Warhammer 40k Darktide, the co-operative FPS based on Games Workshop’s grimdark tabletop miniatures game, is being adapted into a tabletop miniatures game. Specifically, it’s being turned into a board game that seems to use a stripped back version of the Warhammer 40k Kill Team rules.
While not totally perfect, Warhammer 40k Darktide is one of the better Warhammer 40k games on PC or console. While it doesn’t quite have a seat on our sister site PCGamesN’s guide to the best FPS games, it’s still one of the best recreations of the 41st millennium in any media. Players take on suicide missions in the industrial warrens of Hive Tertium, fighting back the unrelenting 40k Chaos powers at the behest of a mysterious Inquisitor.
A Warhammer community post from Monday shows that the new Darktide board game will come with twenty miniatures, four representing the different player classes from Darktide, plus fourteen adversaries:
- Zealot
- Psyker
- Ogryn
- Veteran
- Poxwalker zombies x 6
- Traitor guardsmen x 10
These are all existing miniatures: the Zealot first appeared in Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress, the Psyker was in the first version of the board game Combat Arena, while the Ogryn and Veteran both come from unit boxes. The Poxwalker zombies are an easy-to-build kit, and the Traitor guardsmen are from ‘The Blooded’ Kill Team expansion.
The Warhammer Community post doesn’t give many hints about how the game will play. It seems to be cooperative, as players will each “take up the mantle” of one of the operatives. But it will also offer new players a “first taste of the intense skirmish combat of a game of Kill Team”, a spin-off game that pits small squads of specialists into close-quarters engagements on tight battlefields, rather than the full battles of Warhammer 40k.
So, it looks like a co-op horde fight against AI controlled mobs, using at least some of the rules framework from Kill Team. That seems like a pretty good fit for Darktide. It also promises a more complete experience than ‘Space Marine The Board Game‘ – which was essentially a simplified Warhammer 40k starter set.
There’s no word yet from Games Workshop on the price of the new Darktide miniatures game, nor which stores it will be sold at. Games Workshop typically sells this kind of game via bookstores and mass market retailers and not its own stores, and they don’t always make it to every territory.
Want more videogame-to-tabletop goodness? Check out the upcoming Halo Flashpoint starter sets, or our preview of the Fallout Factions miniature wargame.