Plenty of Warhammer 40,000 novels have been written from the perspective of humans and space marines, but it took a while before Games Workshop really got into publishing books from the perspective of 40K's many alien species. If you're into orks I recommend Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh, and for swashbuckling aeldari pirates there's Voidscarred, but the peak remains The Infinite and the Divine by Robert Rath.

It's the story of a long-term feud between two necrons, Orikan the Diviner and Trazyn the Infinite, immortal robots who were once flesh-and-blood and went a bit loopy in the uploading process. An argument over who owns a particular artifact becomes a heated rivalry (not in the sexy way, though now that you mention it…) that encompasses, as Games Workshop's own summary puts it, "clashing with Exodite armies, xenos uprisings, and a spell in Necron small claims court."

As the part about small claims court suggests, The Infinite and the Divine has a sense of humor. While it's not all comedy all the time, it's the 40K book that's closest in tone to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with a perfect sense of the absurdity of these bitter old robots turning their petty grudge into the entire universe's problem.

While it was a self-contained story, I'm delighted to hear it's getting a sequel by the same author. As announced on Warhammer Community, Orikan and Trazyn will be back in The Wicked and the Warped, in which the two rivals have to work together to find out what happened to an expedition lost on a planet corrupted by Chaos. As Dawn of War showed, if you want to force an unlikely alliance in 40K, throw Chaos at some enemies and they'll have to work together. I look forward to Orikan and Trazyn bickering their way through a few hundred more pages while trying not to get eaten by daemons.

The Wicked and the Warped doesn't have a release date yet, but The Infinite and the Divine is being reprinted in hardback in the meantime. I've heard good things about the audiobook narrated by Richard Reed too.

I think we can all agree, Warhammer 40k's Inquisitors are cool customers. Once you put aside their whole shtick of being able to commit genocide on a whim, exterminatus-ing planets that have fallen to the predations of Chaos, they're basically Witch Hunters hanging out in a moody and noir-ish sci-fi future. There's a reason folks are excited for Dark Heresy.

They get to wear fun hats, run around with inquisitorial warbands filled with strange characters and xenos, and they get cool names like Ravenor, Eisenhorn, Adrastia, and Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau. Wait, what was that last one? Oh, you aren't familiar with the work of Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau.

He's well known across the stars for solving uncrackable cases with his astute deductions, fighting xenos with a legally distinct laser sword, and just generally bringing balance to the For- I mean Imperium. In fact, he was the very first Inquisitor depicted in Warhammer 40k, introduced in the first edition Rogue Trader TTRPG back in 1987 and illustrated by Martin McKenna. You can see this model of Imperial virtue below.

I'm not sure why, but gazing into his eyes I feel like he's saying "You best start believing in daemon stories. You're in one!" And if you're thinking this image gives off some serious Fighting Fantasy vibes, McKenna did also contribute illustrations to those books. The entry in Rogue Trader reads:

"A typical Inquisitor is represented here by the renowned Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau - a tireless exposer of psychic misdeeds and genetic deviance. He wears a suit of skintight powered armor under a long, enveloping cloak. Like most Inquisitors, he distains the wearing of a helmet in favour of civilian head-wear (Inquisitors tend to be eccentric in their dress as well as their life-styles."

You might also be wondering why he's wearing a yin-yang breastplate. I assume it's because the yin-yang was used as Eldar iconography (another hangover from old Warhammer) and Inquisitors are often allowed to use xenos gear. Either that, or he simply believes in the concept of balance, you know, like bringing balance to the For- I mean Imperium, again.

The entry goes on to explain that Inquisitor Clousseau is hauling quite a bit of equipment about, namely:

• Various energy field devices—conversion field, stasis field, refractor field
• A bolt pistol and a power sword
• Three Jokaero digital weapons—hand flamer, laspistol, and needle pistol
• Several grenades secreted around his person—Two blind, choke, haywire, knockout
• Also one crack, plasma, stumm, tanglefoot, and vortex grenade
• A communicator, bioscanner, and energy scanner
• Nose filters, photochromatic eye drops, an immune injector and infra-vision contacts
• Chemicals for the Jokaero needler, a porta-rack, rad counter, and a stimulant chemical
• A syn-skin applicator with sufficient chemicals for three uses
• Three suspenders and a can of web solvent

You might be thinking, that's a lot of gear for a man with only one coat pocket.

As a redditor I observed posits "he's got 13 grenades stuffed up his ass," which may very well explain his gruff countenance. Inquisitors are known for having a trick or two up their sleeve, though he may be the first agent of the throne to weaponise his anal cavity.

Perhaps the best bit about Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau is that, while he hasn't appeared again since the 1980s, like much of Warhammer's weird and wonderful past, he was never officially retconned. Whether you believe he's simply an example to inspire character creation, or a bonafide Inquisitorial agent, Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau could still be out there in a galaxy far, far away.

I, for one, hope he returns one day, preferably during whatever 40k's equivalent of the End Times becomes, scurrying in right at the very end to interject "Ahh that's elementary, my dear Emps".

Here's my problem with Kingdom Come: Deliverance—it's simply not finicky enough. It's too straightforward, I am too able to keep its rules and demands in my head, the game does not compel me to keep track of enough small things. Oh, you expect me to put my armour on in a precise order? That's complicated. For babies.

Fortunately, top minds have figured out a way to increase the grognarditude of one of the games industry's foremost grognard RPGs (which, let me be clear, I adore): they've turned it into a board game. Coming, appropriately, out of board game house Czech Games, Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game is currently up for preorder for the somewhat spicy price—to me, as a man whose board game experience consists of Mouse Trap—of $200.

It comes from renowned game designers Tomáš Holek and Vlaada Chvátil and looks to be replicating the general arc of the games in tabletop form. You start off as a rag-clad peasant, make your way out into the world, and either find success or die horribly. "Deal with unpredictable locals, train to become a skilled archer, a silver-tongued orator, or even a cunning thief. Whatever path you choose, let it be your own," goes the blurb. It can be played solo or with up to four players.

It's of course not out yet, but already redolent in bits: tokens, cards, figurines, boards, sub-boards, figurines, baubles, gewgaws. There's a lot to keep track of, but they are fortunately all quite pleasant to look at, at least insofar as their prototype renders are concerned. This is what I mean by 'KCD, but more complicated.' In fact, here's the full list of stuff:

• Boards
  • main map board
  • 4 double-layer player boards
  • merchant board
  • potions board
  • day board
• Tiles, Tokens, Tracks, and Stands
  • 12 horse tiles
  • 30 animal tiles
  • 36 herb tiles
  • 55 enemy tiles
  • 40 wound tiles
  • 180+ small tokens (herbs, meat, mushrooms, dirt, etc.)
  • 3 town alertness tracks
  • 6 gate tiles
  • 5 trainer tiles
  • 75 coin tokens
  • 2 cardboard card stands
• Cards
  • 80 advanced skill cards
  • 32 starting skill cards
  • 30 virtue cards
  • 20 sin cards
  • 12 player setup cards
  • 20 starting quests
  • 55 side quests
  • 27 solo-game cards
  • 240+ item cards
  • 60 encounter cards
  • 16 spawn cards
• Storylines
  • 10 storylines (with their own cards and tiles)
  • storyline book
• RE-Wood Components
  • 164 player pieces (character figures, beds, cubes)
  • 66 town markers

I rather like the look of this, I must say. If you agree, and you've got $200 burning a hole in your bag of groschen, you can potter over to the pre-order site. The game's slated to release in Q1 next year.

It started small and sensible. A miniature of an ork with one foot on a helmet to give him a more dynamic pose, or a dragon attached to a rocky protrusion to suggest flight. Somewhere in the years since then we lost our way. We went too far. We climbed too boldly and too steep, and we ended up with a dwarf, a member of a species defined by their status as short kings, absurdly perched mid-leap off the head of a fallen statue so he can look tall and dramatic on the tabletop.

He's far from the only sinner. Look at Maugan Ra, the Phoenix Lord of the Dark Reapers, straddling two separate tactical rocks at once so he can stand in a power pose as if he's just been appointed home secretary. He doesn't look ready to harvest souls, he looks ready to pull off a guitar solo with too much deedly-deedly in it.

While other miniature manufacturers aren't immune to the lure of tactical rocks (Corvus Belli sells them separately, with names that reference Dwayne Johnson and The Rolling Stones), it's Warhammer where they've become an unavoidable plague. Games Workshop even had an April Fool's gag where they pretended they were making a life-sized one you could stand on at home.

Surely at the point where the tactical rocks have become so omnipresent you're mocking them yourself, you might tone them down a notch? But no, they keep putting little dudes on so much rubble they look like they're surfing down it.

The original intent was fairly clear. You want your army's general and other members of the command group to be readable as "important" so your opponent can recognize them across the table. Often those characters are mounted, or just huge enough to stand out on their own. When they're not, you put them on a little rock like Orikan the Diviner's 2012 mini or the Chaos Terminator Lord from 2013 (though I'd argue he's imposing enough without it).

Games Workshop has spent a decade-plus turning the dial up on the size of its tactical rocks, as well as tactical branches, ruins, pipes, statuary, and corpses all modeled for the sake of being stood on. Eventually, it starts to seem like insecurity. Kragnos, the End of Empires, is a straight-up god and big enough not to need random stone protrusions to prop himself up on like a man who has lied about his height on a dating profile.

The tactical rocks designed to give the illusion of flight have become ridiculous too. Inquisitor Coteaz has a pet eagle that looks like it's colliding with a metal spar, and the Chaos Lord with a jump pack who is attached to a helmet by smoke drifting out of it looks like he stepped in chewing gum. Bring back transparent flight stands, even if it takes some effort to keep them attached.

I'm aware that, of all the petty complaints I carry around with me and have stitched together into something that passes for a personality, this is one of the pettiest. Surely these are just a bit of extra plastic to give some little guys slightly more exciting poses than they'd have standing flat on the ground?

But I like to make my command group stand out by changing up their color scheme, maybe giving them a banner pole, and putting a bit more effort into how they look. I don't want a crutch, and especially not one that looks like a stack of random stuff that makes my toy soldiers more fragile and harder to fit in a box so I can actually get them to a table.

Also they look dumb and I hate them.

Here's the official advice from PC Gamer this summer: shut your curtains and stay indoors. But it's not just those new-fangled vidya games you should be playing, as I've found 12 Amazon Prime Day board game deals that are well worth your time.

Many of these I've played myself, and a few more are sitting on my wishlist right now after many, many recommendations from friends. I know a lot of board game nerds, and they won't stop banging on about them. Will I finally drop $85 on Star Wars: Rebellion this summer? Probably, for that sort of cash. It beats melting outside, or, y'know, being sociable anyway.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

I can also highly recommend Talisman: The Magical Quest game for a mere $31 at Amazon. I paid double that for my copy earlier this year, and can confirm it's a whole ton of fantasy adventure fun.

I'm also very intrigued by Dead of Winter, a horror-survival adventure that comes recommended by many of my peers. Yours, for $55. But my heart probably belongs to Mansions of Madness, an astonishingly replayable, re-configurable Lovecraftian horror tabletop adventure that will swallow entire weekends within its slimy tendrils. Ask me how I know. It's down to $92, and my goodness do you get a lot of board game for your cash.

Whichever you pick, you'll be beating the summer heat and enjoying a lovely argument (sorry, rules debate) with your loved ones instead. Two birds with one stone, I reckon.

The universe of Warhammer 40k is not a very nice place to live. Everyday there are a thousand potential ways you could die and none of them particularly pleasant, but it's easy to forget that, despite its grimness and its darkness, 40k can also be goofy as hell. Take the Land Raider for instance, an iconic Space Marine tank capable of unleashing devastation as it rolls across the land, raiding, if you will.

What if I told you that the Land Raider and Land Speeder are both actually named after the person who discovered their blueprints, a Tech Priest named, I kid you not, Arkhan Land. So no, not because they raid or speed over the land, but because they are Land's Raiders and Land's Speeders. It's a detail mentioned in the Horus Heresy novel, The Master of Mankind (where Land features as a character), but I'd somehow forgotten it until I was reading the short story collection, The Burden of Loyalty, specifically, Into Exile by Aaron Dembski-Bowden:

"One side of the briefing display is given over to data relating to Arkhan Land, the Arkhan Land. The explorer and scholar responsible for so many expeditions into the ancient Data-Crypts of Mars's crust and mantle. The man that brought back the beginnings of an anti-grav technology to the nascent Imperium. The man responsible for unearthing and sharing the schematics that lead to the mass production of the raiders and speeders, now seen in their thousands among the legions. Land Raiders, Land Speeders, the war machines are even named for him now."

Land pops up a few times in the Horus Heresy—an irascible Technoarchaeologist who's most memorable for his pet Simian (psyber-monkey) which rides around on his shoulder, but I didn't realise that when this detail emerged it lead to the creation of the popular 40k meme, Jimmy Space, you know, The Emperor's real name since he created the "Space" Marines.

The funniest part is that a lot of people originally assumed this was a retcon, until it emerged that Arkhan Land was actually named as the founder of the Land Raider in White Dwarf issue 129 in 1990. That's right, only three years after the creation of Warhammer 40k, this somewhat minor Tech Priest character had already stamped his name on both Space Marine vehicles. It's hilarious to consider that some of the oldest 40k lore surrounds this goofy-ass naming convention.

Not to say that Warhammer 40k doesn't also have some silly naming retcons. The Legiones Astartes project (which saw The Emperor make the Space Marines themselves, the 'Adeptus Astartes') was later revealed in the Valdor novel to be named after Amar Astarte, a human scientist who worked with The Emperor. Many previously assumed they were named for Astarte, a god of war worshipped in the ancient Mediterranean, which would make sense when you consider The Emperor is from ancient Anatolia. But nope, turns out they're just named after a person.

I guess it's not technically a retcon so much as a lack of info and unreliable narration. There's still so much we don't know in Warhammer 40k, and I, for one, am glad I don't have to say Raider Pattern Main Battle Tank whenever I want to refer to a Land Raider. It does make you wonder if there's anything else yet to be named for someone, though. John Primarch, creator of the Primarchs? Frank Chaos, the original Chaos god?

If you've never clocked it before, The Emperor is rather important in Warhammer 40k. Even those who don't really know the setting are adjacently aware of the fact that Warhammer people love to shout "For The Emperor!" at every available opportunity. Not only is he the figurehead of mankind, whose psychic presence is so significant that starships use him as a lighthouse, but he's really the inciting figure for the state of 40k's universe.

