Warhammer’s excellent new smol-scale wargame exposes Games Workshop’s biggest weakness

polygon.com:

Games Workshop is expanding its catalog once more, and this time from a position of strength. With its marquee Warhammer 40,000 tabletop miniatures game selling like hotcakes and the reboot of its popular Old World setting on the horizon, the gaming company is doubling down on a revitalized 28-millimeter-scale Horus Heresy line with Legions Imperialis, a diminutive 6-millimeter-scale wargame set in the same time period. The spiritual successor to the cult classic Epic 40,000 is highly anticipated by the community.

Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games, movies, TV shows, comics, tabletop books, and entertainment experiences. When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun — and worth fitting into your schedule. If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch .

Polygon has spent the last few months noodling around with Legions and we’re impressed. Battles have the look and feel of a grand strategy board game, but with dozens of individual infantry and armor units engaged at multiple points on the map. The system allows for technical, tactical battles with the flexibility to field different unit compositions with drastically different capabilities. And yet, the pace of play moves quickly — especially for having this many pieces on the table. But while Legions’ high model count has the capacity to recreate the kind of massed battles found only on the pages of the Black Library’s best novels, it also exposes the United Kingdom-based manufacturer to its biggest threat — the ubiquity of consumer-grade 3D printers and the use of proxy models on the table.

Legi