CIOASIISAG Part 3: Red Onez Go Fasta

At the same time as we got into wargaming and roleplaying Games Workshop were going through something of philosophical change. They had released a new version of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, they had stopped publishing a number of US games for the UK market, their shops began to stop selling other companies games and they launched a number of big game franchises. The foremost of which was:

This was the wargame we played the most. The key to WH40K success was down to one thing – the box set of 30 plastic Space Marines they released at launch. Back then, for 10 quid you can have enough minatures to play a fun skirmish with. It was cheap, accessible and fun. Much like crack cocaine. A couple of us had boxes of marines, some metal Orks, I had a couple of the plastic Land Raider tank kits, and then we’d pretty much use every other minature we could lay our hands on. This was before Games Workshop turned really money grubbing and officious, and there weren’t “OFFICIAL ARMY LISTS” you had to use. The old Rogue Trader ruleset could pretty much turn any minature into a valid WH40K unit.

When US law required them to remove lead from their minatures and switch to a pricier alloy the writing was on the wall for our love of Games Workshop. Minatures got more and more expensive, the plastic kits included, the shops became the McDonalds of games shops, and the games less and less fun. But I’ll go into how Games Workshop lost their fun, and the evils of company dictated metaplot in later posts.