He's also enthroned on an ancient and nightmarish life support device called The Golden Throne, which has to consume 1,000s of psykers (psychics) everyday just to keep itself running. John Blanche, the artist responsible for much of Warhammer 40k's iconic visual tone, and who sadly passed away recently, originally produced "The Emperor Sits Upon His Golden Throne" back in 1987.

John Blanche himself recently said that the famous illustration is actually not of The Emperor, though:

"It was never meant to be the real Emperor. All these people queue up for generations, all these pilgrims, and they finally get to meet The Emperor at the top of the golden stairs, and he's not real. The real Emperor is a corpse in a big glass jar, kept in machines in the background."

Whether you think Blanche's art shows The Emperor or not, he's not often depicted in Warhammer 40k despite his importance. In fact, one of the few recent times I remember seeing him was on the cover of the first volume of The End and the Death, the final novel in the Horus Heresy series, though this artwork shows him sitting on The Golden Throne at quite a distance, and is obviously not an image of The Emperor's current state circa the 41st millenium. The Emperor has been shown a fair few times in 30k and The Horus Heresy, such as on the cover of one of the books I recommend at the end, but that's certainly not the case for his present state in 40k.

Well, in the most recent trailer for 40k's new edition (launching June 20), Games Workshop finally showed off The Emperor inside The Golden Throne, and yeah, he ain't looking too hot—although I suppose he's not too shabby for someone who's been on occult dialysis for 10,000 years. This is definitely the darkest trailer I've ever seen for 40k—it doesn't even try to deny the fact that The Emperor is a corpse god, calling him "The Carrion Lord of the Imperium", a title usually reserved for those slandering him in the setting.

But this is also the first time since John Blanche's artwork in 1987 (and other artworks such as the original Rogue Trader illustrations) that we've seen The Emperor's actual, current state in modern Warhammer 40k. The trailer does feature a few different versions of him as he seemingly writhes between potential states, but either way, he doesn't look in peak form. I'm surprised we got to see him at all, though, because the ambiguousness of The Emperor's condition on The Golden Throne is a key concept in 40k.

So what's all the fuss about? I'm about to get a little spoilery here, so if you plan to read the Horus Heresy, maybe stop. As mentioned, The Emperor is arguably the inciting figure in Warhammer 40k, an immortal man born in ancient Anatolia who shepherded humanity's ascension and expansion across the stars, but whose hubris ultimately led to the collapse of enlightenment and the never-ending dark ages of 40k.

It's hard not to consider Warhammer 40k as a very personal nightmare for The Emperor, a man who vehemently denied his divinity and touted the "Imperial Truth", that there are no gods, but is now trapped in a life support device and worshipped by the species he sought to free from the shackles of faith.

And there's nothing he can do about it, because if he were to step from the Golden Throne (not that he can), it would unleash a tide of daemons he's holding at bay due to his failed ambitions, onto terra, the throne world, and the astronomican (the lighthouse used to navigate the warp), would go out, leaving humanity separated, stranded, and easy to pick off, as it was in Old Night.

He never wanted humanity to rely on warp travel long-term (a form of FTL that requires humans to pass through the daemon realm of the Chaos gods), but because of certain happenings, all he can really do now is keep the lights on—it's fundamentally plan B.

If you want to know more about The Emperor, I recommend reading The Master of Mankind, though A Thousand Sons is the earlier novel that explains the extremely tragic incident that fundamentally begins the collapse of mankind and big E's ambitions.

There's an introductory text on the first page of Warhammer 40,000's first edition that's been rewritten for various contexts since, with phrases like "there is no peace amongst the stars" and "the laughter of thirsting gods" becoming cheerful taglines for the series as a whole. Now it's the trailer narration for the upcoming 11th edition, and it still goes as hard as it did in 1987.

It's cool to see so many shots of The Emperor himself, in varying states of decay. Maybe they depict his mummifying over the course of the 10,000 years he's spent sat on that thing, or maybe they're different versions of the way he looks based on whether you're a true believer in the God-Emperor, or a heretic who thinks he's a false corpse-god on a throne of lies. He sure doesn't look like he's having a good time either way.

There's a metal-as-anything glimpse into the Warp as well, with the Ruinous Powers and a couple of other gods showing up to the party. If I ever get around to running one of the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop RPGs, I'll show this to the players to get them on the right page.

Where the previous trailer focused on conflict between orks and space marines of the Blood Angels chapter on the planet Armageddon, this one takes in the bigger picture. Framed with the story of a pilgrim traveling to the Golden Throne and then joining the Astra Militarum, it bounces around the galaxy to show various factions in conflict.

The Adeptus Mechanicus take on necrons, the Salamander marines fight tyranids, and the Astra Militarum make a doomed last stand against Night Lords. Amusingly, the aeldari aren't shown at war with anyone. Instead we see one enjoying a rare moment of peace, in homage to a classic Jes Goodwin illustration of a dire avenger on the Biel-Tan craftworld from 40K's second edition.

The poor old t'au and drukhari don't get a look-in, though neither do the Leagues of Votann. I suppose since the genestealer cults are a separate army from tyranids again they technically don't get depicted either. It's a big galaxy, as they say, and there's time for more trailers before the new edition's out on June 20.

I love Wingspan, a birding-themed board game with a humdinger of a digital adaptation, but the hardest part about pitching it to board game skeptics is that they're rarely tantalized by the theme. "Why would I play a game about identifying God's most illustrious creations," they whinge. "I want to play games about exciting things, like purchasing hotels and English vocabulary." Well, I finally have the silver bullet I needed to shut those saps up: dragons.

On Thursday, a trailer dropped for the PC version of a sequel of sorts to Wingspan: Wyrmspan, which appears to play similarly but trades in all the tufted titmouses for wyrms and wyverns. As "an amateur dracologist," each player throws down cards with different point-generating effects while trying to build the biggest tower of synergies before the game is over. Like Wingspan, you can play in a group of up to five or go it solo.

I haven't played the physical version of Wyrmspan, but it has an impressive 8.0 rating on boardgamegeek, where it's also scored at a "medium light" complexity. Just to be clear, this isn't an expansion or an "expandalone" situation, so don't expect to plug in any Wingspan DLC you might have picked up—this is a new game with new mechanics.

I'm hoping its visuals are as lavish as the digital version of Wingspan, which, as PC Gamer's Jonathan Bolding noted in his review, boasts a "stunning attention to detail, and a layout that serves the experience of playing on a PC over mimicking the tabletop game." While it can be sufficient to play a facsimile of your favorite board game on Tabletop Simulator, it's always nice when a videogame adaptation stands on its own merits.

Wyrmspan has no release date just yet, but you can wishlist the game on its Steam page.

Tom Clancy's The Division, to give it its full name, has a lot more staying power than anyone would have originally credited it with. The gloomy post-apocalyptic shooter spawned a sequel, a mobile spin-off, a third game is still in development, and there's even a movie in the works—though the latter has been in limbo for years.

And now the pandemic-themed live service romp is being adapted for our tables in the form of Tom Clancy's The Division: The Official Tabletop Roleplaying Game.

I found both main entries to be serviceable shooters with a few good ideas slightly elevating them above the deluge of live service games—but they're both a bit forgettable, especially if you're not that enthusiastic about American survivalist porn. Which I'm not.

But there's still a hunger for this kinda thing, apparently. The Division 2 is still hosting new events and cross-promotions with other Ubisoft games (nothing says post-apocalyptic survival like doing some Avatar cosplay), as well as spitting out major updates.

Still! I wouldn't have assumed there'd be much interest in a TTRPG adaptation. The Division's setting is not exactly evocative, and as an RPG it's very by-the-numbers, all the loot and stats and character progression without any meaningful roleplaying systems.

I was wrong, though, because the TTRPG has absolutely demolished its—admittedly humble—pledge target of $58,206/£43,394. With 15 days to go, it's already at $383,572/£285,960. That's from just shy of 1,500 backers. Which, granted, isn't a vast number when you compare it to the most popular tabletop Kickstarters, but combined with the amount pledged this does put it comfortably within the platform's current top 10 for tabletop campaigns.

But having checked out what's on the table, I get it. The TTRPG lets you build agents who get dropped into "hostile territory" for some scraps and misadventures, using skills from the games like automated turrets and experimental technology to achieve their objectives. But more interesting to me are the roleplaying opportunities.

"Beyond the firefights, Agents must navigate fragile communities, deal with desperate survivors, and make hard choices to help rebuild a shattered society," the Kickstarter pitch reads. "This is where the roleplaying experience truly comes to life—every decision matters, not just how you fight, but who you trust, protect, or abandon.

"While the Diplomat excels in forging alliances and defusing tensions, and the Technician helps restore critical infrastructure—from clean water systems to improvised power sources—every Agent can influence the world around them, shaping relationships, securing resources and changing the fate of those they encounter."

Yes to all of this! While The Division's world never felt particularly scintillating, it absolutely still held promise. With the breakdown of society and all the infrastructure that once propped it up, it leaves lots of space for heroics and pragmatic decision making—but the games never seemed interested in delving into that, at least not in a meaningful way that gave players any sense of agency.

So it feels like the TTRPG contains a missing piece, completing the grim fantasy that The Division sets up.

That said, there are already countless post-apocalyptic tabletop settings that do this, so I'm not going to be rushing to grab one based on an Ubisoft game just yet, but I can absolutely see the appeal here.

Tom Clancy's The Division: The Official Tabletop Roleplaying Game is expected to appear in October 2026.

XCOM looms over turn-based tactics, and really, PC strategy gaming in general, the same way God looms over all us pathetic mortal mayflies. The best we can do is throw ourselves to the ground in prostration and hope it comes back to save us. Sadly, that's probably not happening at this point, but there is something exciting on the way for those willing to play a game sans video—a miniatures game sporting the XCOM name, which was unveiled last week for Firaxis's 30-year anniversary.

The announcement came in the form of an admittedly spartan reveal website, which has a logo and a sign-up sheet for a mailing list. It's got the logo style from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and as far as I can tell, there is truly no public information aside from that. Will it be a fully-fledged hobby wargame like Warhammer? Something smaller-scale, cooperative, or soloable? All we can do is guess, but Modiphius’s past games may offer some indication of what’s to come.

For one, the company has already done plenty of licensed videogame spinoffs, like the upcoming Doom Arena Board Game and miniatures games such as Fallout: Wasteland Warfare and Skyrim - The Adventure Game (the latter of which I didn't play per se, but I did paint up some Stormcloaks and Imperials so I could pretend they were all star-crossed lovers).

As tabletop news site Wargamer points out, there may be a clue in how the XCOM game is categorized on Modiphius's site. It's under the "Five X" line, sharing a tag with games like Five Parsecs From Home and Five Leagues From the Borderlands. These self-bill as "RPG-lite" skirmish games playable in co-op or solo modes, a format which sounds like it would lend itself great to an XCOM adaptation.

We'll have to wait for a more detailed reveal to draw any real conclusions about how the game will play, but it seems like Modiphius has a strong history with licensed games and the plastic goodies that come alongside them. I, for one, am eager to try and pass a miniature Muton off as my next Dungeons & Dragons character.

When I tried out the Slay the Spire board game in 2024, I was really impressed by how well it adapted the videogame to the tabletop—and especially its clever addition of a co-op mode (nearly two years before Slay the Spire 2 did it!).

I assumed, though, that it was a one-and-done box. The base game covers everything in the original Slay the Spire, there wasn't anything left to add. But now publisher Contention Games is back with a Kickstarter campaign for a new expansion, and it's drawing on an unusual source for its content: one of the game's most popular user-made mods.

Downfall is based on the beloved mod of the same name, with the same simple hook: what if you could play as the bad guys? The set will let you play as the Slime Boss, Hexaghost, and Guardian enemies, as well as the mod's one standard hero, the Hermit. Each comes with its own player board, full selection of cards, and miniature.

It also comes with new enemies and bosses to fight—including versions of the heroes from the base game—as well as extra relics, potions, colourless cards, and more.

I can't think of any other examples of a board game adaptation of a videogame basing expansion content on a mod (correct me in the comments if you can think of one!). It's certainly testament to the enduring success of Downfall—despite being fan-made, it practically holds the position of being an official add-on in the community's eyes, with an Overwhelmingly Positive rating based on over 2000 reviews on its Steam page.

If you choose to pledge on the Kickstarter page, you can get a copy of the new expansion, and you can also get a bundle including the base game if you don't own it. As ever with these board game campaigns, however, it's not cheap—it's $84 for just Downfall, $119 for a collector's edition with upgraded components, and $268 for the bundle with the collector's edition of the base game, and those aren't even the most expensive tiers.

So, is it worth it? Well, as I said in my impressions back then, I'm of two minds about the game. On the one hand it's about as perfect a recreation of Slay the Spire on the tabletop as you could want, and boasts tons of content and a really premium feel. On the other, it's so completely faithful that it's hard not to directly compare it to the videogame, which offers a far quicker, easier, and cheaper version of the experience.

Now that we have Slay the Spire 2 it's maybe even a harder question to answer. We now have a more modernised, updated sequel to play, and the board game doesn't include any of the changes or updates that people have been enjoying there. That may make it feel a little outdated today.

But if you are keen to add Downfall to your collection, you've still got until April 8th by my reckoning to back the Kickstarter. Alternatively, the more patient among you should be pretty safe waiting for it to come to retail—unlike many crowdfunded board games, the base game has been pretty widely available in stores over the last two years, so I'd expect about the same for Downfall.

Like most TTRPG actual-play series, Dimension 20 usually runs Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition—though they have recorded seasons where they roleplay using the Kids on Bikes and Kids on Broomsticks rules, as well as their own homebrew system. Their next season marks the first time they've partnered with a publisher to make official use of someone else's ruleset and setting, as they collaborate with White Wolf and Vampire: The Masquerade for a show called City Council of Darkness.

GMed by Brennan Lee Mulligan, the hardest-working man in actual-play, it's got an outstanding plot hook. The cast are all outcast vampires sent to the sticks to assert dominion over a town that's only just large enough to need its own undead representatives: Purpee, Oregon (population 18,000). "Between zoning disputes, bloodthirsty urges, and mandatory bake sales," says the official summary, "it's undead chaos in the quaintest hellscape imaginable."

Taking modern vampires out of their comfortable city habitat, where they have ready access to dark alleys, nightclubs, and well-stocked fetishwear outlets, is a promising premise for a fish-out-of water campaign. I see a lot of difficulties when it comes to finding highrises to brood on top of, and just generally living as a bloodsucking parasite without the faceless anonymity of a big city to hide in. "I dwell in the darkness" is all well and good, but not if you live in a town where everybody knows everybody. What We Do in the Shadows (the movie), squeezed a lot of juice out of the basic idea "what if vampires, but in little old New Zealand," and that's the vibe I get here.

