The Best GW Games You’ve Never Heard Of
Everyone knows about Warhammer 40K and Age of Sigmar. But did you forget about these amazing GW Games from the days of yore?
Games Workshop makes a bunch of games. Most people know them for iconic Warhammer 40,000 or the slightly less known Age of Sigmar. Old time fans, or Total War players know them for Warhammer Fantasy Battles. The real nerds know them for The Lord Of The Rings Strategy Battle game. If you are into board games you might know them for Heroquest or Talisman. Yeah, it turns out GW makes just a ton of games. Over the years many of them have been forgotten. Some deservedly so. But some of these games real lost gems. So today lets take a look at the five best GW games you’ve probably never heard of, with a focus on tabletop games.
Warmaster
Do you like Warhammer Fantasy but think the scale isn’t grand enough? Then Warmaster is the game for you. Warmaster was a tabletop battle game set in the same universe as Warhammer Fantasy Battles. It moved the game from the standard 28 mm scale and a 10 mm scale allowing for much larger scale battlers. Due to this you could easily buy a whole army in a single box!
The game was innovative and tried a lot of new things, drawing from 10 mm historical games. It had some amazing rules in it. My personal favorite was the units of Slayers (Dwarves who have sworn to die a glorious death) would cost their owner victory points if they were still alive at the end of the game. Overall it was a great game with a strong fan base and was officaly supported from 2000 till around 2013. It was in effect the WFB version of Epic, but maybe even better.
Man O’War
Speaking of WFB versions of 40K side games, we have Man O’ War. Man O’ War is effectively the Fantasy version of Battlefleet Gothic, the epic and amazing 40K game of space combat. Or its more fair to say that Gothic is the 40K version of Man O’ War, since the fantasy game came first by about 6 years. In it players amass fleets and battle it out on the high seas. The game tried a lot of news things and was pretty popular.
It was however around for a pretty short time, only being supported for about 5 years. There are persistent rumors that it went out of stock more due to the model molds wearing out or getting lost, rather than bad sales but GW has never officially said anything about it. The game was praised for the varied ship/fleet designers and its rules. Sadly, while Battlefleet Gothic remains popular, due in no small part to getting a few video games, Man O’War is largely forgotten.
Warhammer Historicals
GW is known today as a maker of fantasy and sci-fi games. However that wasn’t always the case. For a time they dipped their toes into the popular in historical-game genre. This was done with Warhammer Historicals. Not a single game per se, but a group within GW that produced historical games. The most famous, and likely best was Warhammer Ancient Battles. All of the historical games were based on existing GW games and rules. Mostly on WFB, with some minor sprinkling in elements of 40K. Warmaster Ancients as the name implies was based on the Warmaster rules.
The original Warhammer Ancient Battles focused on the early Roman Empire and the foes they fought. A number of supplements were released in the following years. Eventually rules and army lists could be found covering most periods between the Trojan War and the 17th Century, with the English Civil War being one of the later periods covered. Many people consider the Historicals to be some of, if not the best rules GW has put out. This might have to do with the rather unique fact that GW didn’t put out any real models for the games, something that eventually lead to its downfall.
War Of The Ring
You’ve probably heard of the The Lord of The Rings Strategy Battle Game. Despite never being as popular as the other big GW games its stuck around for decades. Much less well known is the spin off War of The Ring. This was a rule set to take LoTR into bigger games. Where as the Strategy Battle Game was a small scale skirmish game, War of the Ring was a real battle sized wargame. It was on the same scale as WFB or 40K and used the same models as the main LoTR game.
The rules for the game were some of the most innovative GW was using at the time and were a great way to represent a ranked up battle game. By using movement trays to convert round based SBG models into WoTR units the game allowed people to swap collections with ease. The movement trays also tied into the rules in a way that made it much more elegant that WFB.
WotR might just be the best set of rules GW has ever written for a game of this scale. Sadly there were a few of small, yet very impact balance issues with the game. Some proper support could have seen it go a long way, but the game never got more than a core book and one small FAQ and died a quiet death.
Battle Masters
Battle Masters is one of those games that really blurs the line between board game and Table Top game. It’s technically a boxed board game, but also came a ton of models, that often got used for WFB. In many ways its similar to something like modern Battletech with can be played on a pre-provided hexmap. The game also plays much more like a table top wargame, with players setting up terrain and a map and then deploying armies. While the game wasn’t super deep, it was incredibly forward thinking for a 1992 game co-made by Milton-Bradly and GW.
Because it was aimed at kids and made my Milton-Bradly a lot of people don’t realize this was a GW game, but it was in fact. More than one WFB or other GW game player got their start with Battle Masters as a kid. Because of this its legacy in undeniable.
Let us know what your favorite forgotten game is, down in the comments!
