Well this is confusing.
I’ve toyed with taking up Warhammer on and off for years, but now it all seems to be… gone? Or just different? Or both?
The big event over the last year or so in the Warhammer Universe has been ‘The End Times’ and apparently it really did all end. The hefty rulebook, the square bases, ranks and formations, non-trademarked names, the world itself: all gone.
In there place we have a four page rulebook, round bases and skirmish rules, Ogors, Orruks, Aelfs, and Steamhead Duardin inhabiting nine new realms and belonging to some new Order.
The starter set comes with a bunch of Sigmar’s pals, intent on taking the fight to the ninth realm of Chaos, who wouldn’t look out of place in a chapter of 40k marines.
From a business point of view this makes sense, something like 60% of GW’s income comes from Space Marines. If no-one’s buying WF let’s get a little Space Marine in there and see how they like it, but any notion of a game system seems to have gone out the window. Or they’ve stripped it down to all you need. It’s hard to tell: no points limits, no selection constraints, special rules based on player moustache size and talking to your miniatures…
As mad as it seems I’m still keen to try it, I imagine you’ll very quickly identify who’s in it to have fun and who’s in it to break/cheat the (lack of a) system. It feels odd that this coincides with Total War: Warhammer which is very much rooted in the Old World but, again, it makes sense to base the game on the established world.
Will I actually play this? I don’t know. I spend enough on board games that I don’t get to play, not sure I can afford to buy and paint a bunch of minis I won’t use either but I’ll keep an eye. Some of the new sculpts are quite cool so I’ll perhaps see how some of the other races turn out (though I doubt I will ever call them anything other than Orcs, Elves, Dwarves…)