City Council of Darkness will feature the core cast of Dimension 20 as players: Emily Axford, Ally Beardsley, Brian Murphy, Zac Oyama, Siobhan Thompson, and Lou Wilson. It starts on April 8 and runs for 14 episodes on subscription service Dropout, which you should already be paying for just to watch Game Changer if nothing else.

Another day, another payload of merchandise. This time it is pretty funny, though: Games Workshop just announced a coffee table book full of "sage wisdom and inspiring speeches" from every Warhammer 40,000 fan's favorite green morons.

The announcement on the Warhammer Community website reads, "Okay, ‘insightful’ might be a stretch, but it should come as no surprise that the Orks have some pretty great quotes when they spend so much time yelling at their enemies." It comes alongside a slew of new plushes and an "ultimate guide" book to Age of Sigmar, full of miniature photos and lore.

Words of Waaagh is a natural follow-up to the last book in this vein Games Workshop sold, Words of War, which was full of space marine quotes instead of ork quotes. I suppose I'd rather consult the wisdom of fungoid football hooligans than witch-burning, chainsaw-wielding failsons, but in both cases it seems safe to conclude these books will be short on actionable advice.

It also might yield mixed results, having a coffee table book dedicated to an in-joke guests will only understand if they're familiar with a niche miniatures wargame or its videogame adaptations. But hey, maybe you're hosting a potluck with a "Red Wunz Go Fasta" theme and need an appropriate conversation piece; I'm not here to judge.

There's all sorts of other merch on the same page. Water bottles, YouTooz figurines, McFarlane action figures, new books for the TTRPGs, a Darktide card game, metal posters, banners, a collectible helmet, and so on. It's a great time to be into Warhammer, especially if you're trying to recreate Warhammer World in your house before it officially comes to the US. Personally, I'm just waiting for Dawn of War 4.

Jervis Johnson is a legend in the world of tabletop game design. During almost four decades spent at Games Workshop he created Blood Bowl and wrote the core rules for Advanced Heroquest, co-created Necromunda, and wrote significant chunks of Warhammer 40,000's second edition, Warhammer Fantasy Battle's fourth edition, multiple iterations of Age of Sigmar, and several of the Warhammer Quest board games.

Though retired from Games Workshop these days, Johnson still contributes to projects like the Godzilla TTRPG and DreadBall All Stars, a kind of full-contact sci-fi basketball in contrast to Blood Bowl's ultraviolent fantasy football. While discussing the latter with FRVR, the topic of Games Workshop's prohibition against AI in its design process came up.

Johnson agreed with his old company's take, saying that while AI "can do stuff that's perfectly good in a middling kind of way, on the low-end," he hasn't been particularly impressed by anything he's seen and doesn't think it's up to a professional standard.

"I think that if you're going to do stuff at the top end," he said, "do properly interesting, creative stuff, then AI doesn't help you. It's a hindrance basically because it allows you to be a bit lazy and not put in the effort."

In Games Workshop's last half-yearly financial report, CEO Kevin Rountree explained that "we do not allow AI generated content or AI to be used in our design processes" and snuck in an amusingly personal complaint along the way, saying that "AI or machine learning engines seem to be automatically included on our phones or laptops whether we like it or not."

"Most of the stuff that I've seen doesn't seem to actually quite match up to the hype," Johnson went on to say. "I saw a great quote recently saying that AI is going to be like the asbestos of the internet and the computer industry. That we're going to be spending decades getting this stuff out again after we've used it a lot and found out it's actually a bit rubbish."

I like Pathfinder 2e. I like it quite a lot, actually. So much so, I've actually written about it on the site before—it's sorted a lot of my gripes with D&D 5e while leaning more heavily into the things I like about the system: Crunchy tactical combat, where teamwork makes the dream work, rather than the Paladin scoring a random crit.

And while this has turned me into one of those insufferable people who recommends Pathfinder 2e to their friends any chance they get (seriously, the three-action system will change your life) it also means I can spot a good deal like this latest from Fanatical, which is offering around $458/£369's worth of books for $15/£13.

The deal includes PDFs of the Beginner Box, but it also has Player Cores one and two, the GM Core, and the Monster Core—the equivalent of D&D's Player Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual respectively.

I should note, however, that if it's just rules you're after, then this bundle isn't necessarily what you're looking for—PF2e gives away all of its rules for free on sites like Archives of Nethys and Demiplane. It's still good to have something like the GM Core so you can flit through the information in the order it's meant to be presented, but for a homebrew campaign? You're already golden.

Even the options included in the Age of Lost Omens Character, World, and Ancestry guide can be found on Nethys for the low price of nothing.

The real juice here for the budding PF2e DM is in its adventure paths, which Paizo usually sells. There's the combat-heavy Abomination Vaults, Rusthenge, Crown of the Kobold King, The Fall of Plaguestone, A Fistful of Flowers (and its sequel, A Few Flowers More), Troubles in Otari, Little Trouble in Big Absalom, and The Threshold of Knowledge. There's also GM screens and placemats.

I also want to mention that these are all PDFs. If you're playing in something like Foundry, for instance, you might want to check if Pathfinder 2e already has an official module for purchase, as PF2e's Foundry integration is seriously very good. But if you're doing the classic pen and paper method? Well, this bundle's really a no-brainer.

The 26-item bundle includes everything I just mentioned. Here's what the 10-item bundle ($7/£6) and the three-item bundle ($1/£1) both include, though you also get everything included in both if you buy the full 26-item package.

Three-item bundle:

• Pathfinder Second Edition Beginner Box.
• Pathfinder Adventure: The Threshold of Knowledge.
• Pathfinder Second Edition Core GM Screen.

10-item bundle:

• Everything in the three-item bundle.
• Pathfinder Second Edition Player Core.
• Pathfinder Adventure: Troubles in Otari. .
• Pathfinder Flip-Mat: Troubles in Otari.
• Pathfinder Adventure: Little Trouble in Big Absalom.
• Pathfinder Advanced Player's Guide Character Sheet Pack.
• Pathfinder Character Sheet Pack.
• Pathfinder Adventure: A Fistful of Flowers.
• Pathfinder Second Edition Beginner Box: Remastered Edition.
• Pathfinder Adventure: The Threshold of Knowledge.
• Pathfinder Core GM Screen.

More than five years after a Kickstarter campaign for a board game based on Darkest Dungeon roared past its goal—ultimately finishing with $5.7 million on a $300,000 target—the project has collapsed. Red Hook Studios says board game publisher Mythic Games is not able to get the job done, so to make up for it as much as it can the studio is giving away all relevant games files to backers.

"As many of you know, the financial situation at Mythic Games has been strained for the past several years," Red Hook wrote on the Darkest Dungeon website. "We have been keeping an eye on the situation, hoping for the best. Unfortunately, at this point, Mythic Games is no longer able to manufacture or deliver the Darkest Dungeon board game.

"We put our trust in Mythic Games to deliver on their promises and uphold the Darkest Dungeon name. We won’t mince words, their collapse and inability to fulfill Wave 2 orders is an enormously disappointing development and we know it deeply affects many Darkest Dungeon fans."

Financial troubles at Mythic came to light—for Darkest Dungeon board game backers, at least—in July 2022, when the company asked backers to kick in more money to help cover production and shipping costs, which had been driven through the roof by a combination of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

This did not go over especially well with a significant portion of backers, as you might imagine, and while a first "wave" of games, with the English-language edition "Core Boxes, the Crimson Court expansion as well as the majority of the Pledge Manager add-ons," did ship to some backers, the promised "Wave 2" did not: The last Kickstarter update, announcing that production of board game miniatures would soon begin, was posted in February 2024.

Hello everyone, As many of you know, the financial situation at Mythic Games has been strained for the past several years. We've kept an eye on the situation, hoping for the best. Unfortunately, at this point, Mythic Games is no longer able to manufacture or deliver the Darkest Dungeon board game.

— @darkestdungeon.bsky.social (@darkestdungeon.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-01-27T16:32:28.584Z

Mythic Games itself is no longer operational, having been officially liquidated in December 2025, according to BoardGameWire. Mythic told the site that as a "final act" it would give backers the 3D printer files for the game's planned miniatures, but a former Mythic employee later said that was basically a fake-out, because Mythic didn't actually own the rights to the files and "never had the intention of releasing them." The employee added that they'd contacted Red Hook directly and had been given permission to release the files.

Red Hook's announcement essentially confirms this report, as all backers have now been sent an email explaining exactly what's happened, with a link to "all game files, including files of the rules, 3D models and more."

"We understand that nothing can replace the experience of receiving the full boardgame. Unfortunately, Red Hook has neither the board game manufacturing expertise nor have we had the ability to divert funds of the scale required to remove whatever obstacles Mythic has faced without endangering our own operations," Red Hook wrote. "We only hope that this final gesture can be a silver lining in an otherwise disappointing situation."

Warhammer is a decidedly British pastime—it did originate in the UK, after all—but I've met plenty of fellow Warhammer nerds right here in the land of opportunity. With all the political strife as of late, it even feels like the grim darkness of the far future is already here!

If you too find yourself in America and love games like Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40,000, and Age of Sigmar in all their tiny, plastic glory, you may want to take note of an announcement Games Workshop made last week. A new Warhammer World is opening on our side of the pond in late 2027.

If you aren't familiar, Warhammer World is a destination of sorts for fans of the tabletop game. It's a hobby store, gaming space, social hub, museum, and restaurant all rolled into one, complete with menu items like Bugman's Big Breakfast, Bugman's Ale, and the Bugman's Stack burger. Yeah, there are a lot of references to Bugman.

It's the closest you are getting to Disney World if you're the sort of person with a 4-digit playtime on Total War: Warhammer, and Games Workshop's blog post discussing the new venue acknowledges that the original Nottingham location is well-loved. "We’re not going to replicate it brick-for-brick, but instead build something equally uncompromising on quality and experience, something worthy of Warhammer’s rich settings and of course the title ‘Warhammer World.'"

The American location will be "based just outside Washington, DC" and "will be a flagship venue that celebrates Warhammer in all its forms." It's hard to know just how it will differ from the original store, but like all Americans, I'm a sucker for themed entertainment, so I'm hoping it turns out.

Tabletop Simulator developer Berserk Games has announced big changes coming this year, with "a series of major updates that we will be releasing for free with the goal of modernizing Tabletop Simulator and setting up the platform for success over the coming decade and beyond."

Version 2.0 of the popular virtual tabletop will include a significant overhaul of the interface, making it easier to play and more Steam Deck-friendly. We'll be able to switch between a "Play Mode" that is "designed to streamline gameplay and make the playing experience less cluttered and confusing" and an "Edit Mode" for "creators and power users who want expansive control over their creative process."

So far, so good. It's also hard to quibble with promises to improve the performance, graphics, online stability, and VR support. Some players aren't so impressed by the promise to implement a Creator Marketplace for user-generated content, which is to say: paid mods.

While you can buy DLC to play games like Zombicide in Tabletop Simulator, the Steam Workshop is where the real action is. It's full of unofficial mods recreating games like Uno and Settlers of Catan, as well as resources like D&D miniatures, all of which are available for free. The addition of a Creator Marketplace will, Berserk Games says, "expand the library of available Tabletop Simulator content without interfering with existing free Steam Workshop submissions."

Not everyone believes that promise, which is why the Steam comments are the way Steam comments usually are, and on the subreddit there's a doompost declaring that Tabletop Simulator is enshittifying into a Roblox-style marketplace. If modders are encouraged to monetize their work, the hypothesis goes, it'll draw the litigious attention of more board game publishers and that'll be it for unlicensed mods that let us play Advanced Heroquest or whatever. Sounds a bit cynical to me, but so does about 90% of what people post to Reddit.

Here we are, entranced once again by twinkling lights and the swelling of bell-chimes as we snuffle around like hogs for discounted board games. There's plenty of time over the holidays and plenty of goodies to surprise your loved ones with over the holiday season. Christmas in my house is almost always improved by a well-chosen board game and, having spent the past few years reviewing them for a living, I have a pretty good idea of which ones will go down well with different kinds of gamers.

Whether you're looking to get a board game with wide appeal for a family gathering, a themed game to suit the die-hard fan of a specific IP, or something that'll really test that board game veteran's mettle, there's a deal to pick from below. From classic wargames like Risk for a touch over $25, to Dragon-flavour point soup games like Wyrmspan for $65, there's really something for everyone below.

Whether the person you're buying for has been playing board games for years, or has only just discovered them, you should be able to spot something on this list to pique their interest. They'll be thankful not to have yet another themed Monopoly board taking up space on their shelf.

Quick links

• Throw Throw Burrito | $17 (save $8)
• Herd Mentality: Udderly Funny | $19 (save $6)
• Forest Shuffle | $22 (save $7.50)
• Risk | $25 (save $9)
• Carcassonne | $29 (save $13)
• Catan | $30 (save $25)
• Ticket to Ride | $30 (save $25)
• Cascadia | $34 (save $6)
• Mysterium | $44 (save $11)
• Finspan | $45 (save $5)
• Betrayal at House on the Hill | $51
• Wyrmspan | $65
• Everdell | $80

The deals

👉Shop all Amazon's game deals👈

If you've gotten this far in life without having gathered up these essential board game classics, I suggest you go away and think about the series of events that have led you to this point. Now with your own actual hard cash to spend, and the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales knocking at your door, it's imperative that you pad out your board game collection with what many consider to be the best board games of all time. Mostly me. I consider that.

• We're curating all the Cyber Monday PC gaming deals right here

"But Katie," I hear you say, "I already have some old board games. Why bother learning something different when I have all I need right here?"

Believe me, there's much more to life than Monopoly and Scrabble. With these all-time favorites at your disposal, you'll not only appear more well-rounded as an individual, but they'll also open a window to the foundations of modern board game design. Besides, there's nothing like shaking up a dust-caked collection with some absolute classics from a new genre for once. Here are my best picks for three essential Cyber Monday board game deals.

Quick links

• Catan | $30 (save $25)
• Mouse Trap | $17 (save $8)
• Quacks | $40

The deals

Catan is just $30 at Amazon (usually closer to $55), and for a game that helped popularize and spread Euro-style board games across the world, that's a lot of legacy for not a lot of cash. It's just seen a fancy refresh for 6th Edition, too, with larger cards and a clearer rulebook for better accessibility. If that floats your boat, then it might be a good idea to grab the incredibly well-received Seafarers expansion for $50, too.

