In defence of Warhammer

Warhammer is a tabletop battle game. Players build and paint little models of aliens, tanks and killer robots and then set their armies against one another on a miniature battlefield. It’s a hobby that lights up the obsessive bits of the male brain: collecting, DIY, military uniforms, hierarchy and complex calculation – all in the name of domination. There are Warhammer clubs across the country as well as 138 dedicated Games Workshops where players can battle one another. Enthusiasts have long been stigmatised as hygienically challenged young men with limited knowledge of the opposite sex; that’s certainly how I remember my early teens when I was – briefly – into Warhammer. According to Rick Priestley, its inventor, his game is seen as ‘something done in secret by young men’.

But perhaps its adherents are more varied than I’d suspected. It turns out the Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, is a fan. His private YouTube channel is dedicated to following expert miniatures painters. In 2012, he tweeted out a video on how to paint Astorath the Grim, high chaplain of the Blood Angels Space Marine Chapter. 

Tabletop war games were first thought up in Prussia in the early 19th century as an alternative to chess for armchair generals. Different units were given numerical values to determine their attacking strengths and defensive weaknesses while dice were used to determine probability of success during play. In the 1820s, the Prussian general staff was presented with Kriegsspiel, designed using the latest information from the front line. By royal decree, copies of the game were bought for every regiment and officers were ordered to play it regularly.

Prussian success during the Napoleonic wars has been attributed to their tradition of wargaming. A 2019 US Naval College study found that ‘Prussian forces were more often than not outnumbered, weapon advantages were mixed, and training methods were similar’ but ‘wargaming appears to have provided a significant advantage’.