PC Gamer Ranked are our ridiculously comprehensive lists of the best, worst, and everything in-between from every corner of PC gaming.
For a brief period between 1983 and 1985, Games Workshop published their own videogames, including Chaos: The Battle of Wizards (created by a young developer called Julian Gollop who'd later make a name for himself with X-COM). But none of the videogames GW published was set in its own Warhammer Fantasy universe.
At the time the setting was a barely formed thing. 1984's second edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle focused on a conflict between alien frogs and Amazons with laserguns on the continent of Lustria. Only after GW got out of the videogame racket would the Old World refocus on the gritty fantasy version of Renaissance Europe that become Warhammer's center stage.
In 1991 Gremlin Interactive adapted the board game HeroQuest, and Warhammer finally came to computers. Though it was a version of Warhammer targeted at ages nine and up, it still included distinctive elements like the fimir and the threat of Chaos. There weren't many Warhammer games over the subsequent 20 years, just a couple of fondly remembered strategy games and a tragically doomed MMO, and it wasn't until the 2010s that the Old World was explored more fully. Much more fully.
In 2015 alone there were four Warhammer Fantasy games released on PC and four more Warhammer 40,000 games. We went from a drought to a flood, from nothing to more than any one person could keep up with... unless they dedicated months of their life to playing every single Warhammer videogame.
Well, I've done just that. I've played them all. This list will help you navigate the flood.
The Criteria
Number of entries: 29. New and altered entries in the latest update are marked 💀.
What's included: Every Warhammer game on PC set in the Old World, the parody-football universe of Blood Bowl, and the Warhammer sequel setting Age of Sigmar.
What's not included: Games Workshop games in other fantasy settings—like HeroQuest 2: Legacy of Sorasil, which ditched the Old World for a new setting called the Lands of Rhia, and the Talisman games which have developed their own "world of Talisman." It's pretty complete, is what I'm saying.
Here's a separate list ranking every Warhammer 40,000 game. And now: Every Warhammer game, ranked from worst to best.
29. Chaos & Conquest (2019)
Hunted Cow Studios/Tilting Point
Steam
Remember Evony? "Play now, my Lord!" Remember the licenced cash-ins that filtered everything from Ultima to Game of Thrones through the same exact formula of settlement construction and army building, with free-to-play energy mechanics and multiple currencies designed to confuse players out of cash? Chaos & Conquest is that, but instead of a lady in tavern-wench cosplay exhorting you to build another granary it's a champion in spiky armor suggesting you upgrade your Chaos Keep. It sucks and I hate it.
💀28. Age of Sigmar: Soul Arena (2023)
Trophy Games
Steam
It's the generic autobattler format—frantically shopping for units while a timer ticks away the wasted seconds of your life, then sitting back to spectate those units as they blunder into each other and their health bars dwindle—given an Age of Sigmar skin. A cutesy one that's unusual for Warhammer, but everywhere in mobile games, which Soul Arena clearly is.
Though its Stormcast Eternals, daemonettes, and lizardmen are all big-headed toys, that doesn't actually make the various subtypes easier to tell apart in the zoomed-out battlefield view. When you're shopping for new units you can properly see how hideous they are, mocking you while you pay to refresh the store's selection only to be shown another three ugly weirdos you don't want.
The autobattler fad kicked off in 2019, and by 2023, when Soul Arena arrived in early access, seemed well and truly over—with good reason.
27. Blood Bowl (1995)
Destiny Software Productions/MicroLeague
Games Workshop's fantasy football game has been adapted multiple times, beginning with this forgotten version published by MicroLeague in 1995. It's faithful to the board game but to call it barebones would be an insult to skeletons. There's only one player icon per team, so there's no way to tell a thrower from a catcher at a glance, let alone a puny skaven from a beefcake rat ogre, which is pretty important. You have to laboriously click through every player to be reminded which is which. People talk a lot of smack about the more recent Blood Bowl games by Cyanide, but that's because they don't know how bad we used to have it.
26. Dungeonbowl (2012)
Cyanide Studio/Nacon
Although this is still pretty bad. The tabletop version of Dungeonbowl was an expansion for the miniatures game, moving it underground and adding a parody of dungeon-crawling RPGs to its parody of American football. The videogame is a standalone take on the same idea, where the ball's hidden in a random treasure chest in a dungeon full of teleporters that bounce players from room to room.
If you thought Blood Bowl was too dicey before, Dungeonbowl will be torture. Even if you like Blood Bowl, taking its rules for maneuvering around open fields and squeezing them into corridors doesn't actually work. At all.
25. Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall (2021)
Carbon Studio
Steam
A VR action game where you're a lord-arcanum of the Stormcast Eternals, basically a lightning wizard in heavy armor. You summon weapons—sword, axe, and staff—by gripping your fists, cast spells by squeezing a trigger while waving, sweeping, and pointing them, and then go to town on the undead of the Nighthaunt.
Those weapons lack heft though, making combat feel like you're waving a Wiimote rather than a magic axe. It's a bit janky all over, with doors getting stuck halfway and the bits where you squeeze through a tight passage or climb down a rope occasionally glitching you off into space. Get past them and you'll find batches of samey skeletons and ghosts appearing in designated combat arenas, which are separated by designated exploration zones with glowing collectibles, and NPCs stiffly waving their arms while droning exposition. Bugs and floaty controls may be fixable, but how boring Tempestfall is? Probably not.
24. Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower (2021)
Perchang
Steam | Microsoft Store
The Warhammer Quest games jump to the Age of Sigmar, but more worryingly become free-to-play. While the first in the series had exploration between battles and story between dungeons, here each time you finish fighting on a recycled map you get shunted back to the menu in the hope you'll spend money in the shop. What can you buy? Lootboxes and random heroes. It's a gacha game, yeah.
Most of the levels are easy, even after they eventually open up and stop being literal corridors, and the closest thing to a challenge is making sure you don't lose enough health to score less than three stars—sorry, scrolls—on the occasional harder one. Even rudimentary features of the previous games, like heroes having multiple interesting abilities to manage and a rotatable camera, have been binned.
23. Arcane Magic (2016)
Turbo Tape Games
Normally I wouldn't be harsh on something just because it's a PC port of a mobile game, but everything about Arcane Magic feels limited by its origin, from the tiny battle maps, to the way scrolls are sold in "plunder packs," to the dual currencies. Fortunately the microtransactions have been disabled for the PC version, but the pacing is still designed around their presence and everything feels slightly off because of it.
The game itself? Basic turn-based tactics where your wizards cast spells from a hand of cards while they explore the Old World gathering lumps of magic rock. It would be boring even without its other problems.
22. Warhammer Quest 2: The End Times (2019)
Perchang
Steam
A turn-based dungeon crawler that uses the apocalyptic ending of the Warhammer world to justify heroic knights fighting alongside skeletons and a dark elf in fetishwear.
While the game it's a sequel to had difficulty options including permadeath, Warhammer Quest 2 has none. Instead you have to play a game that's hard enough you need to grind sidequests to keep up with the curve, while not having permadeath to make failure exciting. Instead when heroes fall they take injuries that weaken them until their next level-up, which means more grinding safe sidequests. I could tell you the fussy line-of-sight rules and the lack of the first game's text adventures also let it down, but the horse is already dead and there's no need to flog it.
💀21. Blood Bowl 3 (2023)
Cyanide Studio/Nacon
Steam | Epic
