Play figure Kataphron Destroyer, 2022

This game piece is part of the tabletop strategy game“Warhammer 40,000” (often abbreviated as: Warhammer 40k), which has been published and continuously developed by Games Workshop since 1987. Players position self-assembled and painted miniatures on a playing field on which they pit their armies against each other in a turn-based game. A dice roll determines the possible actions for the round: movement, fire and close combat. Depending on how the players have assembled their armies and equipped their miniatures, they have different characteristics.

The world of Warhammer 40k is set in a dystopian future in the 41st millennium, in which humans fight against other species for supremacy on planets in the Milky Way. The character of the “Kataphron Destroyer” belongs to the “Adeptus Mechanicus” faction within the human empire. This priestly guild from Mars produces and maintains the weapons and armor with which the soldiers of the Empire are equipped. However, they do not develop new technologies for this purpose, but search for technology from a “lost age” and reassemble it. This process is highly religiously charged, so only weapons blessed by the priests may be used. The priests developed the Kataphron Destroyers as “living weapons”, in which the soldiers fuse with the machine and serve as a biological computer to control it without any will of their own. These Battle Servitors move through the terrain using crawler tracks and are equipped with various weapons, such as plasma cannons.

The science fiction world of Warhammer 40k differs from many other imagined futures: The dark and religiously charged world of Warhammer 40k is not a utopia of progress and space exploration, but an unusually dystopian, warlike future for mankind. With other species based on orcs and elves, the game developers also drew inspiration from “Lord of the Rings” and, with regard to the rejection of artificial intelligence, from “Dune”. Some 40 years after the Second World War, memories of the war were still very present and the fear of nuclear war was still very much alive. The idea of soulless, propaganda-soaked soldiers whose lives consist solely of operating war machines and religiously following a leader represents an exaggerated form of these fears and experiences.

The game developers drew inspiration for the game mechanics from their own childhood and youth in the 1960s and 1970s: The included role-playing games, strategy games, toy soldiers and model building. A big seller at the time was the role-playing game “Dungeons & Dragons” by TSR, which used a number of miniatures. Games Workshop expanded this game principle to include the representation of entire armies, for which many models were needed – and therefore sold. After first establishing a tabletop game called “Warhammer” in the fantasy genre in 1983, its success was followed by the science fiction version Warhammer 40k in 1987. Games Workshop still dominates the market for tabletop games today.

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