It’s Okay, You Can Forget About Games Workshop

Trench Crusade has proven wildly successful. The World War One with demons skirmish game made over $3.3 million during a two week Kickstarter campaign with no advertising whatsoever. The art is stunning, the worldbuilding compelling, the miniatures look fantastic and the rules intriguing. Influencers are going mad for it. An interview with the creators even graced the digital pages of this very webbed site. This success is built on an already flourishing grassroots community, which suggests that Trench Crusade won’t just prove flavour of the month before sinking into obscurity. It’s a big deal, and everyone is talking about it.

So, can we please stop mentioning it in the same breath as Games bloody Workshop?

I always love seeing folks talking about tabletop games in the wild. I’ll spend ages reading through conversations on Bluesky to see what’s caught people’s interest and how they feel about various games and goings-on, but it’s a constant source of frustration to see GW being brought up in totally unrelated conversations. It’s not because I have any particular issue with GW, beyond standard big-company-in-late-stage-capitalism bullshit, it’s just that these comparisons are wildly unrealistic and doing other games and their creators a massive disservice.

Trench Crusade is not a serious Warhammer competitor. It’s not going to have any noticeable impact on GW as a business. It’s certainly not a Warhammer killer. Yes, the $3.3 million that Trench Crusade raised on Kickstarter is a lot of money, but Battletech: Mercenaries, the most funded wargames campaign on the platform, made $7.5 million, and that hasn’t troubled GW one iota. In its 2023-2024 annual report GW listed a pre-tax profit of $255 million. GW is a vertically-integrated juggernaut operating on a different level to even its closest competitors.

That doesn’t make Trench Crusade less worthy of attention. Even if I wasn’t grabbed by the game on a personal level (and I actually think it looks pretty neat) it’s certainly piqued my professional interest. The permissive attitude of the creators and their encouragement of community involvement and creativity is noteworthy. Their decision to implement a third party licensing agreement, something that’s commonplace in indie RPGs but virtually unheard of in wargames, is the epitome of such a permissive mindset, and I can’t wait to see if their plan to elevate other indie creators bears fruit. It’s inherently significant and exciting - there’s no need for wild fantasies about some kind of David and Goliath clash.

It doesn’t help matters that we live in an attention economy. Much of the online conversation surrounding wargames is driven by Youtubers and Instagram influencers who need clicks to get ad revenue and sponsorship. The simple fact is that if your video has Warhammer or Games Workshop in the title, if it has a space marine in the thumbnail, it’s going to do better. Even better, you can add in some hyperbolic rage-baiting nonsense to froth up everyone with a chip on their shoulder about GW. It’s sad, but it works. I’m not completely innocent myself. As a freelancer for Dicebreaker (RIP) most of my articles were about various GW games. Even when they weren’t, they were framed in such a way that Warhammer could be mentioned in the headline, or at least the first paragraph. It’s the nature of the beast when you need to game the algorithm to make ends meet. One of the reasons I love writing for Rascal is that I’m liberated from all that and can choose to cover GW, or not, according to my own capricious whim.

GW’s ubiquity and position in the mainstream consciousness means that it’s where most wargamers will start. For any other given game it’s more likely it’ll be someone’s first step outside of the GW sphere than their first wargame entirely. Trench Crusade’s grimdark aesthetic and Tuomas Pirinen’s GW pedigree are going to attract Warhammer players, and many will be jumping into the indie scene for the first time. Comparisons are only natural, but they quickly become tiresome. GW is an overwhelming presence for sure, but when things get really big, they sometimes become easier to ignore, especially when you expand your horizons. Instead of GW being the elephant in the room, let it be the mountain in the distance. It’ll be there if you want, but the rest of the time you can let it fade into the background.