It may not be as classic as Catan but Mouse Trap is just $17 right now. For kids that grew up in the late '80s and early '90s, it's going to bring back some memories. This one's more essential for households with one or more children milling around, but I wanted to get a broad spectrum on this little gift list as opposed to plowing you with economics-based games. Just in case you prefer something that requires a little more dexterity (at least to set up).

Alternatively, perhaps one for the teenagers, Quacks is an explosive press-your-luck game that's just $40 currently. Generally it's a little more expensive, though Amazon doesn't have it listed as a deal. It's just an overall great buy for the price. You'll get 100% of your money's worth while watching your family members absolutely bottle it on an otherwise great run, as they try to mix the most profitable potions.

👉Shop all Amazon's Cyber monday board game deals👈

Around the holidays, my mind slips back to cozy nights in with the family, eating good food, cracking jokes, and inevitably ending up in a pointlessly full-blown argument over some benign question in Trivial Pursuit. Having spent the past few years reviewing, analysing and playing board games to make a living, I've finally realised our mistake wasn't cerebral, nor was it social.

All we had to do was pick a different kind of board game, and all would have remained peaceful. At its core, creating a harmonious atmosphere for board game night is a case of removing opportunities for conflict. Sure, some players will find any excuse to cause an argument, but you can minimise the chance by choosing board game deals that lack direct conflict, and build teamwork.

• We're curating all the Cyber Monday PC gaming deals right here

It's important to note that co-operative board games won't be for everyone. Some people love working together to solve a mystery or build something cool, while many prefer that rush as they blow the other players out of the water with a higher point score.

The trick there is looking for games that avoid take-that actions, which can often result in vicious retaliation loops for the vindictive. Another option is games that involve obscured scoring—counting up right at the end means players can work at their own pace and don't feel pressured by visible point totals. Here are a few games I'd recommend this Cyber Monday.

Quick links

Minimal Conflict

• Forest Shuffle | $22 (save $7.50)
• Wyrmspan | $55 (save $10)
• Everdell | $60 (save $15)

Co-op

• Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective | $51 (save $9)
• Mysterium | $44 (save $11)
• The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth | $90 (save $30)

The deals

Minimal Conflict Board Games

Cooperative Board Games

👉Shop all Amazon's Cyber Monday board game deals👈

It's never not a good time for a spooky board game. In the lead-up to the holidays, sometimes a little murder mystery can really be a nice juxtaposition to those bright and sparkly end-of-year celebrations. Mysterium is just the ticket for enjoyers of the strange, dark, and mysterious, but who also enjoy a little bit of teamwork through the holidays.

For Cyber Monday, we're looking at a decent discount for Mysterium that's now down to $44 at Amazon. But, honestly, this 1920s supernatural tale is well worth the cost even at full price.

• We're curating all the Cyber Monday PC gaming deals right here

As an asymmetric game, Mysterium consists of a band of psychics and a single ghost player who is desperately trying to convey to them the location, suspect, and murder weapon involved in their untimely demise. The major issues are that they can only communicate through weird, twisted vision cards—no speaking allowed—and that they're suffering from a case of post-unalived amnesia.

No, I'm not joking, it says so in the rulebook (in so many words).

Mysterium is a board game for players who love mystery games, as the title might insinuate. It's also for those who have an overwhelming urge to decipher the roundabout meanings behind surrealist artworks, even when they make little to no sense to anyone. It's a guessing game at its heart, but most of all, it's a team-building exercise. At least, it's a team-building exercise for the psychics. The ghost usually takes an earful for offering up meaningless clues that send the other players down a rabbit hole and lose them the game.

It's a unique mashup of Clue/Cluedo and Dixit, and one that is super simple once you get your head around the concept. Just don't expect to be invited to Thanksgiving again if you play the ghost badly.

👉Shop all Amazon's Cyber Monday board game deals👈

Amazon has been killing it when it comes to board game deals. I should know, I'm practically searching for them on the daily. Call it a bad habit, but I've spent far too much money on board games in the past few years. Maybe this is why I can't afford a house. Thankfully, events like Cyber Monday roll around and, thanks to the masses of cheap board games, I can finally feel less guilty about padding out my board game collection with healthy deals, rather than padding out my credit card with more debt.

This year I've got a selection of classic and modern board game deals, everything from the grandfather of Eurogames, Catan, now down to just $25 at Amazon; to cheap and cheerful games that don't involve too much brainpower, like Throw Throw Burrito at just at just $10.

Whether you're a "sit back and hope that RNGsus will bless me" kind of board gamer, or the "this must be the most efficient engine of all time or else I will cry" sort, there's a board game deal for you below this Cyber Monday. And I've even put them in vague order of pricing, from low to high, for your convenience.

Quick links

• Throw Throw Burrito | $10 (save $15)
• Herd Mentality: Udderly Funny | $16 (save $9)
• Carcassonne | $31 (save $11)
• Forest Shuffle | $22 (save $7.50)
• Catan | $30 (save $25)
• Risk | $25 (save $9)
• Ticket to Ride | $30 (save $25)
• Cascadia | $28 (save $12)
• Mysterium | $44 (save $11)
• Finspan | $45 (save $5)
• Betrayal at House on the Hill | $45
• Wyrmspan | $55 (save $10)
• Everdell | $60 (save $15)

The deals

👉Shop all Amazon's Cyber monday board game deals👈

While Catan didn't begin it all, this legendary board game did usher the Eurogame genre into popular attention, helping it spread its economical tendrils all across the world at large. Today, it's still dominating board game shelves with its familiar red sunset. This deal on Catan's recent 6th edition just goes to show that there's still a demand for classic board games, especially if they're coming in at better than half price.

Usually sitting at around the $50 price tag, with our price matching software indicating the odd (but multi-day) spike up to the $55–$57 mark, spotting Catan 6th Edition for just $25 at Amazon is a godsend for fans that are looking to nab the newest refresh.

• We're curating all the Cyber Monday PC gaming deals right here

That's especially true when the last proper discounts we saw were closer to $35 and $40 back in September and early November, respectively. Sure it's a fair discount… but, if you really want to brag to your board game pals, now's the time to buy Catan while it's 55% off.

Catan is one of those games that requires a pretty specific number of players.

Three or four of your pals will take the role of settlers looking to start a new life on the isle of Catan. Their goal is to grow their colony, forming strategies around how to most efficiently gain resources and expand in order to win. It's a tried and tested model for a Eurogame, one that allows for all kind of playstyles, from turtling up and ignoring everyone, to forming diplomatic alliances and indulging in inter-colony trade.

It's an easy-to-learn, hard-to-master board game that's well worth your time regardless of your level prowess in the boardgame community; a newbie to the genre has as much chance of winning as a veteran, thanks to some clever balancing from the designer.

This edition even comes along with some lovely refreshed artwork, larger components, and much more visually centered rulebook with better illustrations to help new players understand what's what.

👉Check out all of Amazon's board game deals here👈

Trading Card Games are in an odd place. They're probably more popular than ever, with more playing them than ever. Given Magic: The Gathering's recent big focus on crossover events, which makers of Wizards of the Coast keep reporting as being phenomenally successful, they're probably making more money than ever.

At the same time TCGs are still competing for attention with the last decade's huge growth in the resurgent board game, miniatures wargame, and roleplaying game communities. They're also sharing space with digital card games, which give many people the strategic experience of playing a TCG without the social one.

But Magic's still a juggernaut, with only two long-term competitors really sticking around: The Pokémon TCG and Yu-Gi-Oh, neither of which are actual threats to Magic's throne. In Pokémon's case simply because its audience is by necessity either younger or—in many cases—simply speculatively collecting rather than properly playing. Because it's people actually showing up and playing the game every week that makes it have staying power and value long-term. The wisdom would be that it's hard to compete well enough with Magic that you'll actually survive in the world of TCGs, and the road from the '90s is littered with literally hundreds of dead ones that didn't measure up.

So the conventional wisdom would tell Riot Games not to publish Riftbound: The League of Legends card game—but they have, and perhaps the hunger is actually there this time. Their initial print run, despite a few errors, has vanished off shelves and is being scalped at incredible rates. The League of Legends name, the decade-plus driving force of Riot's success, has clearly got enough cachet to punch into the TCG market. Whether it has the staying power to stick with it is another question entirely—to do well it'll have to attract people who aren't solely interested in LoL, but TCG hardliners who're in it to show up and play the game at their local multiple times a month, or travel to conventions for tournaments. That's the kind of loyalty that makes TCGs succeed.

I think that Riftbound might have the juice to succeed in the current TCG space because of how it's played. It's a game-first approach that tailors the rules to how people most enjoy playing TCGs right now.

A match of Riftbound uses a 40-card deck that focuses on a single one of League of Legends' many Champions, who add their own unique cards representing themselves and their abilities from two of Riftbound's six Domains—the colors and theme of the cards you play and the rune resources you draw power from. Decks can't have cards that don't fit their core Champion. Like most modern TCGs, the deck doesn't include the resource you draw power from—those come into play two at a time, every turn, from a 12-card deck of colored runes. To play cards they're either temporarily exhausted or sent back to their draw pile as you play cards.

So far so good, right? If you play Magic you almost certainly recognize two elements that are important here because they're key to the popular Commander format. In Commander, you quickly and pretty reliably gain (and sometimes lose) resources to play cards with, and your entire deck is built around the identity and theme of a single character. It's commonly played very socially in multiplayer "pods" that vary from place to place.

Problematically for Magic, Commander is played with a 100-card deck that doesn't work with Magic's competitive formats, and some players even complain of it driving down interest in Magic's competitive 60-card formats. For these players, between the format conflict and the sometimes-unwelcome crossover events, Magic is fighting itself.

Riftbound, on the other hand, uses the one-deck format for its entire current ruleset, which is designed from the ground up to work in two-player duels, two-on-two team games, and four-player free for alls. It's designed so that the same decks you use for your social multiplayer format are also suited—or at least compatible with—more competitive play. It's also designed such that I think you could even play draft or sealed formats with that same flexibility. (Clutch for retaining players like me, who enjoy plopping down money on the exciting uncertainty of a sealed event but don't really want to collect.)

I might add, after playing a dozen matches of Riftbound, it actually does seem to work well that way. It's naturally scaling, with players fighting for control of battlefields that their own deck brings to the table each match. Controlling a battlefield brings points, and points bring victory, but the basic mechanics of Riftbound mean that only two players at a time can contest a battlefield, with an attacker either taking it over or retreating by the end of their turn. There are also relatively limited windows when you can play cards that react to or alter combats between units, but you can still invite chaos by bringing outside players into any given two-person conflict. In short, the madcap complexity of Magic-style priority rules and turns and phases don't come up nearly as often.

I never felt like I needed a judge at my own home game table, but I did come across plenty of interesting corner cases that required a look at the rules. In short, even when it's complicated and the choices are interesting, the overall format is fairly simple. It's a clear sign that Riftbound's core rules and initial sets were designed for both casual and competitive play.

What also makes me think that Riftbound could pull it off is that I don't question Riot's ability to push a good tabletop game. Their 2016 board game release Mechs vs. Minions was a damn good game. It hasn't been reprinted recently, and sells for several times its original price on the secondary market. Similarly, Riftbound primary publisher UVS has managed to keep their other card games alive in the crowded, cutthroat market.

But it's good enough that even if Riftbound doesn't take off it may well develop a cult community that keeps playing it—like the much-bereaved Android: Netrunner or killed-then-revived miniatures game Heroscape. For my part, I'll be watching Riftbound progress with interest. If they can keep up the pace of interesting game design, good releases, and meet demand they'll have a strong start. If they can draw interested players from other card games, especially ones who don't know jack about League of Legends' many characters, then I think they might be onto something.

Godzilla's been having a bit of a moment lately, hasn't he? Between the hugely successful Monsterverse movies in the US, and Japanese filmmakers knocking out smash hit reinterpretations Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One, the stink of Godzilla 1998 seems to have been entirely dispelled.

What better time, then, for the big fella to finally get his own tabletop RPG?

As revealed by our friends over at GamesRadar, IDW Games will be launching a Kickstarter for the game in March. One promising detail is the talent on the design side—it's being written by Gav Thorpe, Jervis Johnson, and Mark A Latham.

Those are three legendary names in tabletop gaming, particularly on the wargaming side of things. They've all done serious time in senior positions at Games Workshop on Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40,000, and more. Thorpe also worked on videogames including For Honor and Space Hulk: Deathwing, and Latham designed Modiphius' Skyrim wargame and The Walking Dead: All Out War. While their collective experience in designing RPGs is perhaps more limited, these are certainly guys who know how to make chucking dice fun.

Or rather, drawing cards in this case—as, unusually, the Godzilla RPG will use a standard playing card deck to resolve actions rather than dice. It looks like it'll be set in the universe of IDW's newest range of Godzilla comics, one in which super-powered agents of G-Force battle the big man himself and other familiar giant monsters.

I'm not caught up on this new 'Kai-Sei' era, but I've read a large chunk of IDW's previous Godzilla comics and it's put out a lot of really good stuff. I'm particularly a huge fan of Godzilla: The Half-Century War, but also really enjoyed its Kingdom of Monsters series and sequels.

Importantly, it's done a consistently good job of finding meaningful things for human characters to do while the giant monsters are crashing into each other, which seems like it'll be the key thing to get right for this RPG. Even once you crack the mechanics of how the party can fight something 70 times bigger than themselves, you can't just run a titan fight every session—there needs to be other interesting stuff going on along the way.

It looks like that experience in the comics has also secured the game a really strong visual style. The Kai-Sei era of comics has a brilliantly colourful, eye-catching look, and judging by the WIP cover of the RPG, that's going to carry over directly.

This'll be the first IDW Games project since 2021, and seems to be a relaunch for the brand. That could be promising in itself—if you'd be keen to see tabletop RPGs and board games based on its comic properties including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Rocketeer, Locke & Key, and 30 Days of Night, it'll be worth signing up to their new newsletter for updates.

Over the last few years, Games Workshop has been regularly releasing Warhammer Christmas merch in the run up to December, and there's just something so delightfully weird about the combo. From reindeer squigs to Space Wolf Christmas jumpers, it always makes me laugh seeing grimdark collide with holiday cheer.

Sure enough, Games Workshop has revealed a new selection for 2025, including perhaps its most blasphemous offering yet—a set of four baubles dedicated to the four daemonic gods of Chaos, so you can consecrate your tree to the forces of darkness.

For some reason though it's the twin-tailed comet tree topper that makes me chuckle the most. There's just something very funny about swapping out the star that guided the Three Wise Men to Jesus with a symbol that heralds the arrival of the warrior god-king Sigmar.

