How do you remember/use all the rules?

[Helias_Tancred]

I have been finding that the more games of 9th I play I retain more active memory of all the stratagems and certain moves available to my BA army. It comes down to how you learn best, for me its seeing and handling the cards, reading over the entries for all the other stuff each game, etc. In college I used flash cards for a few tough classes, and I've considered doing the same for 9th ed 40k.

[Vermintide]

I've always re-formatted the rules information into a more convenient and readily accessible version. In the old days, it'd be as easy as making a spreadsheet with your stat-lines and special rules, but most of the codexes had a summary page you'd reference everything on, so you didn't even need to go out of your way. The books themselves were much more functional as tools to play the game with.

 

Nowadays it's an arcane art all of its own, where I'm essentially typing up my own mini-codex. The front page is the army special rules, a summary of unit abilities which I've essentially converted back into the old universal special rules, and then there's another couple of pages of condensed datasheets where I've also put a bullet point list of the useful stratagems for each one. If I wanted something similar to the datacards, I'd probably just photocopy the codex pages and cut them out.

 

Part of this is just being older, and having done things in life which have left my memory considerably less precise, shall we say. But I also have a feeling GW doesn't even try make the book layout functional any more, because they know we'll just be using BattleScribe or the app anyway. Selling cards on top is just a convenient way to make money on the solution to that problem IMO.