Warhammer: The Old World First Impressions: Old School Revival

Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy Battles revival brings a more focused slate of nostalgia and old-school miniatures to the table. Warhammer: The Old World brings back the beloved Warhammer Fantasy setting back to life with deliberately throwback appeal, with the new game resurrecting numerous old models, square bases, and the need for movement trays to push units across the table. But with a costly buy-in, the game seems to be aimed firmly for those who played Warhammer Fantasy during its heyday and have plenty of cash to spare to fuel their nostalgia. And while Warhammer: The Old World’s ruleset removes some of the bloat that plagued its Warhammer Fantasy predecessors, it lacks some of the dynamicity of its sister games Warhammer 40K and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. 

For those not familiar with Warhammer history, Warhammer Fantasy Battles was the original Warhammer game long before Warhammer 40K became the dominant Games Workshop brand. The game featured mostly standard fantasy tropes, with humanity, elves, and dwarves representing the forces of good and orcs, goblins, and skeletons representing the forces of evil and chaos, although decades of novels, lore-focused rulebooks, and other peripheral material helped to give the world both a deep history and plenty of fascinating characters and factions. 

The Warhammer Fantasy Battles game had several editions of rules, but they all had common wargame features such as arranging regiments of units on trays and pushing them across mostly open tables at their opponents. Generally speaking, Warhammer Fantasy emphasized the exploitation of angles and superior numbers, with flanking and maintaining a full line of skirmishers usually resulting in much more damage than a frontal assault. However, it quickly became eclipsed in popularity by Warhammer 40,000, in part because of an lower barrier to entry and the ability to accommodate smaller armies and skirmishes. 

While Warhammer Fantasy had its fans, Games Workshop made the decision to scrap the setting and the game in 2015 and replace it with Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, a new setting featuring some of the same characters but with new rulesets that emphasized a similar style of gameplay to Warhammer 40K. Age of Sigmar allowed for existing Warhammer Fantasy miniatures to be used in new factions, although many were cycled out over time and replaced by newer models (usually made of plastic instead of resin or metal.) As for the setting itself, Games Workshop released a series of novels in 2014 and 2015 that ended with the Warhammer Fantasy world destroyed by the forces of chaos, with only a handful of survivors making it into the new world of Age of Sigmar.

Warhammer: Age of Sigmar stumbled out of the gate but has since become a solid seller for Games Workshop, to the point where even Warhammer Fantasy diehards assumed that it would be the fantasy standard for Warhammer moving forward. However, Warhammer Fantasy didn’t die off entirely. Games Workshop licensed the setting to several video game developers, who published the popular Warhammer: Total War and Vermintide franchises based on characters and factions from the original world instead of the new Age of Sigmar. And the fact remained that Age of Sigmar and Warhammer Fantasy Battle were totally different games with totally different feels to them, not to mention radically different rulesets. And so, in 2019 Games Workshop announced Warhammer: The Old World, a spinoff game that returned players to their original fantasy setting. 

To be clear, Warhammer: The Old World doesn’t “bring back” Warhammer Fantasy as an established world – in Warhammer continuity, it’s still dead and gone, destroyed by the forces of chaos. Warhammer: The Old World is set in the distant past of Warhammer Fantasy, allowing for a literal old school revival and a simplification of the game and setting of sorts. By setting The Old World in the distant past, Games Workshop can focus on a slimmer set of armies to produce new content for and not be beholden to the literal decades of lore that Warhammer Fantasy fans have come to expect. Plus, much of Warhammer: The Old World’s initial launch material is directly recycled from past Warhammer Fantasy content. The two Starter Boxes released for the new game comes with one (in the case of Bretonnia) or two (in the case of the Tomb Kings) brand new miniatures – the rest are sprues from the original Warhammer Fantasy line, but made with plastic instead of resin or metal. 

The rules for Warhammer: The Old World seems familiar to recent versions of Warhammer Fantasy, but slimmed down for ease of play. There’s a dash of throwback rules involved, with a “To Hit” table that’s a major deviation from other Warhammer game and a Break Test rules that factors in every time a unit loses a confrontation. The game’s Formation rules are also a big deviation from other Warhammer games, with units having different speeds based on how their rank and file are arranged. While I’ve never played a game of Warhammer Fantasy (my experience with Warhammer is much more recent), the longtime fans of the game seem at least sated by the publicly available rules previewed by Games Workshop in the weeks leading up to the pre-order date. Unfortunately, my ability to actually play Warhammer: The Old World was limited by the fact that only one Army Box was sent for review, meaning that I couldn’t actually try out a full game prior to release. 

While I couldn’t play Warhammer: The Old World, I was able to pull out and build the dozens of miniatures needed for one of the game’s starter armies. The Tomb Kings box features an epic Necrolith Bone Dragon as its centerpiece miniature, one that took me several hours to build, but was an absolute blast. The rank and file Skeletons were a bit of a throwback, with simpler model design than their Age of Sigmar counterparts. I quite liked the old school feel of the miniatures, although the tiny skeletal joints of the skeletons and uneven feet got a bit tedious after building a few dozen skeletons. Comparing the old and new miniatures in the Starter Set, it was fun to see the change in design philosophy – the older models have rows of weapons and body parts to choose from, while the new models are a hodgepodge of bits and pieces arranged to fit the maximum amount of parts in one place, but allow for greater detail and pieces that fit a bit closer together. 

While it feels like Games Workshop is rolling out the red carpet for Warhammer: The Old World, most of the “new” releases available for pre-order are actually re-releases of older models, some of which have been out of print for quite some time. This isn’t a bad thing per se (let’s face it, even Games Workshop models published in the early 2000s are still a lot of fun to build), but it does serve as a reminder that Warhammer: The Old World won’t have the same support that Warhammer 40K or Warhammer: Age of Sigmar receives. I expect that we’ll see a few new models released alongside a bevy of older releases as each one of the game’s nine armies receives a spotlight over the next couple of years. After that, it’ll be interesting to see how much support the game gets, especially as some of The Old World’s factions directly compete with Age of Sigmar armies that are also in need of a line refresh. 

Warhammer: The Old World looks to be the Warhammer Fantasy game that die-hards have wanted for quite some time with tons of old models now relevant for the first time in a long while. While the game is a spin-off in the vein of Warhammer: The Horus Heresy, there’s still plenty of content for newcomers to dig into assuming that they can handle the high cost of entry that the game requires. This probably isn’t a game for a Warhammer newcomer, but Games Workshop has at least provided a way for fans to dive back into Warhammer Fantasy with room for growth if there’s enough of a playerbase. 

Pre-orders for Warhammer: The Old World are available now. Newcomers are recommended to purchase one of the Launch Boxes along with the Modular Movement Trays for ease of use.