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Zond wrote:


However, I don't know if I'd class Salute as a historical wargames show. It's a pretty diverse event. As to the Warlords themselves, no idea what they favour.

Thats the beauty of our side of the hobby... We cater for all things!

While the majority of traders and games are historical, some sci-fi/fantasy stuff is always on offer, as it is with most wargame shows.

But its main focus is historical games.

Thats why I like 'historical' wargame shows, they cover all schools of the hobby.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Aldramelech wrote:


I live in a fairly small city in a rural county in England, 100s of miles from London and in the area around me there are at least 3 Wargames Clubs, count in Sci/Fi clubs and there are 5. The county I live in supports 2 major wargames show.

I thought sheep were the main pasttime in your area?

Big P wrote:
Anyway, Im gonna go back to counting the rivets on my 38ts instead of reading this twaddle...

Now come on, crawl out of your shell a little and tell us how you really feel.

In any case, I don't remember anybody saying it wasa dying hobby, only that fantasy and sci fi have grown a lot bigger and faster. I think that one would be hard to deny.

Big P wrote:

Zond wrote:


However, I don't know if I'd class Salute as a historical wargames show. It's a pretty diverse event. As to the Warlords themselves, no idea what they favour.

Thats the beauty of our side of the hobby... We cater for all things!

While the majority of traders and games are historical, some sci-fi/fantasy stuff is always on offer, as it is with most wargame shows.

But its main focus is historical games.

Thats why I like 'historical' wargame shows, they cover all schools of the hobby.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Aldramelech wrote:


I live in a fairly small city in a rural county in England, 100s of miles from London and in the area around me there are at least 3 Wargames Clubs, count in Sci/Fi clubs and there are 5. The county I live in supports 2 major wargames show.

I thought sheep were the main pasttime in your area?

That's Wales, we're all about the moo cows


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Zinderneuf wrote:

Big P wrote:
Anyway, Im gonna go back to counting the rivets on my 38ts instead of reading this twaddle...

Now come on, crawl out of your shell a little and tell us how you really feel.

In any case, I don't remember anybody saying it wasa dying hobby, only that fantasy and sci fi have grown a lot bigger and faster. I think that one would be hard to deny.

Not hard at all, I don't see that GW's business has grown much at all and there have been nowhere near the amount of genuinely new rule set released for Sci fi games as there have been for historical sets.

Mooo...


Yes apart from the likes of Khurasan, Antenociti and Micropanzer for figures, and Tomorrows War for rules, the sci-fi market seems to have stagnated a little into simply providing GW clones on the whole.

The market is ripe for a good sci-fi game... And as for Fantasy, well its all a bit boring apart from my old favourite of Mordheim. I had high hopes for Fanticide only to see that dashed when the rulebook arrived...

Of course... Im sure one day a new sci-fi game will come along and do well...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Zinderneuf wrote:


In any case, I don't remember anybody saying it was a dying hobby.

Yer ya did...

 Zinderneuf wrote:


Also, it might get people to take a look at a hobby which, as you point out, is now dying along with its adherents.

I really wish I could find a good wargaming club near me. I don't care if it's Sci-Fi, moderns, WW1/2, Napoleonics, whatever I just want a nice club. Heck, I can't even find a good convention around me short of Cold Wars which is just up the road an hour or so.

I have a store near me that is pretty popular for gaming, but it's starting to attract too many children and overzealous GW addicts (like, the kind of people who think GW is the one true game/mini company. It's actually kinda scary). I mean, I will admit I'm young (I'm 16) but I have a good rep with those guys since I've been playing for a couple years at this point. On top of that, I consider myself fairly competent with most historical eras (history is my big interest). It's a bit disheartening to see some clubs disapproving of young blood, though I guess historicals was always a more mature and older market compared to sci-fi. I'm considering trying to birth a club in the Philadelphia area though, try to get something going.

Big P wrote:


Yes apart from the likes of Khurasan, Antenociti and Micropanzer for figures, and Tomorrows War for rules, the sci-fi market seems to have stagnated a little into simply providing GW clones on the whole.

The market is ripe for a good sci-fi game... And as for Fantasy, well its all a bit boring apart from my old favourite of Mordheim. I had high hopes for Fanticide only to see that dashed when the rulebook arrived...

Of course... Im sure one day a new sci-fi game will come along and do well...

I do have to agree with ya P, outside of Tomorrows War I have yet to find a Sci-Fi game that truly works for me and doesn't feel like 40k with a different paint job. Fantasy wise I actually enjoyed WHFB for a while, but it lost a lot of players so I dropped it when I couldn't find opponents. Which is disappointing, since I didn't mind the rule-set. Although, there are some interesting historical rulesets you could mod for fantasy purposes. The beauty of scenario based gaming

Big P wrote:

Yer ya did...

