 and $1,137 is mostly GW’s own single-model pricing quoted back at you as a discount.
Do the boring version instead. Sixty-one models for $295 is about $4.80 a model. A ten-Boyz box runs you $60, which is $6 a body. So even throwing the books and cards in the bin, the box comes out cheaper per model than buying the plastic piecemeal. That comparison is dull and it holds up, which is more than the $842 one manages.
For the genuinely honest version, price up only the things you’d have bought regardless of the box. Ten Intercessors is about $65. The Eradicators another $60. The Land Speeder $60. Say two of the characters are ones you’d actually field, at $43.50 each. Add the core rules you need anyway. You’re already somewhere past $300 of plastic and paper you had a real reason to own, against a $295 sticker, and everything after that, the second pile of characters, the Gretchin nobody asked for, the campaign book, is gravy. Even counting only what you’d have bought on purpose, the total creeps past the box price.
Launch boxes used to be cheaper, and smaller
I keep a slightly grim mental ledger of what these boxes cost. Dark Imperium in 2017 was about £95. Indomitus in 2020 was £125. Leviathan, the one on Pete’s kitchen table, was £150 in 2023. Armageddon is £195, or $295 if you’re in the States. That’s a climb of a hundred quid in nine years, roughly the span I’ve been in my current job.
The detail that actually stopped me, though: Indomitus had sixty-one miniatures. Exactly the same count as Armageddon. Six years apart, same number of models in the box, and the price has gone up by seventy pounds. If you wanted a clean, depressing illustration of GW’s pricing trajectory, there it is.
Except it isn’t quite that clean, and I should be fair. Indomitus was mostly rank and file, a big lump of Necron Warriors and a squad of Marines, with a hardback rulebook. Armageddon is stuffed with characters, eight of them, several brand new sculpts, plus a fat narrative book and two card decks. The mix has moved upmarket. A box full of multipart characters genuinely costs more to design and tool than a box full of repeated Warrior bodies, so part of that £70 buys you real extra plastic. I still think the trend is ugly. I just can’t pretend the two boxes are like for like.
One thing the dollar and pound prices hide: if you’re reading this in Australia, the box is $545 of your dollars, and in Canada it’s $360. The Australian figure in particular explains why the grey importers and the secondary market do such brisk trade down there. GW’s regional pricing has never tracked exchange rates in a way a normal person can follow, and a launch box is where the gap stings most, because it’s the one purchase a lapsed player or a total newcomer actually stops and reads the sticker on.
You can’t split a character in half
Back to the kitchen table. The launch box has always been the cheapest door into 40K because of the split. Two people, one takes each army, everyone pays half. The whole history of these starter sets is really a history of mates halving the cost, going back to the 1993 box that started the Blood-Angels-versus-Orks tradition GW is leaning on again here.
Armageddon splits fine on paper. Marines to one player, Orks to the other, $147.50 each. Lovely. The catch is the same one Pete and I hit with that Ultramarines Captain. The value in this box is concentrated in the characters and the singletons, and you only get one of each. If you and your mate both want the Dakkarig, or you both play Marines and nobody actually wants the Ork half, the clean fifty-fifty falls apart. One of you ends up with the exciting new walker and one of you ends up with a Land Speeder and a vague sense of having lost a negotiation.
And the boring truth underneath the split is eBay. Every launch box, within about a fortnight, the listings appear: “Leviathan, Tyranids half, NoS, built not painted.” People buy the box, keep the army they want, and sell the other half to claw back maybe a third of the cost. It works. It’s how a lot of people actually afford these things. It also means the genuine cost of “your” half is lower than the headline, and the real number is harder to pin down than either $295 or $842. If you want the deep version of why none of this is as simple as a sticker price, our breakdown of what a single kit costs GW to make is a decent rabbit hole.
If $295 is just too much full stop, there’s a decent chance GW does what it always does and carves the big box into smaller, cheaper starter sets a few months down the line, the way Leviathan turned into the Introductory, Starter and Ultimate sets. Those drop the lore book and most of the characters, and the per-model entry price falls to something a teenager with a paper round can almost reach. That option exists if you can wait.
So is it worth it. For a new player with a friend, it’s still the best value entry into the game there’s been in a while, and I’d point anyone starting fresh straight at it. For an existing Marine or Ork player it’s murkier, because you’re paying full freight for an army you half-own already, and the new sculpts are the only real pull.
If you’ve got someone to split it with and one of you genuinely wants the green side, this is the cheapest 1,600 points you’ll buy all edition. Without that, you’re paying $295 for the half you wanted and a lore book, and you’ll be listing the other half on eBay by August.
