Warhammer 40k Combat Patrol Magazine Subscription Review

I subscribed to the Warhammer 40,000: Combat Patrol partwork, so this is a review from the pile of magazines on my desk rather than a spec sheet. The UK collection ran to 90 issues and finished in June 2026, which means this is no longer a guess about how it would turn out - it is the finished article, and we can put a number on exactly what the subscription was worth.

The short answer

Was it worth subscribing? Yes, decisively, if you wanted the armies. Across the 89 issues we hold a retail comparison for, the collection cost £879.11 against £1,893.20 of retail prices for the same contents - a saving of £1,014.09, or 53.6%. On the miniature issues alone the gap is wider still: 59.2% off.

Can you still subscribe? Not to the UK run - it completed in June 2026. What is left is the back-issue market, and that is genuinely worth working: individual issues from specialist retailers are still one of the cheapest ways to buy specific 40k kits. Skip to buying it now for how.

Where does it go wrong? The paint and accessory issues, and only those. 14 of the 15 cost more than their contents were worth at retail.

What is it?

Combat Patrol was a subscription magazine from Hachette Partworks, produced with Games Workshop, and it ran for 90 issues in the UK at a £9.99 cover price. Over the run it built nine complete Combat Patrol armies - Space Marines, Tyranids, Aeldari, Chaos Space Marines, Orks, Leagues of Votann, Genestealer Cults, Astra Militarum and World Eaters - plus, on most factions, an extra unit with its own datasheet that you do not get in the boxed Combat Patrol. A premium tier added bigger kits like the Brutalis Dreadnought and Rogal Dorn Battle Tank.

What actually arrives

It didn't dribble in one issue at a time. Four magazines shipped in a batch every month, which is a much nicer rhythm - you get a proper stack of models to work through rather than a single sprue and a long wait.

Each issue is more than a bag of plastic:

• The miniatures - the reason you're here, and the bulk of the value.
• Paint guides - step-by-step colour schemes for the models in that issue, which is genuinely handy if you're new and don't know where to start.
• Terrain cutouts - card scenery to fight over.
• Skirmish battle briefs - short scenarios to play with what you've built so far. These are a nice touch and mean you're playing games early, not just stacking grey plastic.

The real reason to subscribe: the price

Here's the honest headline - there just wasn't a cheaper way to get plastic into your collection. Almost every issue was a serious discount on the retail price of the models inside. And the clever part is the layering: a boxed Combat Patrol is already discounted against the RRP of the units it contains, and the magazine run undercut even the boxes. A discount on a discount.

The whole run, in numbers

We keep the collection's issue-by-issue record as a dataset - which issue held which kit, what the issue cost, and what those models retailed for at the time - so the comparison is arithmetic rather than impression. Contents compiled by the Bolter and Chainsword community; the prices and savings below are our own working from that record, against retail prices as they stood during the run.

Some individual issues are startling. The launch issue carried a Terminator Captain and a Winged Prime - £53.50 of models - for £2.99. Aeldari Windriders across issues 27-29 saved around £44 against the £37-per-three retail. The Brutalis Dreadnought and Hive Tyrant premium set was £90 of models for £36. Ordinary infantry squads and characters sat somewhere between £16 and £24 under the box.

Where it loses money

The exception - and it matters for a paint site - is the paint and accessory issues. Fourteen of the fifteen cost more than their contents were worth: a £9.99 cover price for a few pounds of paint or a tool. Over the run that is £45.65 handed back, and it is the one part of the collection you were better off buying elsewhere (more on that below).

That is worth keeping in proportion. Losing £45.65 to gain £1,059.74 is not a flaw in the deal; it is the price of not having to think about it.

You don't need to subscribe

Here's the part that makes it almost silly, and it is the only route left now the run has ended: back issues turn up on the usual gaming retailers - Wayland Games, Element Games and the like - so you can cherry-pick individual issues without ever having signed up. Once you know a magazine issue contains the exact unit you want, buying a box of, say, Termagants at full RRP is hard to justify when the correct issue is sitting there for around £9.99. Work out which issue holds the kit you're after, grab that single magazine, done. It is a genuinely useful trick for established collectors topping up a unit.

Two ways to find the issue you need:

• From the kit. Any kit or box page on this site that appeared in the collection carries an "It was in the Combat Patrol magazine" panel naming the issue, what it cost and what it saved. Start from the kit you want or the boxed Combat Patrols.
• From the collection. The community-run Bolter and Chainsword summary thread lists every issue and batch, what's in each, the RRP savings and where to pre-order. It's also honest about the exceptions: a few units (Ork patrols, for instance) are spread across so many issues that buying the box from a discount retailer works out cheaper - so check before you commit.

Availability is the catch. Back issues are a stock-clearance market, not a catalogue: what is on a retailer's shelf today is what there is.

Sold-out issues that retailers no longer stock usually surface on eBay - search by the issue number for the unit you're after.

Browse Combat Patrol back issues on eBay→

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Signing up: a bit clunky, but the support saved it

I'll be honest - getting signed up wasn't the smoothest part. If you've never heard of Hachette Partworks (I hadn't), it feels slightly odd handing over card details to a subscription-magazine company you don't know, and the website didn't do a brilliant job of explaining itself or the process.

Two things made it fine in the end:

• You could start from a back issue. You were limited in how far you could jump in - around 10 issues back from the current one - so you weren't forced to begin mid-army or miss the early, best-value issues.
• The phone support is genuinely good. Speaking to a real person cleared up my questions and was massively reassuring when the website left me unsure. If you're on the fence about whether a partwork is legit, a quick call sorts it.

So: expect a slightly dated, not-obvious sign-up flow, but a real human on the other end if you need one. Worth knowing if you are weighing up one of Hachette's other collections - the Warhammer Imperium partwork works the same way.

What you'll need to paint it

As the table above shows, the paints are the one thing in the collection you shouldn't rely on the magazine for. So this is exactly where a little planning pays off. Rather than paying over the odds for the pots the guides name, match the colours to cheaper equivalents from Vallejo or The Army Painter:

• Use the paint matcher to find the closest paint from any brand to the ones the guide lists.
• Not sold on the official scheme? The scheme generator will give you an alternative palette for your army.
• New to painting entirely? Start with the starter kit checklist and how to start painting miniatures.

The catches worth knowing

• It was a stream of models, not a shop. If you only want one specific unit, the back-issue route was always the better one - and now it is the only one.
• The models are the classic Combat Patrol contents - great for a new collector, less exciting if you already own these kits.
• Partwork sprues are sometimes a different build to the retail kit. Treat an issue as the same models rather than the same box.
• The paint issues are poor value. Skip them and source your paints cheaper (see above).

Verdict

For a new or returning player who wanted to build a real army cheaply and pick up the painting and playing along the way, the Combat Patrol partwork was one of the best-value on-ramps into 40k there has been - and the finished run bears that out at 53.6% under retail. The four-a-month cadence, the built-in paint guides and the little battle scenarios made it feel like a course rather than a delivery.

Now the run has closed, the same logic applies one issue at a time. Find the issue that holds the kit you want, buy that, and pair it with a smart paint-buying plan - you will still spend far less than the shelf price to get a painted force on the table.