There's also a mug featuring the Red Gobbo (who you'll also soon be able to order a new Christmas miniature of), scarves and hats bearing Imperial symbols, and a stocking plastered in the logos of all the Warhammer 40,000 factions. And if you really want to freak out your family this Christmas, a luxurious oodie that makes it look like a diseased, slobbering daemonic mouth has erupted out of your belly seems like the ideal choice.

All of these should be up for preorder this coming Saturday, and then on general sale the week after that on the 15th.

If you're looking for a gift that's a bit less whimsical for the Warhammer fan in your life, hold tight—it's likely that Games Workshop will soon announce this year's range of Christmas army boxes, which offer discounted bundles of models for a selection of different factions across Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. I reckon they'll be announced this coming weekend, so keep an eye on the Warhammer Community website.

"You are what you eat," the old saying goes, and it's an adage that the Kroot are a lot more committed to than most. Among the crowd of iconic Warhammer 40,000 armies—your space marines, orks, tyranids, and more—these bird-like aliens are often overlooked. But I think they're secretly the coolest faction in the game.

They've always been unfairly overshadowed. Starting life as a little one-off piece of art in the 1998 Warhammer 40,000 rulebook, their real introduction was in 2001, as a subfaction of the then brand-new T'au Empire. The anime-inspired T'au grabbed attention with their mech suits, drones, and giant railguns, but even back then I was enchanted by the humble Kroot.

Unlike most factions in Warhammer 40,000, the technologically-advanced T'au would rather absorb than destroy—they'll take over your world, but then they'll invite you to join their empire rather than wipe you out. The Kroot are their greatest success story—a seemingly crude and aggressive species that happily joined up and has been reaping the benefits of jolly cooperation ever since. Except… that's not quite what's happening.

What motivates the Kroot most of all is food. Not because they're hungry (though they often are), but because it literally drives the evolution of their species. They're able to process the DNA of any creature they eat and pass elements of it down to their offspring, creating and reinforcing genetic mutations and improvements.

In this way, different Kroot packs have gained traits like chameleonic skin, hulking musculature, and even wings. Their leaders are literally called 'Shapers' because they oversee this process of controlled evolution. The problem is it forces them to always be seeking new sources of genetic diversity, lest they become trapped in evolutionary dead-ends—like the dog-like Kroot Hounds and lumbering Krootox.

So, how do you go about gaining access to as much varied DNA as possible? You head out into the galaxy and get into a lot of fights—and then eat all the people you kill!

It's that that led them to join up with the T'au, rather than any belief in the empire's grand philosophy of the Greater Good. But the T'au's wars also aren't enough for them. In secret, though it is forbidden, they continue to send out hunting packs into the galaxy to work as mercenaries for all and sundry—sometimes even in conflict against the T'au—to get as wide a buffet as they can.

That's what I think is so fun about the Kroot. Rapidly evolving cannibal bird men are cool to start with, but it's their pragmatism that makes them so unique. In a setting all about extremist ideologies going to war with each other, the Kroot just want to get some meat and get out. They don't hate, they don't hold grudges, they don't want to rule the galaxy—they're just getting on with their own thing.

They're the salt-of-the-earth blue collar workers of Warhammer, earning a living, staying under the radar, and taking advantage where they can while all around them more powerful people are screaming about heresy and the apocalypse. Given half a chance, they'll get along with anyone, easily adapting to different alien languages and technologies as they ply their trade.

Warhammer 40,000 is all about pushing things to their most absurd extremes, but in the midst of all that, the Kroot are refreshingly… relatable. It certainly says something that the most normal dudes in this setting are a bunch of birds that want to eat you and steal your DNA, but it's that contrast that makes them so likable.

And they're a great vehicle for hinting at a wider galaxy. Even just the idea that there's a market for alien mercenaries out there is tantalising—it suggests rather more cooperation and communication out on the fringes than the Imperium would like to think. More recently, the Kroot's magpie approach to tech has become a part of the miniatures and rules. Seeing one wielding an alien weapon called a "Dvorgite skinner" just gets the mind racing. Who are the Dvorgites? Why are they so into skinning people? Wait… or is it a gun that skins Dvorgites?!

Tidbits like that were introduced as part of a major refresh of the Kroot miniatures range last year—their first in the 20 years since they were originally released. Expanding on both their visual identity and their presence in the rules, it was a very welcome set of kits. But the Kroot remain in the T'au's shadow—bigger than ever, but still just a subfaction in the empire's codex rather than their own dedicated army.

It's an injustice! Personally, I think they've always deserved to lead a Codex: Mercenaries book. It could detail an army with Kroot at its core, but also pulling in appropriate models from other factions, and some new alien units drawing from all the wild edges of Warhammer 40,000 lore. Give me ork Blood Axes, eldar corsairs, and renegade squats fighting alongside jokaero weapon-smiths, exodite dinosaur-riders, and rogue Men of Iron, all in one army of deadly freelancers!

Alas, my dream shows no signs of coming true any time soon—but there is one thing on the horizon for Kroot fans to look forward to. It looks like they'll be playing a major role in Owlcat's upcoming Warhammer 40,000 RPG Dark Heresy, with not only a Kroot party member, but what seems to be a whole zone themed around them. Perhaps this'll finally give them the wider recognition they've always truly deserved.

Ok, I'm done—now you can head to the comments and tell me why space marines are actually way cooler.

Content warning: This article includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, help is available from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (US), Crisis Services Canada (CA), Samaritans (UK), Lifeline (AUS), and other hotlines.

Earlier this week news broke of the death of Daniel 'Danya' Naroditsky, a 29 year-old chess grandmaster who was also a popular teacher and commenter in the increasingly online world of chess. The player's family announced Naroditsky's "unexpected" death in a statement that went on to describe him as a "cherished member of the chess community, admired and respected by fans and players around the world."

Naroditsky's body was discovered by a friend. Police have said they are awaiting toxicology results to confirm whether the cause of death was an accidental overdose or suicide. They do not suspect any criminal activity.

Naroditsky was a serious talent: an under-12 world champion who earned the grandmaster title in his teens, a US junior champion, an author and columnist on the game, and someone whose charm and easy manner found a large online following.

In the days since his death, however, the chess world has focused on a darker side of Naroditsky's online life. In his final Twitch stream, Naroditsky referenced cheating allegations that had repeatedly been levied against him by another grandmaster, denying them and discussing the toll they'd taken on his life. In his final YouTube video he is notably distressed and haggard towards the end.

Those cheating accusations are now at the centre of what is becoming an ugly row, with the chess world's great and good seemingly ready to go to war: and determined that one individual faces consequences.

The accusations

In chess, there are few players like the Russian grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik. Kramnik is a former Classical and undisputed world champion, one of the greatest players of the modern era, and in recent times has become obsessed with rooting out cheating in chess.

Cheating is an incendiary accusation in any game, but in chess the problem is that we all walk around with a supercomputer in our pocket. You could sit down opposite Magnus Carlsen, the world's greatest player, and as long as you had Stockfish on your phone beat him handily in every single game.

Obviously IRL tournaments have safeguards to ensure such things can't happen (and accusations of cheating in chess existed long before the smartphone era), but when it comes to online tournaments in particular it's nearly impossible to control. A huge amount of the modern game, online at least, comes down to the personal integrity of players. And it means that accusations of cheating often come backed-up with statistics and 'analysis' to try and prove the point.

Chess now has a whole online ecosystem where players can make more from their online presence than the actual FIDE tournaments. Like many esports pros, contemporary grandmasters double-up as influencers and personalities, and like every other ecosystem they chase audience engagement. A topic like cheating is box office in this context, something that has the potential to explode into the mainstream (as it did with Hans Niemann/Carlsen), and attracts a large audience wondering if they've found the next big scandal.

In other words, there are perverse incentives in contemporary chess for accusing other players of cheating. Which is not to suggest that all accusations are insincere, but it does feel like if a player starts performing spectacularly well (as Niemann did in the runup to the Carlsen scandal) the first thought isn't "wow this guy's made a leap" it's "did he cheat?"

Kramnik first accused Naroditsky of cheating in October 2024. Naroditsky was not the first high-profile player Kramnik accused of cheating nor the last: three months ago he made a video accusing world number two and five-time US champion Hikaru Nakamura of cheating, after Nakamura went on 46-game streak without losing.

But Kramnik pursued his allegations against Naroditsky over an extended period of time, making multiple videos about his games, alongside personal attacks on social media.

In Naroditsky's final stream he said: "Unfortunately, ever since the Kramnik stuff, I feel like if I start doing well, people assume the worst of intentions. The issue is the lingering effect of it."

Last year Naroditsky posted a video accusing Kramnik of trying to "destroy my life" and causing "emotional and physical harm." On the C-Squared podcast he said he assumed Kramnik would make "three or four crazy, delusional videos" and then move on. "Unfortunately, the opposite happened, and it became apparent to me that this is no longer a case of me being next in line, but a sustained, evil and absolutely unhinged attempt to destroy my life." He went on to call Kramnik "one of the most wicked people I have ever dealt with."

Following the news of Naroditsky's death, and I do find this somewhat unbelievable, Kramnik doubled-down on his accusations.

"Too high price paid," wrote Kramnik on X. "But if I was the only person shouting about obvious long term problems of Danya becoming alarming, requiring urgent measures from people around, while 'friends' only cared about hiding it and erase evidence, it's rotten to the core."

The chess world wakes up

The world chess governing body FIDE has announced it intends to take action against Kramnik, with president Arkady Dvorkovich saying that the case will be referred to its ethics and disciplinary committee, which has the power to ban players for life.

Quite outside of that, the disgust among the game's top players is evident. Former world champion Magnus Carlsen said Naroditsky's treatment was "horrible." Hikaru Nakamura called Kramnik "a disgrace to chess", adding "Kramnik can go fuck himself… Kramnik can go rot in hell."

Indian grandmaster Nihal Sarin wrote on X that Kramnik "needs to pay for what he's doing ... The relentless, baseless accusations and public interrogations [Naroditsky] faced in recent months caused him immense pressure and pain.

"This has to stop. When respected figures spread unfounded allegations without accountability, real lives are destroyed. Daniel's smile faded after the attacks began. We all saw it. The chess world has lost one of its brightest lights: someone who made our game accessible to millions."

"In my personal view what was done and happened to Naroditsky was just shockingly and disturbingly evil and horrific," said grandmaster Wesley So on X, tagging in Kramnik. "You wouldn't wish that to happen to your worst enemy. Let's say for a moment that Danya cheated (which I never believed). Would it be worth it to ruin a beautiful young life over a game? What was his soul worth?"

For his part, Kramnik told Reuters: "I'd rather tell the story in whole, no wish commenting on Emil Sutovsky statement, but will comment on FIDE president [Arkady Dvorkovich] statement, if it will appear."

Kramnik also indicated on X he was planning to take legal action against "all those falsely blaming me", accused the "chess mafia" of orchestrating events, and posted images of some messages he'd received: "Already hundred such criminal acts, received, legal team informing the police, letter to the Criminal Court getting ready in few hours. Whatever happens next, all those falsely blaming me will be legally responsible."

Beyond chess

FIDE has expressed its condolences to Naroditsky's family, and says it will honour him in future with a special award.

Naroditsky's mother spoke to the Daily Mail about the accusations against her son. "There was nothing more important to Daniel than his dignity and his name as a chess player," said Elena Naroditsky. "And the ex-world champion was trying to say he's a cheater.

"Daniel tried to defend himself so much. The whole world was on Daniel's side. He played more and did more and more because he was trying to prove that he's not what he was accused of. It's a tragedy. He was my dearest son. He was 29."

Warhammer is enjoying about as big a renaissance of popularity as it's ever had, with a tabletop wargaming boom, popular videogames, and even a TV series or two on the way. But if you're a newcomer to Games Workshop's worlds, it's still not the easiest thing to wrap your head around.

With three different core settings and decades of accumulated lore, figuring out what's what in Warhammer can be seriously confusing. If your curiosity's been piqued by Total War: Warhammer or Space Marine 2, but you're not sure where to start, never fear. I've put together just the primer for you, based on my 20 years of experience reading army books, painting miniatures, and geeking out over the latest Dan Abnett novels.

These quick and easy overviews of the three Warhammer universes will help you find your feet. From there, you'll be ready to start wiki-diving and novel-reading…

Warhammer 40,000

Notable videogames: Darktide, Mechanicus, Dawn of War, Space Marine, Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters, Boltgun

Notable tabletop games: Warhammer 40,000, Kill Team, Necromunda, The Horus Heresy

What's it about?
In the far, far future of the 41st millennium, humans live spread across the entire galaxy, as part of a grand space empire called the Imperium. Things aren't rosy, however: technology and culture are stagnant, thanks to an oppressive religion and totalitarian rule, and humanity is beset constantly by outside threats.

That includes the followers of the dark gods of Chaos, as well as aliens such as the robotic Necrons, rampaging Orks, and all-devouring Tyranids. Serving as mankind's protectors are the Space Marines—genetically-engineered, power-armoured super-soldiers.

Warhammer 40,000 combines sci-fi (taking particular inspiration from Dune) with fantasy elements like sorcery and demons. That's why many of the factions map to traditional fantasy races—such as the Eldar (elves), Votann (dwarves), and Grots (goblins).

The tone is bleak and grim, but also satirical and funny. Everything in the Warhammer 40,000 setting is dialed up to 11 with the aesthetics of a heavy metal album cover, and it's very much intended to be as absurd as it is badass.

Anything else?
You may have heard of the Horus Heresy—a sub-setting that has its own wargame and, most importantly, an enormously popular (and simply enormous) series of novels. It takes place in the year 30,000, and concerns a civil war inside the Imperium that essentially brought an end to its golden age.

The war pitted "loyalist" Space Marines against those corrupted by Chaos, and much of the narrative concerns the interactions between the Primarchs—the leaders and progenitors of the various Space Marine legions (which later become the chapters of Warhammer 40,000).

Where should I start?
Co-op shooter Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is a great introduction to the tone and feel of the setting without being too much of a lore dump. Its premise pitches gangs of (relatively) normal humans against one Chaos cult in a hive city, so you don't need to understand the scope of an entire galactic war to get into it.

If you fancy doing some reading, I recommend the novel Honourbound—similarly, it follows a lowly group of human soldiers in way over their heads, rather than dropping you right into the pomp and politics of a Space Marine chapter.

Where can I find out more?

