The area which has been removed from the board is substantial 816 sq inches (23.6%) but it’s the area where books and models and dice rest.

This is probably not as much terrain as Wes would want down on the table. I was just getting a feel for how much would make it start feeling crowded once a 2000 pts army was down on it. Probably room for another couple buildings before things start actually get tight.

Derek Review
We’ve had a chance to play a few games on the 60″ x 44 board size now. The first impression is that the space removed around the edge is the area which typically is full of dice and rule books or phones. So it shouldn’t have much of an impact on how the game is played.
My assessment is that’s both true and not true. I’ve played thousand sons and tzeentch deamons. When the battle is played head on, i.e. without deep striking a high model count unit. The new board size doesn’t really impact play very much, especially since “No Mans Land” between the armies at deployment is more or less the same as it has been in previous editions. The first turn plays out is mostly the same. There are some Briefings (Missions) which are going to have you closer together than 24″ to start the game but these existed in the 8th edition.
However, in our last game I took a unit of 30 tzaangors and there was just no way to get them all down in the backline. It was super easy to block them out because of the footprint required to put them down. It would have been much harder to block all the space that would have been there on a 4′ x 6′ board.

20 Tzaangor Deep Strike, You can see this is getting a little tight but if those tape lines weren’t there I’d have plenty of room to maneuver.

I find that this is a double edged sword, because it definitely creates a reason to use terminator squads. Wes took 6 terminators and he could easily fit them down on my side of the table. Elite deep strikers are going to be way more prevalent in the new edition. I’ll be thinking hard about if it’s viable to try and deepstrike a 30 bird squad in our next few games.
The biggest annoyance for me is in trying to figure out how to mark out deployment because now it’s not 12″ from the edge it’s 12″ from the middle of the board so I’ve got to get used to making a 10″ measure from the edge or 18″ if your playing long ways.
I don’t think we’ll be giving up our 4′ x 6′ battle mats anytime soon. Especially considering since I last was a big time player of this game the scale moved to 32mm instead of 28mm which meant that we already had models get ~20% bigger in how much room they take up on the table. I’ll be curious to see what shakes out at the local game store and big time tournaments after Covid calms down so we can get back to gatherings.

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