Where? If you are talking about the OP, for the gazilionth time I DIDN'T WRITE THAT. IT IS A QUOTE.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
As to the relative growth of the two hobbies, sorry, butyou guys are just plain wrong. Go into a major chain toy store or book store. What do you see? D&D and similar fantasy games. Some FOW if you are very lucky, but fantasy is bigger by an order of magnitude. The wargames of any size will be stuff like Risk 2210AD, Halo, Nexus Ops, etc.

Compare that to 1979, when I got into the hobby, and fantasy was just taking off, still very much the kid brother of Napoleon, Rommel and Lee.

Of course it is. Historical gaming has really already had its fluff written out. One could get beaten for using Iron Brigade before it was formed or an 1865 Stonewall Brigade. All that is required is for a designer to create rules.

As for fantasy and sci-fi games, someone made all that stuff up and wrote it out. Writing a compelling backstory and rules requires a lot more than just an enthusiastic bunch of people.

I rest my case...

History described as 'fluff'. Its enough to make David Chandler turn in his grave.

Kinda says it all really. And having read a fair bit of GW background, most of it is lifted from WW2 or other historical battles anyway... And some of it is truly poorly written. Apart from that written by my buddy.

All that hard work must be why they have so many editions of 40k.

Yes... Making stuff up is far harder than real research and reading.

Uh... yeah.

Big P wrote:
I rest my case...

History described as 'fluff'. Its enough to make David Chandler turn in his grave.

Kinda says it all really. And having read a fair bit of GW background, most of it is lifted from WW2 or other historical battles anyway... And some of it is truly poorly written. Apart from that written by my buddy.

All that hard work must be why they have so many editions of 40k.

Yes... Making stuff up is far harder than real research and reading.

You seriously think that gathering literally novels worth of historical information, copying that into a book, and adding some themed lists is harder than creating an entire world together with a ruleset, models (and their corresponding names) and the story behind all of it? Well, unless your friend is involved, no bias there at all...

That's like comparing Ian Kershaw to JRR Tolkein.

Tell me... Have you ever done either?

Zond wrote:
I'm hoping that more tight and competitive rulesets appear. I know it's extremely difficult to provide a balance to historical conflicts at times, but gentleman's agreements aren't for everyone.

Ancients is pretty well provided in that respect, because it has been a popular competition genre for decades.

I don't think face to face single battles of equal points work competitively in say ACW, Napoleonics or naval, because the main drivers of battles in those genres was the operational approach to find, fix and attack the enemy at an advantage. Campaigns are a better way to do it.

I don't think face to face single battles of equal points work competitively in say ACW, Napoleonics or naval, because the main drivers of battles in those genres was the operational approach to find, fix and attack the enemy at an advantage. Campaigns are a better way to do it.

You would probably be hard pressed to find any battle in history fought in ‘tournament conditions’ between balanced armies, carefully selected , and on neutral ground.

Most battles are fought under the best circumstances one General can maneuver himself into and even then they must ‘force’ their enemy to commit to a fight. The army under their command will simply be whatever they have available. No general would willing commit to a battle with only a 50% chance of victory unless they had no choice.

Tournament games are great for fun, but there will always be the gentleman’s way of playing historical wargames that tries to reflect the asymmetrical nature of most actual battles.

 Zinderneuf wrote:

Big P wrote:

Yer ya did...

Where? If you are talking about the OP, for the gazilionth time I DIDN'T WRITE THAT. IT IS A QUOTE.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
As to the relative growth of the two hobbies, sorry, butyou guys are just plain wrong. Go into a major chain toy store or book store. What do you see? D&D and similar fantasy games. Some FOW if you are very lucky, but fantasy is bigger by an order of magnitude. The wargames of any size will be stuff like Risk 2210AD, Halo, Nexus Ops, etc.

Compare that to 1979, when I got into the hobby, and fantasy was just taking off, still very much the kid brother of Napoleon, Rommel and Lee.

Thats because Historical Wargaming is a different market, not smaller, just different.

We don't buy our toys in toy shops...........

 LuciusAR wrote:

I don't think face to face single battles of equal points work competitively in say ACW, Napoleonics or naval, because the main drivers of battles in those genres was the operational approach to find, fix and attack the enemy at an advantage. Campaigns are a better way to do it.

You would probably be hard pressed to find any battle in history fought in ‘tournament conditions’ between balanced armies, carefully selected , and on neutral ground.

