By Owen Duffy - December 11, 2015

In the first part of this series, we spoke to Games Workshop’s co-founder Ian Livingstone about the company’s origins selling roleplaying game books from his west-London flat. You might want to read that post before this one.

The 1970s had been good to Games Workshop. From its humble beginnings selling roleplaying game rule books from a west-London flat, the company had grown rapidly on the back of its best-selling product, the fantasy RPG Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). It had opened its first retail store, its White Dwarf magazine was attracting a growing readership, and its annual Games Day event was drawing thousands of attendees.

But as a new decade approached, the company faced new challenges. Its period as the exclusive European distributor of D&D was coming to an end, and while Games Workshop would gain UK publishing rights for other roleplaying products including the science fiction game Traveller and the Call of Cthulhu horror titles, none matched D&D’s massive popularity.

Co-founders Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson were also exploring new projects, and found huge success with their Fighting Fantasy line of adventure game books. The two eventually left to focus on the series, which would go on to sell over 17m copies worldwide.

Their departure left the company in the hands of Bryan Ansell, the head of Games Workshop’s sister company Citadel Miniatures. Under his ownership, the business would reach new heights of success and profitability, with its Warhammer tabletop battle games becoming one of the biggest and most lucrative properties in the gaming industry.

Today Warhammer is something close to a household name, and while many designers, artists and authors have contributed to its growth over the decades, for most of its life the game’s development has been led by one man.

War stories

Rick Priestley is Warhammer’s co-creator. A child of the 1960s and 70s, he vividly remembers the cultural influences of his youth.

“First you had models and construction toys,” he said.

“It was a pre-electronic time, so things like Airfix and Meccano were ubiquitous in a way that’s hard to understand today. If you walked into any boy’s room you would find model aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling.

“Then of course, there was the Second World War. Our parents’ generation had lived through it, either as adults or as children themselves, so there was a real culture of having toy soldiers and playing with them in a very unstructured form.”

“Space was big in the sixties”

And while the great conflict of his parents’ generation was still fresh in the public consciousness, Priestley and his peers were also captivated by the future – most powerfully by the drama of the unfolding space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

“Space was big in the 60s,” he said.

“People had a much simpler faith in the idea of spacecraft and hard science in those days, and we also all read lots of science fiction. Even if I look at my bookshelf today it’s all Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke. All of these things really sunk in.”

These fascinations – war stories, model-making and space-age speculative fiction – would all eventually combine in Priestley’s work on Warhammer. But his first involvement in tabletop battle games came at a much earlier age.

“I first encountered actual wargames rules in Meccano Magazine,” he said.

“There were similar articles in other places, like the Airfix magazine and Military Modeling, but they all led to this transition from just sticking together plastic Spitfires to having actual, structured rules. If you were interested in models, you became interested in playing games with them.”

Priestley was immediately intrigued. He dove deeper into the wargaming hobby, devouring books on the subject.

“Most of them were written by professional writers or historians who had served in the war,” he said.

“They were in all the libraries, and they covered all sorts of subjects and historical periods: aerial battles, naval battles, ancient warfare, the 18th century, World War Two.”

Some authors had been particularly influential, he said. Donald Featherstone, a physiotherapist who had served in the Royal Armoured Corps, and Brigadier Peter Young, who served in the commandos, published numerous books on wargaming and military history. But the greatest influence on Priestley was the book Battle! Practical Wargaming by Charles Grant, who had authored the Meccano magazine articles that had first hooked him on the hobby.

“He had this style of writing that was very inclusive,” Priestley remembered.

“He explained the rules, but also how the rules had been developed, so it actually provided a very good model for doing it yourself. He’d say: ‘Well, I decided to do it this way, buy you might want to do it like that, and I knew some chaps who did it completely differently.’

“It gave you immediate validation and a kind of licence to alter elements of the game, and in a way it meant that as well as playing, you were designing your own games right from the very start.”

This creative freedom sparked Priestley’s interest, and he began working on rule sets of his own, several of which saw publication. He went on to make a living as a miniatures sculptor, but when he eventually joined Games Workshop’s sister company Citadel Miniatures, it wasn’t in a creative role.

“I actually joined to do mail order,” he said.

“I was putting together orders, packing them, sending them out in the post.

