Drafting an army: The playful pastime of Warhammer 40,000

Abstract

Multiple recent works have emphasized the contribution that nondigital game scholarship can make to the study of games and gameplay. Warhammer 40,000 is the market dominator of the nondigital tabletop wargame genre. In this article, we perform a ludological analysis of the process of preparing, or drafting, an army for a competitive Warhammer 40,000 tournament. We find that there are four interrelated categories of resources that influence this fundamentally playful process. Our results indicate that this process of preparation constitutes a core component of the appeal of Warhammer 40,000. This emphasizes the importance of understanding the diverse activities that go into gameplay that ofte..