Most battles are fought under the best circumstances one General can maneuver himself into and even then they must ‘force’ their enemy to commit to a fight. The army under their command will simply be whatever they have available. No general would willing commit to a battle with only a 50% chance of victory unless they had no choice.

Tournament games are great for fun, but there will always be the gentleman’s way of playing historical wargames that tries to reflect the asymmetrical nature of most actual battles.

There are quite a number of historical ancient and mediaeval battles (and some in other eras) in which one army offered battle and was deliberately attacked. Equal points values is a completely different thing, of course.

Zond wrote:
I would never class historical wargaming as "dying". The wargaming hobby as a whole is growing, so everyone benefits.

However, I don't know if I'd class Salute as a historical wargames show. It's a pretty diverse event. As to the Warlords themselves, no idea what they favour.

Last time I went to Warlords it was a mix of GW and historicals, slightly more historical. This was a few years ago now though.

Okay, here is the definitive end of this discussion:

Games Workshop

Games Workshop is a company that has cornered a niche market in tactical wargaming and stealing 10 year olds money while sending them high on super glue. The company owns 95% of the wargaming market, the remaining five percent being comprised by enterprising six year olds who pretend their airfix fighter planes fire real bullets.

To play a Games Workshop game such as Warhammer in the officially approved GW manner you must first purchase their expensive rulebook (£45), then purchase another rulebook specific to the army you want to collect (£20), then buy their over-priced gaming table (£155) and some model trees and buildings to decorate it (c.£60 for a decent amount), then finally you get to purchase the actual models (an army big enough to play a proper game could set you back about £200 plus paints and glue). So there you go, all it takes to get into this game is an initial investment of £500 and giving up all hope of ever owning your own home. It is reputed that Warhammer is the favoured pastime of Pentagon tacticians, who often seek inspiration from sources other than Rome: Total War and are the only ones with the funds available to play it any more.

The days of Games Workshops dominance are thankfully numbered. Companies such as Mantic Games, Privateer Press and Gripping Beast are producing better game systems and much better/cheaper/more original products which are growing in popularity at GWs expense. And it's about damn time! GW have abused their loyal customer base for years, seeing them as a license to print money and everyone is getting well and truly p*ssed off with it! Therefore, don't be surprised if in the next few years you see your local Games Workshop store close down to be replaced with a branch of Poundland or Oxfam.

Many people sadly cannot perceive the attraction of wargaming because they want a life and disagree with the exorbitant prices of Games workshop products. What they fail to realise is that the concept was developed by people who think painting small lumps of plastic and rolling dice is entertainment.





Contents
[show]











edit Corporate History

Believe it or not, Games Workshop started up as a small business run from someone's crappy council flat in the economically opulent and joyful days of 1970's England. Originally, the three high school drop-out nobodies that made up the entirety of the company's workforce scratched an existence fabricating chess and backgammon boards (a.k.a fleecing money from someone else's ideas, a recurring theme in the companies illustrious history). All this changed when one of the three picked up an American copy of Dungeons and Dragons. Having no actual life to be getting on with, he flicked through the rulebook and, in a flash of inspiration inspired by a cannabis high, thought to himself;

"Hey, we can make money from selling someone else's hard work!".

Alas, the beginnings of the most legitimate copyright infringement company in history were laid, although it would take many more years and much more concept inoriginality before Games Workshop became the domineering corporation it is today. Before long, the destitute trio moved out from their underground dungeon. This was partly because of the restraining order placed upon them by the local authorities after several complaints from neighbours of an unhealthy smell of nerd dope wafting from their council flat and suspected acts of buggery, but was mostly due to the fact that the three had made a wad of cash from selling wargames and *bleep!*. The company flourished.

After receiving a contract from the British government to fabricate several seagoing vessels for the Faulklands offensive in 1982, the company turned back to wargaming. One day, some crusty nerd in the company thought up a way to make a huge amount of cash without sucking on someones *bleep!*. The market for wargaming was beginning to boom, and with the success of Conservative Thatcherite government, there was a suprising shortfall in demand for *beep!* from geeks. This acne-riddled troglodyte came up with the clever idea of stealing everyone elses ideas and shoving them all into one fantasy wargame, which would be named Warhammer. This game turned out to be a success, with teen year olds and old hairy bikers everywhere asking their parents for a box of Generic Elves for Christmas. Debatebly, the hairy old bikers merely wanted to get with the ten year old boys, though Games Workshop encouraged this type of behaviour in the spirit of the booming wargames community. This success was followed by Warhammer 40,000, which hoped to relive the magic of Warhammer by making a big bunch of pay money for what was, essentially, glorified heroin in wargaming form.

edit Employee and Customer policy

It is a company policy that all in-store employees must be overweight twenty-something year old university dropouts and have a body odour with equivalent lethality to Sarin nerve gas. Employees in the design concept studio must have an in-depth knowledge of Tolkien and established sci-fi authors, from which their ideas will be stolen.