• Warhammer 40,000 wiki
• Warhammer 40,000 home page
• Warhammer 40,000 online store

Warhammer: Age of Sigmar

Notable videogames: Storm Ground, Realms of Ruin

Notable tabletop games: Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, Warhammer Underworlds, WarCry

What's it about?
Gods and their followers vie for supremacy across the Mortal Realms—eight connected worlds floating in the void. Sigmar, a god of lightning and war, sends out armies of his Stormcast Eternals—towering warriors reforged in his image out of human souls—to try and protect the realms from sinister undead, rampaging monsters, and particularly the forces of Chaos, barbarian hordes that worship dark gods.

Age of Sigmar was created as a new Warhammer setting following the canonical destruction of the world of Warhammer Fantasy. Though it contains dark and horrific elements, its overall tone is much more mythic and hopeful than either Warhammer 40,000 or Warhammer Fantasy, and it takes significant inspiration from Norse mythology.

Many of the factions and species common across the Warhammer settings appear in Age of Sigmar, but in reimagined forms. The Idoneth Deepkin, for example, are elves, but live beneath the sea, and raid coastal settlements to steal their souls. The Kharadron Overlords are dwarves, but have become steampunk airship pirates, sailing the skies of the Realms.

Anything else?
Age of Sigmar actually takes place in the far future of the Warhammer Fantasy setting. Following the apocalypse known as the End Times, fragments of the world and its magic coalesced in the void to create the Mortal Realms, and many of the gods and major characters—such as Nagash, Teclis, and Sigmar himself—are the same beings that appear in Warhammer Fantasy. Some factions even survived the jump pretty much as-is, such as the Seraphon, who are still recognisable as the original Lizardmen.

Where should I start?
Unfortunately we're still yet to get a great Age of Sigmar videogame, but it does have an excellent tabletop RPG. Soulbound offers a great, accessible introduction to the setting, and if you've got a group that's keen, you can delve into it even more by having your own adventures in it.

But if TTRPGs aren't your scene, there are some really fun novels you can get stuck into. Gloomspite is my personal favourite, but be warned—it gets pretty horrifying. You'll never look at goblins the same way again… For a gentler introduction more focused on the setting's poster boys, the Stormcast Eternals, I really enjoyed Soul Wars—a tale of warrior-wizards trying to stem a tide of hostile ghosts.

Where can I find out more?

• Lexicanum wiki
• Age of Sigmar home page
• Age of Sigmar online store

Warhammer Fantasy

Notable videogames: Total War: Warhammer, Vermintide, Chaosbane

Notable tabletop games: Warhammer Fantasy (now defunct), The Old World

What's it about?
Once again we have a human empire (in this case, imaginatively named the Empire) beset by threats on all sides including worshippers of the dark gods of Chaos, but Warhammer Fantasy takes place in a more traditional, Tolkein-esque fantasy world—albeit one mashed up with various real world nations, periods of history, and pop culture.

That means raging battles between stubborn dwarves, haughty elves, rampaging orcs, the Arthurian-inspired knights of Bretonnia, vampires that look straight out of a Hammer horror movie, and more. As in Warhammer 40,000, all that's coloured by darkness and dread, but also absurdity and humour.

Warhammer Fantasy is the original, first Warhammer setting, and much of both Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar are directly based on it. It's where we first got the Skaven (everyone's favourite ratmen), the pantheon of Chaos and their daemons, the eight winds of magic, orcs that talk like football hooligans, and even the eponymous Warhammer itself, Sigmar's mighty weapon Ghal Maraz.

Anything else?
Though the Warhammer Fantasy setting was officially destroyed in the apocalyptic End Times event, it retained a place in the hearts of fans—especially thanks to the popularity of the Total War: Warhammer series. Eventually, Games Workshop decided to revive it as The Old World, a new tabletop game set a few hundred years before the period depicted in those games. That means that while it's mostly recognisable, it does have some major differences, such as the absence of certain factions. Expect this to be the new default version of Warhammer Fantasy seen in games and other licensed adaptations going forward.

Blood Bowl—Games Workshop's popular game of fantasy American football—exists in a sort of nebulous alternate version of the Warhammer Fantasy setting. It shares many of the same factions and species, but dials things much further into the realm of humour and parody.

Where should I start?
As long as you enjoy its unique brand of strategy, the Total War: Warhammer series of videogames might genuinely be the best introduction to Warhammer Fantasy ever made. Covering pretty much every faction and corner of the world, the three games are absurdly rich with lore for you to discover at your own pace when you're not busy conquering all before you.

When it comes to novels, you've got to go back to a classic—the Gotrek and Felix series, a sprawling saga of a dwarf desperate to find glorious death in battle and the man honourbound to follow him into ever more dangerous peril.

Where can I find out more?

• Warhammer Fantasy wiki
• Warhammer: The Old World home page
• Warhammer: The Old World online store

In 1992, Games Workshop was subject to a management buyout backed by a private equity firm, saddling it with massive amounts of debt. In the years that followed, the company looked at players' wallets like a dog looks at a string of sausages. It was not a good time to be a young lad with a dream of some day owning an army of Blood Angel space marines.

But before that was a halcyon time when Warhammer 40,000 had a reputation for being about wacky warbands rather than epic armies that cost an arm and a leg to acquire. A time when nobody expected you to have the right models because half the things in the rulebook didn't even have models yet. That said, the first edition of Warhammer 40,000 was supposedly a complete mess rules-wise—borderline unplayable without a degree from Wargame University. How true are these things?

To find out I dove into the rulebook and played 40K's first edition. Just how different were things back in 1987, the year that gave us other such significant cultural events as Ronald Reagan's speech challenging Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, and also Beverly Hills Cop 2?

The first thing people will tell you about Warhammer 40,000 first edition, subtitle: Rogue Trader, is that it suggests you play with a "Games Master," an amiable third-party who can settle rules disputes, control neutral units, keep track of hidden troops, and help decide where to place the hills made of styrofoam painted green. Combined with an emphasis on having a narrative for each scenario and a loosey-goosey approach to concepts like balance, this makes 40K seem more like an RPG to players brought up on the competitively balanced miniatures gaming of today.

The truth is that suggesting you play with a referee wasn't uncommon in old school wargames, and also that lots of people didn't use them anyway. The older guys at the gaming club I joined as a kid played 40K without Games Masters, and used army lists from White Dwarf magazine and the many supplements for first edition to play it in a way that would be familiar to anyone who saw 40K in its subsequent editions. They had smaller but still fairly uniform armies of space marines and orks and eldar, and they lined them up on opposite sides of the table to shoot at each other. People in the past put their trousers on one leg at a time, just like us—even in the unimaginably distant time of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

What was different was the rules. Playing today, a bunch of things stand out as being unique. One is the emphasis on facing, a detail later editions largely ignore in favor of having everyone able to spin freely and aim at anything in a 360-degree arc around them. In first edition you can only shoot in a 90-degree arc in front of you, and you get one free 90-degree turn per move. If you want more than that you have to pay half an inch of movement for every subsequent 90 degrees or part thereof.

This means flanking actually matters. Playing the Battle at the Farm, the orks-vs-marines scenario that comes with the rulebook, I positioned my orks to come at the marines from two angles. When the marines took out a squad attacking from the left, other marines still facing in that direction couldn't do anything about the orks coming at them from the right until next turn when they had a chance to pivot.

My opponent, who plays the current edition of 40K (I dropped out years ago and mostly get my fix from the videogames and books), was charmed by this and wished it was a rule that had stuck around. He said the same about the way troops could elect to stand-and-shoot when charged, getting a panicky shot off at a penalty, and about blast templates for explosive weapons, which are just fun to place over three potentially doomed guys.

A less charming difference was the Reserves phase, a common feature of the early Warhammer family of games, in which units who hadn't shot and weren't in combat could take an extra move to help them get closer to the action. Later editions would collapse that into the Movement phase—a sensible simplification.

Another difference was the stat line, which in common with early editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battle gave everyone scores for Intelligence, Cool, and Willpower. Intelligence determined which equipment a unit could operate, Cool was rolled on to resist psychological effects like fear and terror, and Willpower was for using and resisting psychic powers. Another case where simplification was a clear win.

Looking at the stats for our troops, space marines seemed a lot closer to baseline humanity than they are now. They even had a Toughness of 3 like an ordinary Imperial soldier, though that was quickly bumped up to 4 in one of the many White Dwarf articles adding to and revising 40K.

Our battle ran smoothly, though we didn't have any vehicles and so avoided one of the more complex parts of the system. Vehicles have to worry about their Turn Radius Ratio, a number you multiply by their Speed to determine the radius of the arc they turn on while moving a distance equal to said Speed. No, thank you.

The marines' leader, represented here by a chibi version of the marine from the cover art I picked up in a Warhammer store in Shinjuku, took some early shots from the orks but managed to survive the rest of the battle on a single Wound point by using the follow-up rule to always be in combat—since you can't fire into combat in first edition and he was an absolute machine in melee, he took out half the orks by himself.

Given first edition's whimsical approach to balance it's not surprising the orks lost, and not just because I was playing them. Their army's worth almost 100 points less. But since this was designed to be your first game of 40K, it's worth letting the "good guys" get in a win since so much of the game's storyline is about stomping them into the dirt.

The 40K of 1987 is different to the way it's played today, with less minis on the table and more individualization among them—especially with the random equipment lists full of oddities, like Inquisitors having a 90% chance of starting the game with a pocket-sized torture implement called a porta-rack. Games like it are still around, though. It feels more like an ancestor of Games Workshop's skirmish games. Rather than being lost in time, the spirit of 40K first edition has been preserved, only now it's called Necromunda.

Cards Against Humanity is a party game where the humour revolves around fill-in-the-blank statements on cards, which players then complete with taboo or offensive terms. It's a very fun game, if you get the right kind of group together, and frankly a little bit of a tonic in a world where censoriousness feels like a passion project for some.

The company behind the game has now announced Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke, a special edition where every card explains why it is funny. The reason? This makes it an "informational product" rather than a game, meaning it is "100% EXEMPT FROM DONALD TRUMP’S STUPID TARIFFS!"

I'm going to warn you in advance, in case it's not clear, that the people behind this really don't like Donald Trump. So read on at your own risk.

"Trump is Going to Fuck Christmas" opens the announcement, before going on to explain that "like a teen girl at a beauty pageant, Christmas is in grave danger because of Donald Trump.

"In stores across America, the price of toys, games, clothes, and food are skyrocketing, all thanks to our demented president and his dumbass tariffs. But what if you didn’t have to surrender a chunk of your Christmas budget to Trump and his cabinet of ass-kissers and ball-fondlers?"

Well now you can avoid that by buying Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke for Christmas. Pre-orders are live now for $25 until October 15, after which they won't make any more, and 100% of the profits go to the American Library Association in order to help fight censorship.

So for example, one card in Cards Against Humanity says "This week's mass shooting." This now comes accompanied by the following explanation: "America experiences so many mass shootings and so normalizes them that the non-specificity of this joke heightens its comedic realism. Sad fact: this card was once 'This year's mass shooting.'"

Every joke is now accompanied by an explanation of "why it's funny, and any relevant social, political, or historical context." You can't play Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke, but being a "historico-philosophical analysis that is very serious and definitely not a game" gets that all-important classification of "information material" and thus means no tariffs (the cards are printed overseas). Brilliantly, the company has already obtained a ruling to this effect from US Customs and Border Patrol.

Then there's an FAQ, which contains some gems such as: "What if DHS Secretary and Dog Murderer Kristi Noem gets mad and decides that Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke is not informational material?" Yes, Noem actually did kill her 14 month-old dog Cricket.

Answer: "She can fuck right off, because we got a binding ruling from Trump’s own government that confirms this product is informational and 100% exempt from his stupid tariffs."

The only bum note is that this is not available for overseas customers: "This is an American promotion for freedom-loving, tariff-hating Americans."

This is not the first time that the Cards Against Humanity lot have picked a fight with the Trump administration. In 2017 it bought land in Texas on the Mexican border, purely to make it more difficult for Trump to build his beloved wall. Last year it sued Elon Musk for $15 million for encroaching on that same land. Like the game, it's maybe not big or clever. Sure is funny though.

Warhammer 40,000 is big. Really big. You may think Hitman 2 takes up a lot of space on your hard drive, but that's just peanuts compared to Warhammer 40,000. This is a setting where multiple entire chapters of space marines can be lost, whether they're deliberately expunged from all records like the second and eleventh legions were, or just go missing like the Crimson Axes.

The Steel Confessors are an interesting example, because they didn't vanish in the lore, but out here in the real world of primary sources. While references to them in White Dwarf magazine and the Index Astartes exist, the main source of detail about the Steel Confessors was a flimsy pamphlet handed out at the official Games Day & Golden Demon convention in 2005. Since nobody could source a copy of it, all the detail contained within was basically a big "citation needed" and has been a point of contention in the 40K fandom for 20 years.

Until a Discord user called Guy posted blurry photos of the official programme from Games Day & Golden Demon 2005, confirming the Steel Confessors were a legit chapter, that their homeworld really was named after the Finnish national epic Kalevala, and that planet had its own psychic choir and a vast manufactorum. What was previously thought fanon is now canon—as much as anything is in a setting as vast, apocryphal, and subject to change as 40K.

"A miracle! The lost wisdom of the ancients!" declared TheBladesAurus on the 40kLore subreddit. "More seriously, fantastic work. That's one of the things that we've had to take people's word on for years." "BROTHERS! REAL ANCIENT LORE HAS BEEN RECOVERED", added a scholar going by the name Doopapotamus. "TONIGHT, WE PARTY PRAISE THE EMPEROR LIKE IT'S 0.999.999.M29".

Go by official prices and you'll get the wrong idea about how expensive it is to get into Warhammer. None of the armies being brought out weekly at my local wargame club cost full price. Between third-party retailers, mail-order discounters, Facebook marketplace, secondhand stores, bootleg Chinese recasts, 3d-printing, and going halfsies on a boxed set with your mate who wants the space marines when you just want the tyranids, it costs less than you think to put together an army of little guys. You can even make them yourself.

This is what the Poorhammer community is dedicated to, and it's an inspiring example of DIY ingenuity. One of my favorite examples is an ork submarine made out of cardboard and rubbish, with a Pringles can as a significant part of its structure. Orks are a gift to the Poorhammer player, with their junkyard aesthetic perfectly suited to modeling things out of leftovers, as is the melty and mutated vibe of a Chaos army.

Terrain is the other thing you can easily make on the cheap by recycling rubbish. The traditional Warhammer hill is two or three layers of packing styrofoam glued together and painted green, but I've also seen a lot of ingenious things converted from spare sprues after miniatures have been removed from them. Cut those up and glue them back together and you can make excellent brick and plank walls, as well as the ruins and rubble delightfully nicknamed spruins.

