While Games Workshop owns the Warhammer universe, it licenses out the property pretty much everywhere. One such relationship involved board game publisher Fantasy Flight, but come early 2017, that relationship will end… along with reprints for a great deal of popular, Warhammer-themed board games.
Fantasy Flight announced the news yesterday on its website, including the specific date that all involved products will be removed from sale:
Beginning February 28th, 2017, Fantasy Flight Games will no longer offer for sale any games in conjunction with Games Workshop, including Talisman and all games taking place in the Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000 universes.
Now, to be fair, Fantasy Flight could probably have done more with the licenses it had thanks to Games Workshop. That said, a few gems did get produced during the eight-year relationship: Forbidden Stars, pen-and-paper RPG Dark Heresy, Space Hulk: Death Angel and of course, the Talisman reprint.
Speaking of reprints, I doubt FF will be able to pump out new copies once the relationship is officially over, so if you’ve been holding out for any of the following, best to pick them up sooner rather than later:
• Black Crusade
• Blood Bowl: Team Manager
• Chaos in the Old World
• Chaos Marauders
• Dark Heresy
• Dark Heresy Second Edition
• Deathwatch
• Forbidden Stars
• Fury of Dracula
• Only War
• Relic
• Rogue Trader
• Space Hulk: Death Angel
• Talisman
• Warhammer: Diskwars
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
• Warhammer: Invasion The Card Game
• Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game
• Warhammer 40,000: Conquest
In fact, I dare say some more entrepreneurial individuals will stockpile what they can. Who knows what a copy of Talisman will be worth in a decade or two? Well, that is unless GW starts a new partnership and just prints them again.
A new path forward [Fantasy Flight Games]
Comments
3 responses to “A Bunch Of Warhammer Board Games Are Going To Be Very Rare, Very Soon”
Damn, had been thinking of finally picking up another one of the Talisman expansions for the last few weeks but kept putting it off, might need to now.
Surely Games Workshop make enough off games like Talisman and Dark Herasy to sort out a new deal though… Will be sad if all these games just die but then it wouldn’t surprise me with GW these days.
Relic’s pretty good too. Different enough that it’s not just a 40k re-skin of Talisman. Would reccommend
Games Workshop seems to struggle with making any business decisions besides pumping out revised editions of products and occasionally bumping up prices to even more insane levels. They lost me back when they split White Dwarf into two separate magazines. I told them not to do it an they went ahead, only to recently change it back into (more or less) the old style.
My suspicion is that GW overheads are too high and they are forced to charge high prices to cover these and still make a profit for shareholders.
They will likely produce their property themselves like talisman. Forbidden stars and Fury of dracula for example were done by FF design teams and so its unlikely they will continue those lines directly, if there is enough interested they will probably do new editions.