Games worth discovering

Warhammer ( Video Games ) Season 1 Episode 9

3K View2025-06-1423 games listed

Warhammer (formerly Warhammer Fantasy Battle or just Warhammer Fantasy) is a tabletop miniature wargame with a medieval fantasy theme.

The game was created by Bryan Ansell, Richard Halliwell, and Rick Priestley, and first published by the Games Workshop company in 1983.

As in other miniature wargames, players use miniature models (minis) to represent warriors.

The playing field is a model battlefield comprising models of buildings, trees, hills, and other terrain features.

Players take turns moving their model warriors across the playing field and simulate a battle.

The outcomes of fights between the models are determined by a combination of dice rolls and simple arithmetic.

Though the gameplay is mostly based on medieval warfare, it incorporates fantasy elements such as wizards, dragons, and magical spells.

Warhammer was the first commercial miniature wargame designed to use proprietary models.

Prior to this, miniature wargames rulesets were designed to use generic models that could be bought from any manufacturer.

The first edition rulebook for Warhammer was released in 1983, and the line was supported for thirty years by model releases, supplementary rulebooks, and new editions of the core rules.

The eighth edition of the core rules was released on 10 July 2010.

The game is no longer supported by Games Workshop, and the last supplementary rulebook was released in 2015.

It was replaced later that year by Warhammer Age of Sigmar, which uses the models created for the Warhammer line in a new setting and game system.

In 2024, Warhammer Fantasy was brought back in a reboot known as Warhammer The Old World, which brings a new version of the old rules and updated models.

The Warhammer setting is inspired by the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock.

The fictional background for the game was developed in rulebooks, White Dwarf magazine, Inferno! magazine, and more than 150 novels set in the Warhammer universe.

Many of these novels are still in print under the Warhammer Chronicles imprint.

Warhammer is a tabletop wargame where two or more players compete against each other with "armies" of 25 mm – 250 mm tall heroic miniatures.

The rules of the game have been published in a series of books which describe how to move miniatures around the game surface and simulate combat in a "balanced and fair" manner.

Games may be played on any appropriate surface, although the standard is a 6 by 4 ft (1.8 by 1.2 m) tabletop decorated with model scenery in scale with the miniatures.

Any individual miniature or group of similar miniatures in the game is called a "unit".

The core game rules are supplied in a single book, with supplemental Warhammer Armies texts giving guidelines and background for army-specific rules.

Movement of units about the playing surface is generally measured in inches, and units' combat performance is dictated randomly by either the roll of a 6-sided die (a 'D6') or a 6-sided 'scatter' die.

The latter is often used to generate direction, commonly alongside an 'artillery' die, for cannons, stone-throwers, and other artillery.

Each unit and option within the game is assigned a point value for balancing purposes.

A game will commonly have armies of 750 to 3,000 points, although smaller and larger values are possible.