Magnagothica: Maleghast
Necromancer skirmish on a chessboard by Tom Bloom. Pick a house of the dead, raise a small warband, and go after the enemy necromancer. $6.66 for the rules, and any minis you like.
"The rulebook I'm reading right now, and the minis I can't wait to paint."
What is Maleghast
Magnagothica: Maleghast is a skirmish wargame by Tom Bloom, the guy behind Kill Six Billion Demons and co-creator of the Lancer RPG. Death is broken in Anzenmezzeron, a necropolis of a billion souls, and you play a necromancer leading a warband of the dead, chasing the End of Death. The whole thing leans hard on extreme metal, gothic horror, and comics, and the rulebook doubles as an art book and a listening guide.
It’s for two to four players, and it’s played on an 8×8 grid. That’s a chessboard. Each side is a necromancer plus five slots of units, and a game runs six rounds of alternating activations. The usual way to win is to kill the other necromancer.
It came out on itch.io on 31 October 2023, designed for virtual tabletop first (there’s a Tabletop Simulator mod), and it’s been growing since through the free Games for Freaks zines.
How it plays
Every unit activates on its own and can move and act, or move twice. Attacks always do something: a miss still deals 1 damage as a graze, and a hit adds effects on top. So the game is all about stacking combos across your activations, pushing, pulling, and setting up the kill, which is why a lot of people compare it to the video game Into the Breach.
Your necromancer runs on SOUL, which you earn from units dying, and spends it on big abilities. Each house also has its own tokens, buffs, debuffs, and terrain tricks, so two houses on the same board feel like different games.
There are no points. A force is the necromancer and five slots filled from a set of unit roles: thralls (two per slot), scions, freaks, horrors, hunters, and tyrants. Tyrants are big 2×2 monsters and you only get one.
The houses
The core book has six houses. The Games for Freaks zines added three more, so there are nine now:
- C.A.R.C.A.S.S. A skeleton private military company, bone fused with metal, who want to shoot you with their operator-wannabe skeletons.
- Goregrinders. Fast, aggressive melee. They pay tithe to the Corpse Piler.
- Deadsouls. Attritional skirmishers who build walls, cut targets off, and grind them down with doom.
- Gargamox. Plague and hazardous terrain.
- Igorri. Token-heavy mutation.
- Abhorrers. Demons with katanas.
- Steeplewracks. Cultists of flesh-eating owls. Swarm and rip apart. (Games for Freaks #1)
- Hellminth. Parasitic corpse worms that evolve, with a 2×2 Nephilim as their necromancer. (Games for Freaks #2)
- Volvadani. Mecha-cops. Each round they lay down a law, and anyone who breaks it picks up guilt. (Games for Freaks #4)
The zines also add optional stuff like mercenaries, merchants, and objective modes.
How to start
- Buy the rules. $6.66 on itch.io. Grab the free Games for Freaks zines while you’re there.
- Grab a chessboard. Any 8×8 grid works.
- Pick a house and find some minis. Anything works. Tom has always encouraged kitbashing, and the game ran for years with no official models at all.
- Or print the official ones. Taiga Miniatures did the official 30mm warbands, Kickstarted in August 2026, and the STLs are now on MyMiniFactory: every house plus the mercenaries, at $66 a warband.
- Or play it online first. The Tabletop Simulator mod is what the game was designed around.
Community
Discords
Tools & rules
Reviews & videos
The Hobbinomicon take
I love the simplistic design of the new minis, and I can’t wait to paint them up in the same style as the official paint jobs. Raw but cartoonish. That’s the look I’m going for.
The rules are the book I’m reading right now, and I’m excited to dig into them. I’m hoping to get it on the table soon.
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