Customers either meet the above description of in-store employees, or be ten years old with rich parents. If they do not meet this criteria, they are most likely in the store to intimidate and physically abuse the employees and real customers on account of being nerds, and therefore shall be ignored or exposed to the in-store employee with the foulest body odour.

All Games Workshop stores are fitted with air conditioning, but this is never turned on. Instead they turn up the heating even in the middle of summer so all the nerds will sweat and thus smell even more. Annually GW runs an inter-store tournament to see who can produce the most repugnant body odour. The 2011 champions were Sheffield Meadowhall, who produced a stench so foul it caused an evacuation of a full three quarters of the Meadowhall centre and caused several restaurants in the food court to fail food hygiene inspections.

Employees will also badger you none stop until you either leave from annoyance or you buy something. Some even go to the realms of sarcasm if they realise you haven't got a clue what you're looking at. It's a great way to alienate your customers so they never venture into your stores again.

edit Strategy

To sell these overpriced pieces of crap the games workshop employees must wash themselves with a Games workshop shower gel which smells like a mixture of sweat and heroin, added with the natural sweat of the employee and the smell of a games workshop interior (heated superglue and paint) will send the rich parent high and will agree to buying another ton weight book of incomprehensible rules and another box of woeful plastic pieces. All for the "reasonable price" of $149.99.

edit White Dwarf Magazine

White Dwarf (otherwise known as 'How To Buy Space Marines') used to be a hobby and gaming magazine which had articles on stuff which interested hobbyists and gamers, such as how to make model hills out of polystyrene. However, some time in the early to mid 2000s Games Workship decided that this approach was not profitable enough and so White Dwarf became an monthly advert for GW products (e.g. model hills, now available as a plastic kit from GW for £15) with articles aimed solely at making ten year old boys pester their decadent middle class parents to buy them the latest overpriced releases.

edit Products

Games Workshop builds many weapons and tanks not only for Warhammer 40k, but for the US military; see this list of Games Workshop products.

edit Warhammer

For a brief summary of Games Workshops' world of Warhammer Fantasy, take a trip to your local bookstore, purchase both every major work of fantasy literature written in the past thirty years and an atlas of the world during the 16th century (this in itself will be cheaper than actually purchasing the game), then place them in an industrial-sized blender. Just add water, connect the blender to a mains outlet and press the on button. Voila! The mush you have produced is Warhammer.

edit Armies and Gameplay

The original game, currently in its 98th edition, the improvement from the 97th edition being a minor rules alteration on how you must use Games Workshop sanctioned dice or forfeight all your minatures to the nearest Games workshop employee. Warhammer is, believe it or not, a wargame inventively titled "Warhammer" after a device used to bludgeon people to death, a practice profusely used by the Games Workshop pricing team. The whole point is to collect small figures, pretend they're alive and battle each other.

Armies you MUST collect in order to ultimately win the game are:
Humans: Come in two forms; Empire: Renaissance Germans...with Griffons, magic swords and magicians!
Bretonians: Medieval French knights who worship some tart who lives in a lake. And magical swords and Hippogriffs!

Tolkien-esque force #1: Orcs: Based on the "Chav"; a particularly aggressive and uneducated variant of Homo Sapiens found commonly in England and popular tourist destinations.
Tolkien-esque force #2: High Elves: exactly the same as Tolkien High Elves.
Tolkien-esque force #3: Dwarves: Pretty much the same as Tolkien Dwarves, but with guns.
Skaven: Speech-impaired machievellian Rat men, vaguely original of the "The Secret of Nimh".
Tomb Kings: A rip-off of the mummy series. No, not the gakky dragon one. The egypt ones.
Vampire Counts: Not the gay twilight vampires, but when they were cool and had cool clothes and ghosts. OoOoOoOoOoOoO!! is their battle cry.
The Bad Guys, aka Chaos: The scary bad boys of the Warhammer world. Include Demons (spelt "Daemons" because thats how the cool kids spell it).
Lizardmen: The highly original name gives it all away really.

edit Warhammer 40,000





Chaos Space Marines proving that in the far future of the forty-first millennium there are only fashion disasters.
Take a gothic-styled Imperial Roman Empire. Throw it 38,000 years into the future. Add enemies by taking every major sci-fi film nemesis and ripping them off, or by simply giving the Warhammer Fantasy races guns and floating tanks. Add half a cup of Dune backstory, make it so unbelievably dark and edgy that a GPS is powered by human sacrifices, throw away all that nonsense about physics, and add salt to taste. You now have Warhammer 40,000. Although the game is set 38,000 years into the future, the preferred way to defeat an enemy is to expend their ammunition with useless cannon fodder and eventually kill them by bashing them over the head with an over-anticipated power fist that you need 20,000 10 sided dice for. It is rumoured these tactics have been adopted by the U.S Westpoint Military Academy.

