To advertise Blizzard’s upcoming mobile Warcraft game ‘Warcraft Rumble’, the firm is releasing free STL files of each of the game’s units, to use with home 3D printers. So far it has released Alliance and Beast models, with models for Blackrock, Horde, Undead, NPCs, and Bosses to follow.
Warcraft Rumble is a mobile strategy game that – like Hearthstone – represents a game played in the world of Azeroth, in this case a magical arcade machine that prints toy versions of Warcraft characters. Releasing the models as 3D printer files makes this whole thing feel very meta: you’ll 3D print miniatures from STLs of 3D models, which represent magically printed toys, toys that represent characters from Azeroth, who were originally 3D models… our eyes are spinning.
So far 27 models are available to download from the Warcraft Rumble website, 14 for the Alliance and 13 for the Beasts. These models use an exaggerated version of the already cartoony Warcraft style, which should make painting the miniatures pretty easy once they’re printed and cleaned up. They would definitely make cute DnD miniatures for anyone wanting a polymorphed sheep or cuddly-looking gnoll.
In our sister site Pocket Tactics’ Warcraft Rumble interview, Game Director Tom Chilton explains why the game depicts a game inside Azeroth, rather than the world of Warcraft itself: “As we visually simplified and figured out what are the most important elements to capture, to communicate the essence of what these characters are and the essence of the environment, that’s when we started to realize that these are almost toy versions of themselves in World of Warcraft.”
He continues: “So, we started to orient the creative direction around it being these miniature characters and that it would be in a game machine in the Warcraft universe…. That’s when the idea of this arcade machine, or a pinball machine, just kind of jumped out at us. What if this was like an arcade machine? What if these were little characters that came to life? A lot of people on the team were really into miniatures through Warhammer and stuff like that. So that made total sense, and it resonated in a lot of ways with a lot of us”.
We imagine it won’t be too long before an enterprising cosplayer creates a 3D replica of the Warcraft Rumble arcade machine using these files for the pieces – we’ll let you know as soon as we see it.
It’s been a good long while since there was a really solid Warcraft strategy board game, though a variant of Pandemic called Wrath of the Liche King was released in 2021. Rescaled appropriately, you could use these miniatures to retheme any old strategy game into a Warcraft experience – check out our guide to the best board games for some suggestions.