Warmachine
Large-scale army miniature game built around steam-powered warjacks, warlock-driven warbeasts, and a small resource pool that every army has to spend wisely each turn.
"The army game I keep coming back to, even when I've told myself I'm done buying minis."
What is Warmachine
Warmachine is a tabletop wargame set in the Iron Kingdoms, a steampunk-fantasy world of soot-blackened cities, full-plate knights, and ten-foot steam-powered combat robots called warjacks. Each army is led by a single commanding model: a warcaster, a warlock, or one of the newer variants that came in with MK4. That model is the engine of your turn.
Resource management is the through-line. Warcasters drive their warjacks with focus: a small pool the warcaster generates each turn and channels through their jacks to power attacks, spells, and full activations. Warlocks drive their warbeasts with fury: their beasts generate it by raging out, and the warlock has to leech it back without overflowing into a check that hurts. MK4 added more variants on top of those. The specifics differ army to army, but the bones are always the same: a small pool, never enough, and the model managing it is also the model the enemy is trying to kill. Every turn becomes a small puzzle of how to cover the most board with the least spend.
The original game launched in 2003 from Privateer Press. The current edition is Mark IV (MK4), published by Steamforged Games, who acquired the Iron Kingdoms IP in 2023. MK4 reorganized the old factions into smaller, more focused armies (e.g. Cygnar Storm Legion, Khador Winter Korps, Crucible Guard Prime Conflux). Competitive events are usually played at 100 points; 75 is also common.
Why play it
What makes Warmachine distinctive is that it’s a large-scale army game that plays tight. Lists run 15 to 25 models. There’s no mid-table dead-zone where models drift around looking for something to do. Threat ranges are short, your caster is a model on the table that can absolutely die if you misplay, and almost every activation matters. The MK4 armies aren’t just stat reshuffles either: they each have a clearly different play feel (jack-heavy gun lines, infantry attrition, fast cavalry, swarm-and-grind), and once you find a caster whose tricks click for you, the game gets sticky.
It’s a tight ruleset built for competitive play, but the world it sits in is one of the deepest in the hobby. The Iron Kingdoms has decades of lore about steam-soaked nations, religious wars, infernal invasions, and the casters who carry it all on their shoulders. Some of my favorite lore in any game, full stop. The bulk of the community plays competitively, but if you want to run a slow-burning narrative campaign with friends, the game and the world give you all the room you need.
Every rule in the game is free. The official app gives you the full rules, every army’s rules, and an army builder, and Steamforged keeps it current with errata. You don’t need to buy a hardback to find out what your jacks do. And multiple MK4 armies are available as official 3D-print STLs through MyMiniFactory, which means you can build a full force at home for the cost of resin and a few hours of slicing.
The community is the part that surprises people. Tight competitive games usually collect a flavor of asshole that makes the room miserable. Warmachine somehow doesn’t. The events I’ve been to and the servers I’m in are full of people who want you to learn the game and then beat you. That has not been my experience in every competitive miniatures community I’ve tried. You can find a tournament most months, and you can play full games online for free on WarTable.
How to start
After Warmachine Academy, the fastest path is:
- Pick an army. Browse the Steamforged store and find an army whose models and play style speak to you. Don’t overthink it. The army boxes are designed as complete starter forces.
- Get the rules. The full rules and every army’s rules are free in the official app, which doubles as an army builder.
- Find a game. The Community Finder maps active local groups. If there isn’t one near you, WarTable Online lets you play full Warmachine games over webcam for free.
And bookmark Longshanks. It’s the competitive hub for Warmachine: it tracks tournament results, archives the lists people actually play, and is where most events post their sign-ups. Even if you’re not planning to compete, scrolling through recent event histories is one of the fastest ways to see what a working list actually looks like at the army level.
How to get good
Get table time. A lot of it. Warmachine is the kind of game where your first 20 games are mostly about learning your own list: which warjacks live and die at which threat ranges, which pieces fold to which kinds of attacks, which spells matter on turn one versus turn three. Until that’s reflexive, you’ll spend half your turns looking up your own rules instead of making real decisions, and you won’t have any brain left over for what the other player is doing.
The fastest way to get those games in is the WarTable leagues that run on most of the active Warmachine Discords. They pair you up with similar-skill opponents over webcam, give you a regular cadence to actually show up and play, and the WarTable client handles all the bookkeeping so you can focus on decisions. Show up to a league for a few months and you’ll learn more than you would in years of pickup games at the local store.
When you want to push past the basics, check Longshanks to see what lists are placing well and pick something close to a meta list to learn from. But don’t get too attached to chasing the meta. Steamforged ships a balance patch every January, most armies come out of it in genuinely playable shape, and at the levels where the game is fun, player skill and list familiarity matter far more than which faction you picked. The person who’s run their list in 200 games will eat the person who’s run a “stronger” list in 30.
Community
Warmachine has a centralized community that mostly lives on a handful of main Discord servers, with Facebook groups still active for buy/sell/trade and legacy formats.
Discords
Tools & finders
Warmachine Academy
Community wiki: MK4 guides, faction breakdowns, learning resources
Longshanks
Competitive hub: tournament history, meta lists, event sign-ups
Community Finder
Map of active local Warmachine groups
WarTable Online
Play full games of Warmachine online for free
Official Rules App
Free rules + army builder, kept current with errata
Facebook & social
Warmachine Facebook page
Official, run by Steamforged
Community Facebook group
General Warmachine community discussion
Buy / Sell / Trade
Facebook marketplace group for Warmachine
Warmachine Unlimited
Community for the legacy MK3-and-earlier formats
Official @warmachinegame
TikTok
Official @warmachinegame
The Hobbinomicon take
Warmachine is the wargame that has occupied the most of my hobby life in recent years, by a long margin. I own more armies than I’d like to admit out loud, ha. Some are painted. Most are not. That’s the relationship.
What keeps pulling me back is that the game thinks. The resource economy, whatever flavor of it your army uses, means you can play the same list the same way twice and get two completely different games out of it. Lists are small enough to actually paint without losing your mind. The rules app means I can just check what something does instead of digging through a stack of cards. And MK4’s smaller, more focused armies have made it dramatically easier to keep up with new releases without having to commit to another five years of building.
If I had to recommend one army to someone starting today, I’d point them at whichever one’s silhouette they like best in the Steamforged store and tell them to stop overthinking it. That advice has worked better, for more people, than any “best army” list I’ve ever read.
From the Hobbinomicon
Hobbinomicon.com
Taking a look at Inquisitor Kroyle
Mail day
Infernal diaries two - quick channel update.
Why are 3d sculpted models so overly detailed?
