I have written on this site before about one of the great tragedies of my – admittedly fairly blessed – life, the loss of my copy of the original Warhammer Quest boxed game. I was there when this beloved Warhammer Fantasy Battle spin-off first launched back in 1995. It was not Games Workshop’s first dungeon crawler (HeroQuest beat it to our tabletops and earned a place on many best board games lists), but it was arguably the best of them.
Man, I loved that game! It filled endless Saturdays as me and my mates took our little squad of Barbarian, Wizard, Elf, and Dwarf (and later Pit Fighter and Imperial Noble) deep into the original Warhammer underworlds in order to battle monsters, loot treasure, and occasionally get splatted by a minotaur. The game was a huge amount of fun, and virtually endless given that it was designed to be compatible with Citadel’s entire range of fantasy miniatures. This did mean that it was not impossible that you could be unlucky enough to encounter a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch with 75 wounds, but hey ho.
Dungeon crawls
You can’t get the original Warhammer Quest anymore, there are some modern equivalents. The closest matches are HeroQuest (which is usually under $100 at Amazon), Gloomhaven (with a new second edition up for pre-order on Miniature Market), or Descent: Legends of the Dark (which is usually $120ish at Amazon).
Alas, my well-loved copy of the game (complete with most of the additional hero expansions) mysteriously went missing sometime in the early 2000s while I was at university. Perhaps it was an oddly specific burglar, or more likely my mum in a fit of spring cleaning fever, who nabbed the game and no doubt passed it on to some lucky neighbor. Either way, it’s now long gone, vanished, kaput – and given that complete boxes of the game routinely reach £300 on eBay, I’m unlikely to ever to get a copy like it back again.
There have been new editions of the game in the decades since, of course. Silver Tower and Shadows Over Hammerhal put a smart new Age of Sigmar spin on the titles, while the brilliant Blackstone Fortress moved the setting to the 41st millennium and reinvented the game from the ground up. Most recently, the infamously troubled (but also excellent) Cursed City returned us to the AoS setting and put a gothic horror spin on the game. Clearly the appetite is there for these more self-contained dungeon crawling adventures.
Anyway, perhaps it’s because I recently started building and painting The Old World Grand Cathay Battalion box set – or perhaps because Warhammer Plus recently launched a new series, Questing Nights, based around the original edition which turned 30 this year – but I’ve been afflicted with a desperate need to play that original edition again. Most likely I’m just getting on a bit, because I’ve also gotten dangerously into watching oldhammer videos on YouTube and browsing sealed blister packs of expensive lead and white metal minis on eBay.
Still, the Warhammer Plus videos did make me wonder why, exactly, Games Workshop has only rarely made concessions to the nostalgia market, despite there being a lot of us older gamers out there.
Sure, The Horus Heresy’s whole deal for the last few years has been making beautifully retooled versions of older miniatures – beakie Marines, the goofy new Saturnine Terminators, and so on – but it doesn’t generally reissue older books or games, despite their being a clear market for it.
What I’m asking for here is simple – though I imagine rather more difficult for Games Workshop in production terms, I’m not completely delusional. How about a complete reissue of the original game as it was in 1995? Yes, with all the original monopose miniatures intact. Give me those weirdly cheerful goblin archers, that stocky barbarian, the hordes of identical spiders, and bats with flight stands up their butts. HeroQuest has had a mostly faithful reissue of the original game (which we praised in our HeroQuest review) and that flew off the shelf! It feels like Warhammer Quest ’95 could be equally popular.
It’s not just the original Warhammer Quest that Games Workshop could reissue, either. The company’s ongoing refusal to reissue Space Hulk, despite much fan demand, remains downright baffling. The most recent edition of that was in 2009 and sold out almost immediately. A fourth edition would be nice, sure, but you could simply reprint the third edition box as it was and people would be happy. The Terminators from that set still more than hold up.
Or how about a reissue of arguably the most celebrated Warhammer release of all time: the famous 40K second edition box set, complete with identical ranks of Mark 7 Space Marines and the cardboard Ork dreadnought? There’s a definite market of gamers keen to relive the wild days of Vortex Grenades, scatter dice, and the frankly deranged early rules for the Shokk Attack Gun, as the spicy resale prices (and existence of sketchy prints on various dark corners of the internet) can attest. Hell, I still have a beaten up old copy of that but would buy a new one in a heartbeat.
Look, I get it. Games Workshop doesn’t exist solely to cater to the whims of old fans. It’s only right that its focus is primarily on the modern games: Warhammer 40,000, Age of Sigmar, The Horus Heresy, and all the associated smaller titles like Necromunda and Warhammer Underworlds.
Still, the existence of The Old World does indicate a willingness on the company’s part to look back to its older glories from time to time. I’m always going to be excited by the announcement of a brand new Warhammer Quest title, but if there aren’t any more currently planned (and there have been no rumors or hints about that), then how about making the original made to order for a while? It’ll make a lot of people very happy, and I’ll finally be able to let my poor old mum off the hook.
Some alternatives, for now
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