“Everyone did everything back then, it wasn’t a huge company like it is today. So if a load of metal came in for delivery you’d have everyone, including the boss Bryan Ansell, all loading tonnes of the stuff into the office on hand carts.”

Ansell had had a background in miniature manufacture before founding Citadel, and he was keen to boost sales of the company’s metal figures. But as the sister company of a business that focused primarily on RPGs, he faced difficulties.

“Sales of the figures were largely driven by roleplaying,” Priestley said.

“It was huge at the time, but if you were a roleplayer, you tended to buy one miniature at a time. So you’d have your adventurer or your orc, you’d paint it and you’d play with it in a campaign that might last a couple of years.

“That’s fine, but if you’re a company trying to turn a profit, it’s not generating turnover in the same way as a historical wargamer buying 20 or 30 Napoleonic infantrymen to add to a regiment.”

Ansell’s solution was for the company to develop a mass battle game with a fantasy theme, capitalising on the popularity of fantasy fiction such as the Lord of the Rings and Conan novels and appealing to the existing community of fantasy gamers that had grown around D&D.

He initially entrusted the project to Richard Halliwell, an old school friend and writing partner of Priestley’s, but the project soon grew to include Priestley as well.

“Bryan told us: ‘We need a game to sell more toy soldiers, get on with it.’ He’s like that,” Priestley said.

“His role was very top-down. He only laid down a couple of paramaters. He told us the game had to have rules for every model the company made at the time, and that it could only use standard six-sided dice, because every kid had them in their Monopoly sets.

“Richard wrote the initial manuscript, and then I did a lot of the production and development work, so a lot of the game mechanics were down to Richard and I did a lot of the refinement and detail.”

The result of their efforts was Warhammer’s first edition. Published in 1983 as a set of nondescript black and white booklets, it included rules for manoeuvring and fighting with a variety of fantastical creatures and soldiers. But it came with none of the fictional background that’s now synonymous with the Warhammer brand. Instead it was marketed as a “dual system” allowing roleplay gaming groups to fight large battles as part of their ongoing campaigns.

“Quite franky,” Priestley said, “in the early 80s you could have put a turd in a box and it would have sold as long as it had the word ‘roleplaying’ on it.”

Roleplayers would have found several aspects of the game familiar, not least the requirement for an impartial person to act as an umpire, adjudicating on situations that weren’t explicitly covered by the rules. And while the idea of a referee in wargames wasn’t new, future editions of Warhammer would adopt the term “game master” – commonly used in RPGs – to describe them.

Citadel takeover

The game was a key part of Bryan Ansell’s plan to grow Citadel’s business, and its first edition met with an enthusiastic reaction from players. But its development came at a tumultuous time for the company. After acquiring control of Games Workshop, Ansell decided to consolidate both companies in Citadel’s home of Eastwood in Nottinghamshire. The decision didn’t go down well with many of Games Workshop’s existing staff in London.

“It was presented at the time as a merger,” said Priestley, “but really it was a takeover by Citadel.

“We even spoke at the time about changing the name of the company, but there were already about half a dozen Games Workshop stores, and we thought it would have been very expensive to have the signs repainted.

“It was a bit rough on the London staff. Only about half a dozen made the move and the rest decided they didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t a very clean operation, and it was quite acrimonious at the time.”

This reluctance to relocate to Nottinghamshire was understandable. The area was caught up in the bitter dispute between striking coal miners and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, which had led to violent clashes between police and miners across the country. Games Workshop’s staff were frequently harassed on their way to work by police who mistook them for mine workers en-route to picket lines.

But the internal strife caused by the relocation passed, and Priestley and his colleagues continued to work on Warhammer, expanding the game from a simple set of rulebooks to a how-to guide for hobbyists. By 1987 the game was in its third edition – a more polished book with professional artwork and photography as well as information on collecting and painting miniatures.

It also now boasted its own fictional background, and while the game still included much of the creative freedom that Priestley had admired in the work of Charles Grant, it now had a coherent setting rich with the potential for epic conflict. The Warhammer world was an amalgamation of tried and tested fantasy tropes, populated by savage, bloodthirsty orcs, haughty, enigmatic elves, redoubtable dwarves, majestic dragons and legions of the reanimated dead.