Armies:

Space Marines: Imagine a whole army of monastic Rambos, with rapid-firing rocket launchers and encased in space armour. With tanks. And some with jetpacks. The staple of Games Workshop, and thus have been made invincible through the "And they shall know no death" rule- this effectively means that should any player play against Space Marines with a non-Space Marine army, they automatically lose on the basis that no sentient lifeform would ever consider shooting at Humanity's Finest. Understandably favored by new comers to the game. It should be noted that a Space Marine Chapter, the Salamanders, are all black. Their successor chapters include Peckerwood Eliminator's and the Tokens. They are the only black people in all of 40K. When asked for advice on painting black and Asian skin onto models by an Imperial Guard player, an employee of a Games Workshop in the north of England was heard to say "but the Imperium is all white...". NO JOKE

Chaos Marines: See above. Includes Daemons (cos they're better than standard demons).

Eldar: Space Elves. With guns. And floating tanks.

Dark Eldar: See above, look like Cradle of Filth after a show.

Tau: Space Minotaur Commies. With bigger guns. And floating tanks.

Orks: Space Orcs. With backfiring guns. Their technology only works because they believe it will, and their insane stubbornness bends the laws of reality. No joke.

Imperial Guard: Standard humans with piss-poor armour and laser pens. There to make everyone else look good, unless you include tanks, in which case your men are replaced with between 5 and ten tanks which will proceed to kick everyone's ass, which is why the Imperial Guard is the favorite army of Erwin Rommel.

Necrons: See original two Terminator films. The third was gak, apart from the bird with the nice rack.

Tyranids: Reference Starship Troopers and Alien.

Bitch Hunters: Space Nuns, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds. More commonly referred to as Battle Bitches or Slapper of Battle. Latent arsonist tendencies.

edit Spin- Offs

Spin-off games (officially called 'Specialist Games' for some reason) were big in the 90s. Many of them had a good fan base and were a lot of fun to play but some time in the early 2000s GW decided to sack them off and concentrate on ruining their two main games instead. On the plus side you can download all the resources needed to play these games from GWs website for free (yeah, I couldn't believe they were giving something away either).
Lord of the Rings: - Oh the irony. Games Waorkshop spends 25 years ripping off Tolkien, only to eventually produce a boardgame of his universe. Which, funnily enough, was gak. This cynical cash-in was officially licensed by New Line Cinema and is supposed to be Games Workshop's 'third core game', but nobody plays it so it doesn't count.
Battlefleet Gothic: A war game with spaceships. Need I say more?
Necromunda: Skirmish game set in Warhammer 40,000. Was canned after GW realised that people would spend more money on minatures if it didn't exist to distract players from the main two games. Or give them a game which only required them to buy a maximum of 20 minitures. I miss the old days...
Mordheim: See above, but in the Warhammer Fantasy world.
Inquisitor: Set in the 40K universe. Was the result of GW's miniature factory accidentally producing a larger scale set of models, which was then botched quickly into a new game so these models could be flogged off.
Blood Bowl: Warhammer Fantasy world aproach to American Football, including a realistic attention to the unlimited addenda, rules changes and updates of the real world passtime leading to it being re-titled "Blood Boil"

edit See Also
Dawn of War
Dawn of War: Dark Crusade
Women
Bratz
A Life


http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Games_Workshop

 LuciusAR wrote:

I don't think face to face single battles of equal points work competitively in say ACW, Napoleonics or naval, because the main drivers of battles in those genres was the operational approach to find, fix and attack the enemy at an advantage. Campaigns are a better way to do it.

You would probably be hard pressed to find any battle in history fought in ‘tournament conditions’ between balanced armies, carefully selected , and on neutral ground.

Most battles are fought under the best circumstances one General can maneuver himself into and even then they must ‘force’ their enemy to commit to a fight. The army under their command will simply be whatever they have available. No general would willing commit to a battle with only a 50% chance of victory unless they had no choice.

Tournament games are great for fun, but there will always be the gentleman’s way of playing historical wargames that tries to reflect the asymmetrical nature of most actual battles.

