Warhammer Community showcases Armageddon miniatures ahead of June 20 launch

Warhammer Community’s Armageddon preview landed like a painter’s bench cleared for inspection, with 61 brand new Space Marines and Orks set to hit shelves on Saturday 20 June 2026. The point is not just to tease a launch box for the new edition of Warhammer 40,000, but to show how far the same kits can go once different hands, and different tastes, get involved.

The box itself is loaded for a full hobby weekend. Alongside the miniatures, Armageddon includes a Core Rules booklet, Armageddon: Operation Imperator lore book, Chapter Approved 2026-27 Mission Deck, Dominatus Narrative Campaign Deck, datasheet cards and a transfer sheet. The setting gives the paint jobs extra bite too: the Orks have swollen in the wake of Ghazghkull Thraka’s return to Armageddon, while the Space Marines answer with Operation Imperator.

That is where the community gallery does its real work. Rather than acting like a tutorial, it hands the new sculpts to a roster of painters who each pull them in a different direction: Jon Gómez, Jon Ninas, José David González Ramos, Darcy Bono, Juan Sanz, Lukas Kuhn, Marko Miladinović, Patrick Brampton, Sam Lenz, Thibaut Rahm, Vincenzo Celeste and Virginia Rosenberg. The standouts include a Blood Angels Chaplain and a Weirdboy crackling with psychic energy, two models that make the case for Armageddon as a launch built to be painted, not just played.

The most useful takeaway for anyone planning a force of their own is buried in the Ork treatment. Warhammer’s ’Eavy Metal team said the new Ork skin tones were painted slightly more naturalistically than before, with more variation, which is an easy idea to steal even if the rest of the army stays close to the classic green. That subtle shift turns a mob into a field of individual faces instead of one flat block of colour, and it gives weathering and basing more room to breathe.

Warhammer staff leaned into the same message earlier in June, showing off their own Armageddon paint jobs, including a Ravenwing Land Speeder, two Warbosses and an Ancient. The mix of vehicles, named characters and rank-and-file heroes underlines what the release is meant to be: a community moment as much as a product drop. Even the Chaplain choice taps into old Warhammer muscle memory, from the first Chaplains in White Dwarf Issue 108 in late 1988 to Chaplain Lemartes arriving in 1998 as the first Blood Angels Chaplain on a jump pack. By the time Saturday comes, the box will already have done the important job, turning a launch into a gallery of possibilities.