And while the battle game presented an overview of this new world, players who wanted to delve deeper could immerse themselves in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay – an RPG focusing on parties of individual adventurers. Players could explore the Teutonic-flavoured human Empire, the chivalric kingdom of Brettonia or other territories modeled loosely after Scandinavia, Arabia, feudal Japan or the jungles of South America.

Over time the games would unfold more and more of the detail behind the Warhammer’s battles, fleshing out the characters and cultures that made up its world, and while Games Workshop eventually ceased work on the RPG, companies including UK-based Hogshead Publishing and current licensee Fantasy Flight Games released further roleplaying products allowing players to seek adventure in the setting.

But while Warhammer had found the success that its creators had hoped for, it was a foray into the new territory of far-future science fiction that would prove to be the most important development in Games Workshop’s history.

Into the darkness

Before he ever joined Games Workshop, Rick Priestley had developed a science fiction game.

“It was called Rogue Trader,” he said.

“It was a ship-based game, and I’d created a range of models to go with it. And even though I’d joined Games Workshop to answer the phone and put toy soldiers into cardboard boxes, it was always on the understanding that they’d eventually get round to producing this game.

“But the reaction to Warhammer was so successful that everybody wanted to do a science fiction version. In fact, I’d been working on science fiction rules and variants in the journals we kept while we were working on the first edition, so the intent was there from very early on.”

The new game, first published in 1987, was Warhammer 40,000 (40K). Set in a dark, gritty and impossibly distant future, it incorporated elements of Laserburn, a science fiction game developed years previously by Bryan Ansell. It would become one of the most iconic brands in all of gaming.

But the first edition, released under Priestley’s original Rogue Trader title, was very different from the game players know today.

“We just plundered everything.”

“At the time, roleplaying was still really big,” he said.

“Rogue Trader still had a lot of roleplaying elements in it, it still had an umpire. But we quickly realised that a battle game was what people wanted, and we gradually developed the rules for choosing armies and for playing without an umpire.

“I think by the time we did the second edition in 1993 it had moved from essentially a roleplaying skirmish game to a battle game, which is commercially advantageous because you’re selling more models with it.”

The 40K universe was bleak, dangerous and engulfed in endless war. Human civilisation had expanded across the galaxy, encountering a host of alien species based on typical fantasy races. Elves became Eldar, mysterious, lithe and deadly creatures travelling on giant spacecraft that served as artificial worlds. Orcs received a science fiction makeover to become Space Orks – essentially a race of green-skinned football hooligans. Squats – later dropped from the game – were a futuristic take on dwarves.

“I just sort of bunged all the ideas I could think of into it,” Priestley said.

“We just plundered everything. Obviously Tolkien was a big influence, and in terms of 40K there’s a lot of Frank Herbert’s Dune in there. If you’ve read Dune, every chapter starts with a bit of an excerpt, and I rather enjoyed that, so I just copied the idea by putting little bits of pseudo fiction in.”

Other influences included the works of Robert Heinlein and H.P. Lovecraft, but it was a much older source – the 17th century poet John Milton – who would provide the inspiration for the game’s greatest conflict.

In a reimagining of the epic poem Paradise Lost, which deals with an attempt to overthrow God by a faction of rebel angels, Warhammer 40,000 featured a cataclysmic schism within the forces of the Empire of Mankind. In an event known as the Horus Heresy, chapters of Space Marines – genetically engineered, fanatically religious super-soldiers – turned against their Emperor after falling prey to the influence of the Chaos Gods, the supreme antagonists of this dark future setting.

“The original idea for Chaos was Bryan Ansell’s,” Priestley said.

“He wrote a Warhammer supplement called Realms of Chaos where he came up with the gods and the demons. He produced this huge hand-written manuscript where he defined all of that, and I took what he’d written and developed it as a book.”

But Priestley’s idea of Chaos differed from Ansell’s, and in 40K he sought to expand on the concept.

“Bryan’s idea of Chaos was very much derived from [science fiction and fantasy author] Michael Moorcock,” he said. “I always thought it was a little too close for comfort, it looked like we were just copying.

“But I’d always had this sense of Chaos existing as described in Paradise Lost. I’d tried to bring elements of that into the background and gradually change it from a description of demons into a kind of force out of which came realities, a kind of literal primal chaos.

“Unless you’ve read Paradise Lost you don’t get it. The whole Horus Heresy is just a parody of the fall of Lucifer as described by Milton.”