I have been making this argument for a while now against so-called balanced codexes in 40k. Every army has advantages and disadvantages. Why do armies need to be balanced against each other? I'm sure Lee would have loved a couple regiments completely armed with Henry rifles, or Patton with a division of King Tigers. They used what they were issued.

 SoloFalcon1138 wrote:

I have been making this argument for a while now against so-called balanced codexes in 40k. Every army has advantages and disadvantages. Why do armies need to be balanced against each other? I'm sure Lee would have loved a couple regiments completely armed with Henry rifles, or Patton with a division of King Tigers. They used what they were issued.

But there's different design qualities in the games themselves. If 40k was meant to be only played as a scenario-driven, pre-planned game, then I can see where the idea of 'imbalance' would come into play. If it was a case of 'play what you get, not what you want', then there wouldn't be a points system, and a random army generator would be used (like what I've seen Baccus use in their Polemos games).

But it's a game where I could call up a friend, agree that 1500 points is ok, and then arrive at the store/club/basement and have a game. Which is why balance is then important. Its what WAB (or its descendants), or FoG, or FoW, are designed around. That's why armies should be relatively balanced against one another - it's a part of the design of the game itself.

Also, I disagree with the OP. Yes, there are larger fish in the scifi/fantasy pond, but anyone with two brain cells to rub together and an internet connection can easily discover the myriad of other games in those genres: Tomorrow's War, Hammers Slammers, Dropzone Commander, Gruntz, Pride of Lions, Kings of War, etc., etc.

 Zinderneuf wrote:
Okay, here is the definitive end of this discussion:

Games Workshop

Games Workshop is a company that has cornered a niche market in tactical wargaming and stealing 10 year olds money while sending them high on super glue. The company owns 95% of the wargaming market, the remaining five percent being comprised by enterprising six year olds who pretend their airfix fighter planes fire real bullets.

To play a Games Workshop game such as Warhammer in the officially approved GW manner you must first purchase their expensive rulebook (£45), then purchase another rulebook specific to the army you want to collect (£20), then buy their over-priced gaming table (£155) and some model trees and buildings to decorate it (c.£60 for a decent amount), then finally you get to purchase the actual models (an army big enough to play a proper game could set you back about £200 plus paints and glue). So there you go, all it takes to get into this game is an initial investment of £500 and giving up all hope of ever owning your own home. It is reputed that Warhammer is the favoured pastime of Pentagon tacticians, who often seek inspiration from sources other than Rome: Total War and are the only ones with the funds available to play it any more.

The days of Games Workshops dominance are thankfully numbered. Companies such as Mantic Games, Privateer Press and Gripping Beast are producing better game systems and much better/cheaper/more original products which are growing in popularity at GWs expense. And it's about damn time! GW have abused their loyal customer base for years, seeing them as a license to print money and everyone is getting well and truly p*ssed off with it! Therefore, don't be surprised if in the next few years you see your local Games Workshop store close down to be replaced with a branch of Poundland or Oxfam.

Many people sadly cannot perceive the attraction of wargaming because they want a life and disagree with the exorbitant prices of Games workshop products. What they fail to realise is that the concept was developed by people who think painting small lumps of plastic and rolling dice is entertainment.





Contents
[show]











edit Corporate History

Believe it or not, Games Workshop started up as a small business run from someone's crappy council flat in the economically opulent and joyful days of 1970's England. Originally, the three high school drop-out nobodies that made up the entirety of the company's workforce scratched an existence fabricating chess and backgammon boards (a.k.a fleecing money from someone else's ideas, a recurring theme in the companies illustrious history). All this changed when one of the three picked up an American copy of Dungeons and Dragons. Having no actual life to be getting on with, he flicked through the rulebook and, in a flash of inspiration inspired by a cannabis high, thought to himself;

"Hey, we can make money from selling someone else's hard work!".

Alas, the beginnings of the most legitimate copyright infringement company in history were laid, although it would take many more years and much more concept inoriginality before Games Workshop became the domineering corporation it is today. Before long, the destitute trio moved out from their underground dungeon. This was partly because of the restraining order placed upon them by the local authorities after several complaints from neighbours of an unhealthy smell of nerd dope wafting from their council flat and suspected acts of buggery, but was mostly due to the fact that the three had made a wad of cash from selling wargames and *bleep!*. The company flourished.