Old heads will remember when Games Workshop's White Dwarf magazine encouraged using stacks of books to make hills and contained a template for making a cardboard Baneblade tank, as well as showing off a grav tank made from an old deodorant stick. To be fair, they're still on board with this kind of thing, even posting on the Warhammer Community website about how to make your own unit fillers.

(Tournament players may get their knickers in a twist about unofficial models, but the competitive scene is its own weird niche and it's best to pretend they don't exist. Nobody at a casual gaming club is going to complain about your proxies and "counts as" substitutions.)

Though the prices are way out of date and the whole thing's been consigned to the Internet Archive, the Hipsterhammer blog used to be another great source for ideas about building a Warhammer army on a budget, with suggestions on cheaper minis you could substitute from other manufacturers. Glue some spikes on Vikings from a historical wargame and put them in your Chaos army, why not? It was also an excellent source of inspirational mood boards and maybe the most insightful thing ever written on Slaanesh.

Games Workshop is adamant that Warhammer is more than just a game—it's a hobby. Assembling and painting and kit-bashing an army of little guys, they say, is as important as putting them on a table and rolling a million dice to figure out how many of them die. Inevitably that leads to players thinking about all the ways we could save a few bucks by doing it ourselves. Poorhammer DIY projects are just another part of that hobbyist spirit.

You know, I've got an old deodorant stick and some spare bits of an old model ship lying around. I really should make a grav tank out of them.

There's nothing quite like setting up a custom, intricate hell maze in a level editor, sending it to friends, and watching as they trounce it with minimal effort. Turnbound, which debuted at today's PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, is boxing up that unique brand of shame and delivering it to your door in the form of an asynchronous autobattler.

Visually, it's a board game where you place tiles on a grid. You start with a hero character—public domain sorts like Lewis Carroll's Alice and Robin Hood—and smack down synergistic combo pieces to take out opponents of increasing difficulty, drafting a build in-between battles. Being an autobattler, once you've decked out your board with trinkets and abilities, all you can do is watch and hope it comes out on top.

The catch is that the opponents you fight are board setups previous players had their souls "trapped" with, with asynchronous battles playing out similarly to Backpack Battles or Down With the Ship. Ideally you'll keep your own soul on hand with an ironclad build, and if you go undefeated long enough, you'll start raking in additional items for future drafts, cosmetics, and so on.

I haven't spent much time with autobattlers since that initial wave first bubbled up, so it's fun to see the genre embrace a variety of conceits and aesthetics. I especially like Turnbound's chunky wooden UI where you drag gems and tiles onto a diegetic board, even if I find it funny Alice and Sun Wukong are playing a haunted board game together. Alice's gothic sensibilities are well-documented, but I take Sun Wukong for more of a Blood on the Clocktower kind of guy.

If you like your autobattlers spooky, you can try out Turnbound's demo and wishlist the game on Steam.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

Blood Bowl 3 has reached Season 10, and with a new season comes a new team, a new community event, a new set of Blood Pass rewards, and the usual round of bug fixes and balance tweaks.

This season's new team are the Vampires, definitely one for veteran players. Their most powerful skill is Hypnotic Gaze, which lets them strip opponents of their tackle zones and prevent them using skills like block and dodge. It works on a 2+, rather than 3+ under the old rules in Blood Bowl 2, though it's modified by -1 for each marking player. Hypnotic Gaze is a great way of bypassing blockers and busting cages, but it's balanced by the Bloodlust rule. Every bloodsucker has to pass a test before they act, and if they fail they bite someone else on your team—which is why the handful of useful vampire players have to be bulked out with a mob of thralls who exist just to be snacked on.

Playing as the Vampires can be infuriating, as a few bad Bloodlust rolls will see you injuring your own players faster than your opponent can (there's no armor roll for your thralls when they get bit). And great as Hypnotic Gaze is, the roll will absolutely fail when you need it most. In the hands of an experienced player, Vampires can be amazing, but for anyone else they're a nightmare.

It doesn't help that in this digital incarnation, the UI is a bit of a sticking point. If you fail a Bloodlust check, actions you should still be able to take vanish from the action wheel. And getting Hypnotic Gaze to work requires a precise set of unintuitive steps. My one attempt at playing as the Vampires felt like I was at war with the interface more than my opponent.

Season 10's community event is called Sylvania's Harvest, and lets you choose from one of three undead teams to play against the AI. Even if you don't buy the Vampires, this will give you a chance to try them out. The event's rules mean each half lasts for six turns instead of eight, and you'll be able to blitz and foul twice on each of those turns.

One of the most significant improvements made to Blood Bowl 3 since its launch was the addition of an Eternal League, which continues being supported in the latest patch. More pitches have been added to it, and opponents will now have cosmetics that reflect their level. I've been pretty down on Blood Bowl 3 overall, but adding Eternal League is a big deal and I'm glad it finally happened.

Though I probably won't be buying the Vampires, for the sake of keeping my blood pressure down if nothing else. If the next team added is the Gnomes, then I'll be tempted.

Blood Bowl's tabletop incarnation last had its rules updated in 2020 with the "second season edition" and now Games Workshop has announced a third season is coming later this year. They're at pains to let everyone know we won't have to relearn all the rules, however, saying "The core game is exactly the same: the pitch hasn't magically grown any new squares, there are no new stats, and everything should be very familiar."

That said, changes have been made. The rules penalty for Wildly Inaccurate Passes are gone (which might encourage more desperate hail mary throws), the kick-off table's been revised, and small players who survive being picked up and thrown down the pitch by bigger players will now earn a star player point where previously only the thrower did.

More significantly, there's a whole new action that should let clumsy teams reliably pick up the ball. It's called Secure the Ball and, while it ends your turn, it lets you grab the pigskin on a roll of 2+ no matter what your Agility is. You can only Secure the Ball if there are no opponents standing within two spaces of it, and "Big Guys and certain other powerful players aren’t able to perform it at all," but it should give orcs a chance to actually try the running game if they feel like taking a break from winning games by punching their opponents to death.

A new edition of a Games Workshop game means a new boxed set, and in this case it comes with two new teams. The Tomb Kings return after being absent for a while, while the Bretonnians are a brand new contender. (Warhammer's fantasy French folk did briefly have a team popularized in the videogame Blood Bowl 2, but when they made it to the tabletop officially they were reskinned as Imperial Nobility, so this will be a fresh interpretation of them.) The Bretonnians in particular are some lovely miniatures, with a real Monty Python goofiness to their knights and peasants.

What does this mean for the videogame Blood Bowl 3? Developers Cyanide say it'll be updated to reflect the changes, though not until 2026.

There's something about dark fantasy and the observation that it's a bit cold out that goes together like whiskey and… well, ice. Frosthaven, an adaptation of a board game by the same name, understands this—and also happens to've just launched into early access.

Led by Julian Gollop, head of Snapshot Games and creator of X-COM, Frosthaven aims to replicate the dark fantasy tactical RPG vibes of its board game. And to celebrate, we've gone ahead and partnered with them for a giveaway.

One lucky adventurer'll be the proud owner of a Frosthaven-branded Alienware Aurora 16 gaming laptop, some swag (including a beanie and pin set) and an early access key. Even if you aren't the chosen one, you might be one of ten runners-up, who'll also get a key for the game.

To be eligible for your prize, you need to be from North America, the United Kingdom, or Europe. You'll also need to be 18 years old as of August 12, 2025.

Once you've made sure you're both those things, you can then enter by doing the following:

• Create an account on the PC Gamer forums, or sign in if you already have one.
• Go to our official giveaway thread and follow the instructions there.
• (Make sure you read the terms and conditions posted at the bottom of the thread, too!)
• Sign up using this giveaway widget to confirm your entry, and you're done! Don't skip this step, or your entry won't count, and make sure your email's correct.

Winners will be randomly selected and contacted via email, so keep your bow trained on your inbox.

If you're lucky enough to be selected—that is, contacted by email and informed you're a winner—please make sure to provide your best shipping address and your phone number (shipping may take 3-5 weeks). You can only enter once, and the giveaway'll be running until August 28. Good luck!

For over two decades now, Warhammer 40,000 facts and lore have been accumulating in my brain like calcium buildup in your plumbing. I don't remember what I had for dinner yesterday, but somehow I do remember the specifics of Kroot mating habits. I am not a useful person.

But it does make me particularly well equipped to bring you today's quiz: a test of your knowledge of the grimdark future.

Do you know your Primarchs from your Primaris? Your orks from your krorks? Your Second War of Armageddon from your Third War of Armageddon?

It's time to find out, with 10 devious questions that run the gamut of Games Workshop's enduring universe. Get all 10 and I might even give you Henry Cavill's mobile number.

Let us know in the comments how you did—or share your favourite Warhammer 40,000 fact!

There's a board game for everything now. Last time I looked in at my local store they had board games based on Oregon Trail, the Iliad, and World War II espionage in the Mediterranean theater specifically. I shouldn't be surprised there's going to be a board game based on that one fighting game where you can be a jaguar man, and that it comes with flash-looking miniatures including one of said jaguar man with extremely well-defined abs.

Tekken: The Board Game is "an asymmetric fighting game" where one to eight players of ages 13 and up can "fight on various stages, and choose between a single match, and an epic tournament." Its crowdfunding campaign was posted on Gamefound with a goal of €50,000 (roughly $US58,311) that it managed to reach in 35 minutes and 45 seconds. It's now blown well past that, raising more than €350,000 ($408,180), or 700% of its original goal so far.

Like most of the board games that become crowdfunding hits, I assume people want it more for the expensive components than the game they'll maybe play twice. The core box for Tekken: The Board Game comes with eight "overscale" miniatures, representing Jin, Kazuya, King, Paul, Jack-8, Nina, Asuka, and Yoshimitsu. It's not classic Paul with the perfectly conical hair, however, so you can count me out.

It also comes with boards representing different stages (sanctum, urban square, descent into subconscious, and into the stratosphere), and decks of cards for each fighter to represent their combos and sweeps, heat activation, and rage arts. Multiple expansions are already planned, each adding four new fighters, with the first promising Panda and the second both Kuma and Heihachi in its lineup.

Dungeons & Dragons is rolling out another collaboration with Stranger Things, this time focusing on fan favorite heavy metal dungeon master Eddie Munson, from Season 4.

Stranger Things: Welcome to the Hellfire Club will be a board game-style bundle that has lots of thematic premade pieces to run a series of four D&D adventures for 3-5 players.

"The set is a collaborative 3-5 player board game, featuring Eddie Munson's lost adventures. With 4 adventures and hours of play possibilities, Welcome to the Hellfire Club invites you to gather the gang—and choose how the story ends," says Wizards of the Coast.

The adventure seems pretty delightfully set up, with the full aesthetic of 1980s D&D on display for the four adventures included—The Vanishing Gnome, Scream of the Crop, Devil. Metal. Die!, and Ballad of the Rat King. There are also maps and tokens to play them with, and a DM's screen with what look like some pretty rad illustrations on it. There'll also be, of course, monsters based on the upside-down creatures from Stranger Things.

The board game style box is the same setup that you might know from the upcoming Heroes of the Borderlands starter set for the 2024 edition of D&D. It's basically a straightforward setup primed with tokens and cards and premade characters to make playing some D&D as easy as possible.

It'll come in a physical or digital edition for $50, with a digital-physical Ultimate Bundle for $60. That digital version is probably worth the most to you if you're using the Maps VTT built into D&D Beyond, since it includes material that you can only find there alongside some digital-only "Eddie's lost adventures."

You can find the game for pre-order on D&D Beyond, Amazon, and an array of local game stores.

There's nothing quite so alluring to your average Warhammer player as something that used to be available and now isn't. Armies originally discontinued due to lack of interest build up a new mystique that eventually has the community begging for their return. Previously, that kind of revival has been rare, but the 2020s seem to be the era of Games Workshop diving back into the archives and giving those never-forgotten factions a second chance.

The Old World—Games Workshop's revival of Warhammer Fantasy—launched with two 'lost' armies, Bretonnians and Tomb Kings, for maximum nostalgia value. Over in Warhammer 40,000, the infamous "Squats" (space dwarves) returned as the Leagues of Votann. Now, Age of Sigmar has its own blast from the past, with the revival of the Chaos Dwarfs.

Revealed during Games Workshop's 2025 Summer Preview, the "Helsmiths of Hashut" are strikingly faithful to their 30+ year old original ranges, complete with their dark industrial feel, returning units such as bull centaurs and hobgoblin underlings, and of course their signature enormous hats.

If you don't have either a decades-long wargaming addiction, or a bunch of hours in Total War: Warhammer 3, the Chaos Dwarfs might bear a bit of explaining.

They're essentially just evil dwarfs, obsessed with dark magic and daemonically-fueled technology. Their patron god, Hashut, manifests as a flaming bull, which has pretty much led to every part of their culture either being on fire or part bovine. Listen, Warhammer has never been about subtlety.

They were originally introduced all the way back in the 80s, but never really found a place in the core Warhammer roster, and it wasn't long before they were slowly phased out. Since then, they've shown only occasional signs of life. For a while there was a selection of resin models available from the now-defunct Games Workshop spin-off Forge World. More recently, they got a new Blood Bowl team, as well as a selection of cameo appearances in skirmish game Warcry. But that's been about it.

This, however, is a full-on and complete revival. The range of models is all new, and surprisingly extensive for this kind of army release—normally, Games Workshop starts small, but the Helsmiths are coming out of the gate with a wide selection of infantry, heroes, monsters, and centrepiece models.

I have to admit, I find them a bit too conservative myself—couldn't we get a bit more adventurous than recreating designs older than a lot of current players? In my mind, Age of Sigmar is the home of the company's most exciting and strange designs, so it's a little frustrating in recent years seeing it start to play things just as safe as modern Warhammer 40,000 does. Counterpoint: the community seems very happy with the Helsmiths, so what do I know?

It does feel a little strange that these guys have popped up in Age of Sigmar, rather than returning to the original Warhammer Fantasy setting with The Old World—but it may be that that game simply has its hands full with other nostalgia-indulging armies such as Cathay and the likely upcoming Kislev. Still, I'm sure we'll see more than a few of these models on square bases one way or another. Just don't let Games Workshop catch you.

The Summer Preview also revealed a big new update to the aforementioned Leagues of Votann, a Kill Team box set pitting the Deathwatch against Necron monstrosities, and inevitably a bevy of Space Marine heroes, among many other announcements. Oh, and you can now preorder Titus' helmet from Space Marine 2 to wear on your real-life head. You know, if you're so inclined.