“To me the background to 40K was always intended to be ironic”

The civil war within the human Imperium would set the scene for 40k’s entire backstory, and the Space Marines would become the most recognisable figures in its fictional universe. But while recent editions of the game have cast them in a heroic light, Priestley argued that Games Workshop had misinterpreted the intent behind the characters.

“To me the background to 40K was always intended to be ironic,” he said.

“The fact that the Space Marines were lauded as heroes within Games Workshop always amused me, because they’re brutal, but they’re also completely self-deceiving. The whole idea of the Emperor is that you don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. The whole Imperium might be running on superstition. There’s no guarantee that the Emperor is anything other than a corpse with a residual mental ability to direct spacecraft.

“It’s got some parallels with religious beliefs and principles, and I think a lot of that got missed and overwritten.”

Expanding the empire

The dark and bloody tone of Warhammer 40,000 resonated with its core audience of teenage boys, and Games Workshop owner Bryan Ansell was keen to capitalise on this connection by offering new products for these loyal – sometimes obsessive – customers to spent their money on.

“Bryan ran Games Workshop as a bit of a personal empire,” said Priestley.

“He was very into music, so he decided that as well as selling games, he wanted to be a music publisher. He worked with bands like [British heavy metal act] Saxon, it was all part of his ‘we can do anything’ attitude.”

The company would work with other UK artists including thrash metallers Sabbat. But their best-known partnership was with legendary death metal band Bolt Thrower, whose war-obsessed lyrics and extreme, aggressive sound were a perfect fit for the war-torn galaxy the company had built.

“We had this idea for doing robots – you know those Robot Wars shows?”

Under Ansell’s leadership the company also sold Warhammer-themed clothing and published tie-in novels, including a number by award-winning British horror and science fiction author Kim Newman, who wrote under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil. But the director’s ambitions went even further.

“We looked at doing live-action roleplaying events with a bunch of guys getting off of a bus somewhere and fighting one another with BB guns,” said Priestley.

“Bryan and I even had this idea for doing robots. You know those Robot Wars shows? We were going to manufacture robot kits where all of the electronic circuitry was built into their casings. They’d fight each other and the outer casings would be knocked off and they’d gradually lose their abilities, I thought it was a brilliant idea.”

While nothing came of the robot battle proposals, Games Workshop’s core business saw strong growth, in no small part because of its retail operation.

Where other gaming companies had been content to sell their products through independent retailers, Games Workshop opened its own network of stores dedicated solely to selling the company’s own products. Sales director John Stallard was in charge of the strategy.

“We always viewed the stores as our advertising spend,” he said.

“They’re hugely expensive things to run, but they served as our billboards, our place on the high street and our primary recruitment tool. Really, they were recruitment stations with a shop attached.

“When you’re doing something something as wacky as a huge toy soldier game with goblins, it can be a bit of a tough sell. But when people can see how glorious it is, see the beautifully painted armies and all these people hooting and hollering and rolling dice, it gives you an instant idea of how much fun it is.”

The company’s expansion plan was unconventional, but effective.

“We just looked at the top division of the English football league,” Stallard said.

“We thought that if a town was big enough to support a top level football team, then it was big enough to support a Games Workshop store.

“After that we got a bit more clever. We looked for towns that had a Marks & Spencer [an up-market British department store chain] and an Early Learning Centre [a group of toy shops with a largely middle-class clientele]. We thought: ‘Well, they’ve done their research, they know where the good locations are.'”

“If you look at what the stores achieved, it’s an extraordinary success story”

Games Workshop stores were more than just shops – they were social hubs. They hosted events, ran tournaments and provided a place for players to share their interests. They played grunge and indie rock, and their staff were avid Warhammer players themselves, enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the games they sold.

“For the customers, these guys were the big brother they always wanted,” Stallard said.

“And if you look at what the stores achieved, it’s an extraordinary success story. To have young people – primarily boys – taking up a hobby that requires so much reading in the teeth of the computer games industry, it’s just remarkable.”

Strange new worlds

As Games Workshop’s empire expanded, so did its Warhammer 40,000 universe. Over time the game incorporated new playable races. The Tyranids, an alien species from beyond the known galaxy, bore a marked resemblance to the Xenomorph, developed for the Alien film franchise by Swiss artist H.R. Giger. The sinister skeletal mechanoids known as the Necrons served as a futuristic take on the undead armies of Warhammer Fantasy, and had a similar appearance to the robotic killers of the Terminator films.