After receiving a contract from the British government to fabricate several seagoing vessels for the Faulklands offensive in 1982, the company turned back to wargaming. One day, some crusty nerd in the company thought up a way to make a huge amount of cash without sucking on someones *bleep!*. The market for wargaming was beginning to boom, and with the success of Conservative Thatcherite government, there was a suprising shortfall in demand for *beep!* from geeks. This acne-riddled troglodyte came up with the clever idea of stealing everyone elses ideas and shoving them all into one fantasy wargame, which would be named Warhammer. This game turned out to be a success, with teen year olds and old hairy bikers everywhere asking their parents for a box of Generic Elves for Christmas. Debatebly, the hairy old bikers merely wanted to get with the ten year old boys, though Games Workshop encouraged this type of behaviour in the spirit of the booming wargames community. This success was followed by Warhammer 40,000, which hoped to relive the magic of Warhammer by making a big bunch of pay money for what was, essentially, glorified heroin in wargaming form.

edit Employee and Customer policy

It is a company policy that all in-store employees must be overweight twenty-something year old university dropouts and have a body odour with equivalent lethality to Sarin nerve gas. Employees in the design concept studio must have an in-depth knowledge of Tolkien and established sci-fi authors, from which their ideas will be stolen.

Customers either meet the above description of in-store employees, or be ten years old with rich parents. If they do not meet this criteria, they are most likely in the store to intimidate and physically abuse the employees and real customers on account of being nerds, and therefore shall be ignored or exposed to the in-store employee with the foulest body odour.

All Games Workshop stores are fitted with air conditioning, but this is never turned on. Instead they turn up the heating even in the middle of summer so all the nerds will sweat and thus smell even more. Annually GW runs an inter-store tournament to see who can produce the most repugnant body odour. The 2011 champions were Sheffield Meadowhall, who produced a stench so foul it caused an evacuation of a full three quarters of the Meadowhall centre and caused several restaurants in the food court to fail food hygiene inspections.

Employees will also badger you none stop until you either leave from annoyance or you buy something. Some even go to the realms of sarcasm if they realise you haven't got a clue what you're looking at. It's a great way to alienate your customers so they never venture into your stores again.

edit Strategy

To sell these overpriced pieces of crap the games workshop employees must wash themselves with a Games workshop shower gel which smells like a mixture of sweat and heroin, added with the natural sweat of the employee and the smell of a games workshop interior (heated superglue and paint) will send the rich parent high and will agree to buying another ton weight book of incomprehensible rules and another box of woeful plastic pieces. All for the "reasonable price" of $149.99.

edit White Dwarf Magazine

White Dwarf (otherwise known as 'How To Buy Space Marines') used to be a hobby and gaming magazine which had articles on stuff which interested hobbyists and gamers, such as how to make model hills out of polystyrene. However, some time in the early to mid 2000s Games Workship decided that this approach was not profitable enough and so White Dwarf became an monthly advert for GW products (e.g. model hills, now available as a plastic kit from GW for £15) with articles aimed solely at making ten year old boys pester their decadent middle class parents to buy them the latest overpriced releases.

edit Products

Games Workshop builds many weapons and tanks not only for Warhammer 40k, but for the US military; see this list of Games Workshop products.

edit Warhammer

For a brief summary of Games Workshops' world of Warhammer Fantasy, take a trip to your local bookstore, purchase both every major work of fantasy literature written in the past thirty years and an atlas of the world during the 16th century (this in itself will be cheaper than actually purchasing the game), then place them in an industrial-sized blender. Just add water, connect the blender to a mains outlet and press the on button. Voila! The mush you have produced is Warhammer.

edit Armies and Gameplay

The original game, currently in its 98th edition, the improvement from the 97th edition being a minor rules alteration on how you must use Games Workshop sanctioned dice or forfeight all your minatures to the nearest Games workshop employee. Warhammer is, believe it or not, a wargame inventively titled "Warhammer" after a device used to bludgeon people to death, a practice profusely used by the Games Workshop pricing team. The whole point is to collect small figures, pretend they're alive and battle each other.

Armies you MUST collect in order to ultimately win the game are:
Humans: Come in two forms; Empire: Renaissance Germans...with Griffons, magic swords and magicians!
Bretonians: Medieval French knights who worship some tart who lives in a lake. And magical swords and Hippogriffs!

