Warhammer Fantasy Battle - Playing Warhammer

Playing Warhammer

Warhammer is a tabletop wargame where two or more players compete against each other with "armies" of 25 mm - 250 mm tall heroic miniatures. The rules of the game have been published in a series of books, which describe how to move miniatures around the game surface and simulate combat in a "balanced and fair" manner. Games may be played on any appropriate surface, although the standard is a 6 ft by 4 ft tabletop decorated with model scenery in scale with the miniatures. Any individual or group of miniatures in the game is called a "unit", whether represented by a single model, or group of similar troops.

The current core game rules are supplied in a single book, with supplemental Warhammer Armies texts giving guidelines and background for army-specific rules. Movement about the playing surface is generally measured in inches and combat between troops or units given a random element with the use of six-sided dice. Army supplements also assign points values to each unit and option in the game, giving players the ability to play on even terms. An average game will have armies of 750 to 3,000 points, although smaller and larger values are quite possible. There are also different rules for movement, shooting, combat and so on, the action usually being dictated by the roll of a 6-sided die or a 'D6', or it can be a 6-sided 'scatter' die used to generate random directions, often used alongside an 'artillery' die, used mainly for cannon, stone-throwers, and unusual variant artillery.