Let's face it: board games are an expensive pastime. When you're not backing Kickstarters and paying through the nose for the latest releases, you're trying to find space to stack them on your shelves without causing some kind of deadly avalanche from which you'll never emerge.

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Thankfully, there are a fair few Prime Day board game deals this time around, with a number of discounts on popular games, including some of the more notable videogame tie-ins like Slay the Spire: The Board Game, Frostpunk: The Board Game, and even The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – The Adventure Game.

Usually, you have to splurge quite a bit of cash if you want to acquire an official videogame tie-in, and honestly, they can be very hit and miss in terms of their actual quality—most board game fans have been burnt at least once backing a Kickstarter. Mercifully, though, the ones included below are all decent, so I've provided some details about each.

Quicklinks

• Dungeons & Dragons Honor among Thieves Monopoly | $30 @ Amazon
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – The Adventure Game | $92 @ Amazon
• Slay the Spire: The Board Game | $100 @ Miniature Market
• Dorfromantik: The Board Game | $36 @ Miniature Market
• Frostpunk: The Board Game | $83 @ Miniature Market

Slay the Spire: The Board Game

Considering Slay the Spire was already a roguelike deck-builder, the experience translates extremely well as a board game. That iconic formula of acquiring and discarding cards to build a powerful deck, plus randomised encounters as you make your way up the tower itself, amounts to a board game that's fun, addictive, and extremely replayable—perhaps not the best option if you've only just cured your addiction with the original.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – The Adventure Game

The Skyrim board game is weirdly complex compared to the original, but if you've got a few friends who are fans of The Elder Scrolls series (and can convince them to try it out), you'll likely get a kick out of it. Just like any other Elder Scrolls RPG, you'll get to choose a character and fight through the perils of Skyrim, from Draugr-infested tombs to spider-filled mines, even undertaking choose-your-own-adventure-style quests.

The only caveat I'd give is that since it takes a while to wrap your head around the gameplay systems, and setup is quite long, this really isn't worth trying if you want a quick and easy game.

Frostpunk: The Board Game

The Frostpunk board game is not for the faint of heart. Its hefty learning curve, setup time, and difficulty all make it a somewhat daunting prospect, not to say anything of its heavy subject matter (trying to desperately help your city survive an icy apocalypse). That said, none of these things should be surprising to anyone who's played the original. Just like that game, if you're willing to invest the time to learn, Frostpunk: The Board Game is a rewarding challenge to undertake, whether it's with friends or by your lonesome.

Dungeons & Dragons Honor among Thieves Monopoly

There's something a little Inception-like about Dungeons & Dragons Honor among Thieves Monopoly—it's a game based on a movie, based on a TTRPG, translated into an entirely different game that doesn't have all that much to do with actual D&D. Still, Monopoly is great if you come from a family who won't try to murder each other each time you play—I, sadly, do not—and this is certainly a more attractive version of the classic than just plain old vanilla capitalism.

Dorfromantik: The Board Game

I've recommended a lot of mayhem and murder up above, but if you're a relaxed board gamer who prefers minimal setup and relaxed vibes, you'd struggle to find a better fit than Dorfromantik. As with a lot of other tile-based games, it's easy to learn and play if you fancy a quick game vs. a multi-hour session. It's also a far cheaper option than the videogame tie-ins above; a good choice if you're not a big fan of endless plastic figurines and extra clutter.

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There's more to miniature wargames than just Warhammer, and in fact my favourite has no connection to Games Workshop or grimdarkness whatsoever. Shatterpoint pits two teams of iconic Star Wars characters against each other, and it produces some of the most tense and exciting moments I've ever experienced on a tabletop.

Why am I telling you about it? Well, because it just got very cheap to get into.

👉Shop ALL the Prime Day deals on Amazon👈

The Star Wars Shatterpoint Core Set is currently 34% off in the Prime Day sales, making it just $108.99. And that's not just a starter set—it genuinely contains absolutely everything you need to play, including:

• Enough models for two full teams, including Anakin Skywalker and Darth Maul.
• The rules cards you need to play with all those units.
• A set of terrain designed around the game's uniquely acrobatic movement rules.
• A mission deck to get playing with.
• A metric ton of tokens and other game accessories.
• A full set of the game's custom dice.
• Movement tools—no tape measure needed.

Even at full price I think the Core Set is fantastically good value as wargame starters go, but at this big of a discount it's a steal. It really is the full package—no extra purchases necessary—but if you find you enjoy it, publisher Atomic Mass Games sells a whole range of other Star Wars characters from all across the films, TV shows, and even videogames to supplement your forces.

So what is it I like so much about Shatterpoint?

First of all, it's not a game about just wiping your opponent off the table. Characters will get injured over the course of the battle, but it takes a lot to actually remove them. Instead of pure violence, the focus of the game is outwitting and outmaneuvering your foes, in order to take control of ever-shifting objectives. That means everyone on your team gets a chance to shine.

Rather than simply a case of accumulating points, each mission is like a tug of war, where you build up your advantages and try to swing the Struggle Tracker over to your side. It's always a best of three rounds of play, with the mission escalating in chaos as you go—more often than not, it comes down to a nail-biting third round that makes for a fantastic climactic skirmish.

Equally, when units fight, they don't simply chuck damage at each other—an attack can unleash a whole array of different effects depending on the character using it, from shoving foes back, to disarming them, to allowing you to sprint or jump to a new position, to unleashing a force power. It really creates the feel of an exciting Star Wars duel.

The miniatures support that theme perfectly. You only bring a handful each—6 - 8 per side—but they're sculpted in a larger scale to most wargaming miniatures, making each one its own little heroic display piece. They're really gorgeous pieces, and the larger details make them great fun to paint, too—here, I'll show you one of mine if you promise not to judge it too harshly:

Over the last two years I've been having a blast bringing my Jedi, clones, and Mandalorians to events and tournaments, and it's secured a special place in my heart for Shatterpoint—so when I saw this deal, I felt like I had to spread the word. Don't feel too pressured if you're unsure, though. While this deal won't stick around for long, it isn't too unusual to see these kinds of discounts on the Core Set—it was similarly cheap at a lot of places for May the 4th earlier this year for example, so there should be more opportunities to grab it in the future.

👉Check out all Amazon's board game deals👈

There's a term in tabletop gaming: "beer and pretzels." It's an epithet you'll find tacked on to any game best played with unserious intentions and inebriants aplenty. I've described Deep Rock Galactic to friends as a "beer and pretzels" sort of horde shooter, so I don't know why it never occurred to me that one of the best co-op games on Steam would also make a great party-friendly board game. It absolutely did from the looks of it, and three expansions are now inbound after publisher MOOD's Kickstarter for the addons secured full funding in all of five minutes.

You can follow the board game expansions' Kickstarter here, where at the time of writing it's amassed over $900,000 in crowdfunding—well past the target of $23,540. The first update blog confirms that a legion of 3,732 backers carried the campaign to 3788% funding in the first 24 hours.

The expansions—Rival Incursion, Horrors of Hoxxes, and the Shockwyrm mini-expansion—each come with their own glut of new environments, miniatures, and cards to flesh out the existing game's mineral-hoarding, bug-blasting action. There are a lot of familiar treats for fans, like snazzy new miniatures for the Glyphid Dreadnought twins and a "flick the barrel" minigame recognizable to anyone who's gotten bored in DRG's in-game lobby.

If you weren't aware that Steam's favorite space dwarves even had a board game, it's a passion project that started germinating within Ghost Ship back in 2020. It's a dice-rolling dungeon crawler where you pick a dwarf, your equipment, and a premade scenario, praying you make it out with your riches before giant alien bugs slurp your brain out. It's been remarkably well-received, currently sitting at a comfortably high 8.1 average rating on BoardGameGeek.

On top of sounding like an all-around good time, it's another victory lap for the breakout hit spelunk 'em up. In case you've been living under a yet-to-be-mined rock, Deep Rock spinoffs include an upcoming roguelike, a Vampire Survivors-style auto-shooter, and a heavy metal crossover song by a band that, admittedly, already had dwarves as their whole thing. Given that it's one of the only games I can play without randoms teaching me the latest innovations in profanity, it's hard not to cheer on the game's continued success.

There are 27 days left to support the Kickstarter, which runs until August 1. If you only play games if a keyboard and mouse is involved, the videogame version of Deep Rock Galactic is going for $9.89 on Steam through July 10.

CMON started as CoolMiniOrNot.com before turning its hand to board game publishing, having an early hit with co-operative miniatures game Zombicide in 2012. A fast-paced dice-chucker, Zombicide was funded by a $781,597 Kickstarter that provided the model for CMON's subsequent releases—many of them Zombicide spin-offs, reskinning it as a western or fantasy or post-apocalyptic, or rebranding it with Marvel superheroes or, more recently, Monty Python's Flying Circus of all the things.

Which is why it's such a surprise to see CMON sell this tentpole of its business. While it's had success with other games (like Cthulhu: Death May Die, a more shotgun-to-the-face spin on Lovecraftian games like Arkham Horror), hearing that CMON has got rid of Zombicide is like hearing that Sega just put Sonic on the auction block.

Recently, fans have complained of crowdfunding rewards being delayed, and the US-China tariffs haven't helped. In April, CMON announced it was putting all future projects on hold and laying off creatives.

Asmodee, the publisher that bought Zombicide, is a European business that already has the rights to popular board games like Catan, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, and Diplomacy. It's not as well-known for lovingly crafted plastic miniatures as CMON, though since its merger with Fantasy Flight Games it does technically have the Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game in its portfolio.

Asmodee used to have a noteworthy digital division, responsible for videogame adaptations like Gloomhaven, Terraforming Mars and Scythe: Digital Edition. As of April, Asmodee Digital renamed itself Twin Sails Interactive and went independent, so whether we'll get a Zombicide game on PC out of this deal is up in the air.

Scalpers are a menace in a lot of hobbies, not just in the realm of gaming hardware and paraphernalia. Still, they've been especially bad here in recent years. Flipping phantom graphics cards, snapping up special editions, and ruining cute exhibits meant for children. Games Workshop, the company behind Warhammer and Warhammer 40k, are certainly no exception to this rule: If you want to release a thing, scalpers'll probably ruin it.

The thing in question this time is the special edition of Siege of Terra: Era of Ruin, which is the latest instalment in the Horus Heresy (now the Siege of Terra) books. Games Workshop opened up pre-orders via a queue system on its website, designed to stop scalpers armed with armies of bots spoiling the whole thing.

Then scalpers armed with armies of bots spoiled the whole thing. On the same day, Games Workshop hit the panic button and took its entire website down to stem the tide (thanks, Wargamer). As an official post on the company's Facebook reads:

"You might have noticed that we've paused Warhammer.com for a short period—here's why:

"Today we launched our pre-order for the much-anticipated special edition of Siege of Terra: Era of Ruin anthology. Unfortunately, scalpers attempted to use bots to bypass our normal safeguards."

The bots, which the post later calls an "abominable intelligence if there ever was one"—comparing these bots to the Silica Animus which is, and I mean this lovingly, a dunk that only people whose bedrooms smell of mini paint will get—forced Games Workshop to pull the plug.

"We're pausing the launch of Era of Ruin and have removed it from Warhammer.com for the time being. Don't worry, it's still coming—we're just absolutely determined that real fans get it. All erroneous orders are being purged. This is our number one priority."

Fans looking to get a leather-bound anthology can instead sign up for an emailing list to find out when "the re-launch happens".

The Horus Heresy is one of Games Workshop's most prolific series, with over 60(!) books comprising the entire saga. This one in particular's an anthology, with tales from a whole regiment of prior authors featured in the Horus Heresy—and it's slated to come out in July. Whether anyone'll be able to get their hands on a special edition, though, only the Omnissiah knows.

Any fan of Monopoly will probably already have Monopoly GO downloaded on their smartphone, but not everyone loves relying on such a small screen when playing a game. Even though there isn't an official version of Monopoly GO available on PC, there are ways you can bring the board game to your desktop and continue making the most of your rolls without having to navigate through a mobile app.

The best way to bring Monopoly GO to PC is by using Bluestacks, an Android emulator. It's easy to download and even easier to navigate once you're in. Before you know it, you'll be back making your way around the game board. Here's what you need to do so you can play Monopoly GO on your PC.

How to play Monopoly GO on PC

The first step is downloading the Bluestacks emulator. This can be done through the official website, and the conveniently labelled "Download BlueStacks" button in the middle of the screen. Launch the program once the download is completed, and log in to your Google Account:

1. At the top of the screen you'll find a search bar, which is where you can type in Monopoly GO and find the app straight away.
2. An option labelled "Play on App Player" will pop up, which you need to select to start downloading the game.
3. The Monopoly GO icon should appear on the home screen of the Bluestacks App dock once complete. Double-click this, and Monopoly GO will load on your PC.

All your game progress, if you have been playing on mobile, will be saved to your account too, including things like all your free Monopoly GO dice rolls you've already redeemed. The only downside is that there are certain things that won't operate as they would on mobile, like redeeming codes, so you'll still need to rely on the mobile app for certain things. For the most part though, you'll be able to enjoy Monopoly Go as you would on your phone, and it's as simple as that.

3D printing has been revolutionary for the world of at-home miniatures bashing and terrain building... but we're entering what I can only imagine is the endgame of that growth and this is my evidence: Behold, Czech Dungeons & Dragons group Bez Zástěny has created a 7.5 foot tall, 130 pound (90 cm, 60 kg) model of Strahd von Zarovich's vampire castle.

[OC] 3D Printed Castle Ravenloft from r/DnD

This is like... renting a storage space or building an extra shed just to house your terrain territory. It's outrageously large. I went ahead and measured and I couldn't put it on the giant dining room table I use for games because it would hit the overhead light fixture even though the ceiling is like 20 feet in there. Did I mention that the 130lb/60kg weight is without the towers?

"It took about 3,700 print hours on several printers," said Bez Zástěny on Reddit, noting later that they "lost count" of how many rolls of plastic filament were consumed creating the behemoth.

As pointed out by Wargamer, the creation of this monstrous Strahd's-castle-like-but-legally-distinct model itself was crowdfunded by a 3D print designer back in November of last year. The model, Castle of the Vampire Lord, was made by Mexican 3D print designer Axolote Gaming.

It's actually not even done yet, as the designer is still working through the catacombs and basement areas. So, you know, in theory the finished model is actually even bigger because it sits on a huge mountain to contain the lower sections.

Bez Zástěny intend to use the castle for a free, multi-table epic event in the Czech Republic this July. Which... will probably be very full as people crowd around just to see this monster print.