Tolkien-esque force #1: Orcs: Based on the "Chav"; a particularly aggressive and uneducated variant of Homo Sapiens found commonly in England and popular tourist destinations.
Tolkien-esque force #2: High Elves: exactly the same as Tolkien High Elves.
Tolkien-esque force #3: Dwarves: Pretty much the same as Tolkien Dwarves, but with guns.
Skaven: Speech-impaired machievellian Rat men, vaguely original of the "The Secret of Nimh".
Tomb Kings: A rip-off of the mummy series. No, not the gakky dragon one. The egypt ones.
Vampire Counts: Not the gay twilight vampires, but when they were cool and had cool clothes and ghosts. OoOoOoOoOoOoO!! is their battle cry.
The Bad Guys, aka Chaos: The scary bad boys of the Warhammer world. Include Demons (spelt "Daemons" because thats how the cool kids spell it).
Lizardmen: The highly original name gives it all away really.

edit Warhammer 40,000





Chaos Space Marines proving that in the far future of the forty-first millennium there are only fashion disasters.
Take a gothic-styled Imperial Roman Empire. Throw it 38,000 years into the future. Add enemies by taking every major sci-fi film nemesis and ripping them off, or by simply giving the Warhammer Fantasy races guns and floating tanks. Add half a cup of Dune backstory, make it so unbelievably dark and edgy that a GPS is powered by human sacrifices, throw away all that nonsense about physics, and add salt to taste. You now have Warhammer 40,000. Although the game is set 38,000 years into the future, the preferred way to defeat an enemy is to expend their ammunition with useless cannon fodder and eventually kill them by bashing them over the head with an over-anticipated power fist that you need 20,000 10 sided dice for. It is rumoured these tactics have been adopted by the U.S Westpoint Military Academy.

Armies:

Space Marines: Imagine a whole army of monastic Rambos, with rapid-firing rocket launchers and encased in space armour. With tanks. And some with jetpacks. The staple of Games Workshop, and thus have been made invincible through the "And they shall know no death" rule- this effectively means that should any player play against Space Marines with a non-Space Marine army, they automatically lose on the basis that no sentient lifeform would ever consider shooting at Humanity's Finest. Understandably favored by new comers to the game. It should be noted that a Space Marine Chapter, the Salamanders, are all black. Their successor chapters include Peckerwood Eliminator's and the Tokens. They are the only black people in all of 40K. When asked for advice on painting black and Asian skin onto models by an Imperial Guard player, an employee of a Games Workshop in the north of England was heard to say "but the Imperium is all white...". NO JOKE

Chaos Marines: See above. Includes Daemons (cos they're better than standard demons).

Eldar: Space Elves. With guns. And floating tanks.

Dark Eldar: See above, look like Cradle of Filth after a show.

Tau: Space Minotaur Commies. With bigger guns. And floating tanks.

Orks: Space Orcs. With backfiring guns. Their technology only works because they believe it will, and their insane stubbornness bends the laws of reality. No joke.

Imperial Guard: Standard humans with piss-poor armour and laser pens. There to make everyone else look good, unless you include tanks, in which case your men are replaced with between 5 and ten tanks which will proceed to kick everyone's ass, which is why the Imperial Guard is the favorite army of Erwin Rommel.

Necrons: See original two Terminator films. The third was gak, apart from the bird with the nice rack.

Tyranids: Reference Starship Troopers and Alien.

Bitch Hunters: Space Nuns, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds. More commonly referred to as Battle Bitches or Slapper of Battle. Latent arsonist tendencies.

edit Spin- Offs

Spin-off games (officially called 'Specialist Games' for some reason) were big in the 90s. Many of them had a good fan base and were a lot of fun to play but some time in the early 2000s GW decided to sack them off and concentrate on ruining their two main games instead. On the plus side you can download all the resources needed to play these games from GWs website for free (yeah, I couldn't believe they were giving something away either).
Lord of the Rings: - Oh the irony. Games Waorkshop spends 25 years ripping off Tolkien, only to eventually produce a boardgame of his universe. Which, funnily enough, was gak. This cynical cash-in was officially licensed by New Line Cinema and is supposed to be Games Workshop's 'third core game', but nobody plays it so it doesn't count.
Battlefleet Gothic: A war game with spaceships. Need I say more?
Necromunda: Skirmish game set in Warhammer 40,000. Was canned after GW realised that people would spend more money on minatures if it didn't exist to distract players from the main two games. Or give them a game which only required them to buy a maximum of 20 minitures. I miss the old days...
Mordheim: See above, but in the Warhammer Fantasy world.
Inquisitor: Set in the 40K universe. Was the result of GW's miniature factory accidentally producing a larger scale set of models, which was then botched quickly into a new game so these models could be flogged off.
Blood Bowl: Warhammer Fantasy world aproach to American Football, including a realistic attention to the unlimited addenda, rules changes and updates of the real world passtime leading to it being re-titled "Blood Boil"

edit See Also
Dawn of War
Dawn of War: Dark Crusade
Women
Bratz
A Life


http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Games_Workshop

That quite cheered me up!