Aimed at new players, the new Warhammer Academy offers some surprising utility.
First announced just a few weeks ago during the Big Summer Preview, the Warhammer Academy has officially opened its doors. This new website is free to all and designed to offer a new player a step-by-step introduction to the entire Warhammer 40,000 experience. Divided into a series of digestible guides, the new site looks to be an incredible resource for new players, but veterans shouldn’t ignore it; there are some great tips and tricks to be found for established hobbyists.
It’s worth noting, though, that for now, at least, Warhammer Academy is solely devoted to 40k, but it’s easy to see how it can be expanded to provide similar utility for Age of Sigmar or any of Games Workshop’s games.
Choose Your Path
First time visitors to the Academy website are asked to create a My Warhammer account and then answer a few simple questions about their level of experience in the hobby. Depending on the answers given the Academy suggests a starting point, the default seeming to be the “Path of the Gamer”. Paths are the heart of the Academy’s system and consist of a recommended series of short videos to be watched in order.
Paths vary in scope from the broad, like Path of the Gamer, to the narrow like Path of the Warhammer 40,000 Starter Set. In the former, 14 videos (totaling just under 2 hours) provide a holistic introduction to the 40k gaming, starting with a general overview and ending with videos teaching you to play a full game of Combat Patrol. In the latter, the Starter Set guide is a broad overview of everything 40k and is split into 5 sub-series with over 5 hours of content to watch. Other Paths are focused more narrowly on learning about specific armies, gaming concepts, and painting tutorials and guides. Naturally, an achievement system is baked in, so you can mark your progress on your Paths and earn badges for completing specific paths.
That Path system is going to be a huge boon for new players who can use it to navigate the immense and sometimes overwhelming galaxy ofthe Warhammer hobby. However, you can still watch any indivdiual video you want at anytime, there’s no locked content.
Building and Painting
The hobby content here is unsurprisingly excellent. The heart of this section is a very thorough Path of the Painter, offering well considered introductions to basic miniatures painting concepts. New painters will find this very helpful, of course, but there’s some useful stuff here for more advanced hobbyists. A series of videos are available for every Combat Patrol army currently supported in the game. These are exceedingly good tutorials that aren’t just general overviews, but collections of videos each of which is a guide to painting an example of every model in each Combat Patrol to “Parade Ready” quality.
I’ve been painting miniatures for decades but will absolutely use these as quick references. If I’m figuring out my own scheme or trying to reverse-engineer an official paint job these are going to be tremendously useful to me. Even if I don’t need the nitty-gritty of which brush is recommended at each step, I’m glad that info is there for new hobbyists and it’s provided in an unobtrusive manner. These videos are great and I’d put them up alongside beginner level tutorials being produced by the Duncan Rhodes Painting Academy.
Not Just For Beginners
Veteran hobbyists are likely to find some of these videos useful, particularly when learning the rules of the new edition. I haven’t had a chance to play as much of 11th edition yet as I’d like, so I am absolutely going to use some of these tutorial videos as preparation before my next game.
On the whole, I’m very impressed with this site. I do hope the site is expanded to cover Age of Sigmar content, as well but that’s a minor quibble for now. Combined with the recently released Combat Patrol Companion, it looks like Games Workshop may finally be addressing some of the biggest barriers to entry.
What did you find the most challenging part of getting into miniatures gaming in the first place?
Don’t Miss:
Simon Berman has been a wargamer since 1993 and has worked in the tabletop games industry since 2008 as a staff writer for the first three editions of WARMACHINE and HORDES. These days he’s the General President of the Brush Wielders Union, a worldwide organization of miniatures painters of all skill levels, a freelance games writer who has contributed to a number of roleplaying games like Eclipse Phase, Dune: Adventures in the Imperium, and The Hammer and the Stake. He runs his own small-press publishing company, Strix Publishing, and paints more miniatures than he can keep track of. Simon lives with his wife in Tacoma, Washington along with a number of cats and a pack of savage wiener dogs.
Source: Bell of Lost Souls