But while these new armies expanded the game, its creative director was keen to explore aspects of the setting in far greater detail, and Games Workshop produced a number of smaller skirmish-level releases that focused on specific locations within the expansive 40K galaxy.

Set in one of the gargantuan hive cities constructed across human-inhabited space, Necromunda depicted the conflict between rival gangs in pursuit of renown, money and power. Released in 1995, it reintroduced some of the RPG elements that had been stripped out of Warhammer and 40K over the years, with individually named characters who gained experience, suffered injuries and upgraded their weapons and equipment over time. The game presented a jarring, punk-infused take on a fusturistic dystopia, and it was perhaps the most obvious example of one of the main inspirations for the 40K universe – the British comic book 2000AD.

“We all read it,” Priestley said.

“It was very influential from the early days of 40K, and the 2000AD artists actually worked with us on some of these games. I got to meet [Judge Dredd co-creator] John Wagner, which was quite a privilege.

“I actually wrote the Judge Dredd roleplaying game in the 80s and we produced miniatures for it. That was just before we produced 40K, so there’s a lot of spillover.”

And where Necromunda borrowed from the colourful, violent and often satirical stories of 2000AD, a subsequent release took its inspiration from the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max.

GorkaMorka was another skirmish-scale game. But where Necromunda had focused on gang warfare in a cramped, claustrophobic urban setting, this new release depicted battles on an arid desert planet between rival bands of savage Space Orks. Marooned after their spacecraft crash-landed on the isolated world, they fought using salvaged and highly unpredictable vehicles and equipment.

Both games met with a positive reaction from players, but according to Priestley they led to a crisis within the company – now headed by Tom Kirby, Games Workshop’s former general manager, who led a management buyout that saw Bryan Ansell depart in 1991.

“Tom had to borrow a lot of money to buy the business,” Priestley said. “That meant we had to grow the company very quickly.

“I thought that one way to do that would be to expand the product line, so you’d have Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, then this series of games that would let you explore the universe at a much closer, more detailed level.

“But it ended up being one of the great dividing points of Games Workshop. We’d grown internationally at a very fast pace, and we had to deal with French, Spanish, Italian versions of the games. The print runs of the foreign language editions were always bigger than we could sell, and after several near-disasters where we’d printed way too many of something, GorkaMorka being a classic example, we’d nearly bankrupted the company.”

The financial scare spooked management, Priestley said, leading to a change in Games Workshop’s culture.

“The appetite for new games just disappeared,” he said.

“But I have to say that this was not due to the concept being wrong, I think it was due to them not having the sophistication to manage the stock or manage the new sales divisions that had been created.

“The studio, the creative part of Games Workshop, had always been kept apart from the sales part of it. One thing Bryan said was that if the sales people got to be in charge of the studio, it would destroy the studio, and that’s exactly what happened.”

One ring to rule them all

Games Workshop retreated from games like Necromunda and GorkaMorka, along with other titles like the spaceship combat game Battlefleet Gothic and the dark fantasy title Mordheim, concentrating instead on its established battle games. But it would eventually branch out into new territory once again with one of the biggest properties in all of fantasy literature.

“The Lord of the Rings films were being made, and I thought that if anyone was going to produce a game based on them, it should be us,” Priestley said.

“I pitched it to the company as a defensive move. I said that if we didn’t do it, then someone else would, and if they did well out of it then it could give them a step-up to a level where they could challenge us.

“But really, I just thought we should do it. The heritage of fantasy wargaming owes so much to The Lord of the Rings.”

The argument worked, and the company, which had spent decades building the value of its own intellectual property, licensed the rights to produce battle games based on Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of the best-selling fantasy books. But while Priestley was keen to work on a treasured fantasy property, he also saw an opportunity to address problems that had crept into Games Workshop’s design and production process.

“The model design for Warhammer had started to get overblown,” he said.

“The models started to get big and came with too many parts. The number of pieces and the size of design are key factors in the cost of production, and there was a lack of discipline that meant the models were becoming less profitable.

“When I did Lord of the Rings I redefined the miniatures to be 28mm again. I took them down in size and had single-piece models. That was part of the reason it was successful.”

“The surge faded away, and we always knew it would.”

Designed alongside Alessio Cavatore, who had previously worked on projects including Mordheim and various Warhammer supplements, the game met with praise on its release. Subsequent expansions would explore the events of Tolkien’s novels in more detail, allowing players to recreate the biggest and most dramatic battles in the epic series and incorporating elements from the original texts which had been cut from the film adaptations.

For a number of years the game sold well, riding the immense popularity of the film series. But when the hype surrounding the films died down, interest in the tabletop game declined as well.

“The surge faded away, and we always knew that it would,” said Priestley.

“But the reason it became a problem for Games Workshop was that the sales divisions, which had been given a huge degree of autonomy and political power, suddenly found they had hugely overblown organisations. They had the staff, but none of them could actually sell anything – they were used to people just coming in and buying stuff. So the success of the Lord of the Rings ended up being a failure in the company’s eyes because they lost control of it, which always pissed me off.”

Priestley left Games Workshop in 2010, almost three decades after the release of the original Warhammer. He said he’d grown increasingly disillusioned with the direction the company was taking.

“I was the head of the creative department, and they weren’t doing anything creative any more,” he said.

“The role I had in the studio was with staff working on game development and design, and they’d pretty much decided that game development and design wasn’t of any interest to them. The current attitude in Games Workshop is that they’re not a games company, it’s that they’re a model company selling collectibles. That’s something I find wholly self-deceiving and couldn’t possibly agree with.”

Since his departure, Priestley has embarked on new projects, most notably the science fiction wargame Beyond the Gates of Antares. But while the game has a futuristic setting, it’s markedly different from the gothic universe of Warhammer 40,000.

“It takes a slightly more hard science approach,” he said.

“Or at least, it isn’t all based on medieval spooks and demons and superstition. It has a little more scientific credibility, if you like.

“It’s an entirely fresh game system. It’s gameplay-oriented and it’s designed for forces as small as 20 or 30 models a side up to hundreds. There are four factions out immediately with more planned for the future. There are plans to make plastic miniatures and all sorts of things. It’s a game with a future, which I don’t think 40K is.”

But if Priestley’s has moved on, so has his former employer. Games Workshop recently brought the curtain down on the Warhammer world, destroying it in an apocalyptic conflict known as the End Times. In its place is Age of Sigmar, a complete reboot of the game’s setting and mechanics. The new game is a stripped-down version of Warhammer with a simpler turn structure, fewer stats to track and a rulebook that comes as a four page PDF.

The changes haven’t met with a universally positive reaction, and many long-term players have expressed their opinion on the changes in no uncertain terms. The wholesale destruction of a world that some players had sunk decades of gameplay and thousands of pounds into exacerbated existing discontent with years of what many saw as unreasonable price rises, and one particularly incensed fan went so far as to burn his miniature collection in a video posted on YouTube. But while online reactions to the game have been blunt, the company’s most recent report to investors showed a modest increase in sales. The game is still in its early days, and it remains to be seen whether the reboot will draw in in more players over time than it alienates.

What comes next may be uncertain, but wherever Warhammer goes in years to come, its importance to gaming culture is undeniable, and the influence of its co-founder is inescapable.

Unplugged Games approached Games Workshop regarding this article. The company declined to comment.

Warhammer began as part of a plan to boost sales of metal gaming miniatures. It would go on to become one of the biggest names in tabletop gaming industry.Battle! Practical Wargaming was a powerful influence on the young Rick Priestley, inspiring him to write wargame rule sets of his own.Warhammer’s first edition featured very basic graphic design, a far cry from the polished look of later versions. Image courtesy of Bell of Lost Souls.By its third edition, Warhammer had its own fictional world to serve as a backdrop to the game’s tabletop battles. Image © Games Workshop, used under fair dealing provisions.Genetically engineered, clad in power armour and fanatically devoted to their god-emperor, Space Marines were humanity’s ultimate soldiers.Necromunda focused on gang warfare between groups of criminals, mutants and religious fanatics. Image via Styfen @ BoardGameGeekGorkaMorka pitted rival bands of Orks against one another on an arid desert planet.Rick Priestley’s new game ditches the gothic trappings of Warhammer 40,000. Image © Warlord Games