Short answer
Warhammer 40,000 is a tabletop miniatures war game made by Games Workshop, first released in 1987. You build and paint armies of small plastic models, then fight battles on a table with dice and a tape measure. The game sits on top of a huge shared setting: the year 40,000 and beyond, where a decaying human empire fights aliens, demons and itself. That setting also feeds hundreds of novels, a run of video games and a growing amount of animation.
The setting in one minute
Picture the far future, but nothing has gotten better. Humanity spread across the stars, then fell apart in a long dark age. A figure called the Emperor pulled it back together around ten thousand years before the main story. He nearly finished the job. Then his favorite son turned on him in a civil war called the Horus Heresy.
The Emperor survived only as a body kept alive on a machine called the Golden Throne. The empire he left behind, the Imperium of Man, has spent ten thousand years getting more paranoid, more religious and more stuck in its ways. It worships him as a god. It burns heretics. It can't build new technology, only copy old designs.
Travel between stars works by diving into the warp, a parallel dimension made of emotion and thought. The warp is also home to the Chaos Gods, who feed on those emotions and want to devour the real universe. So every starship trip carries a risk of letting something terrible in.
The story today sits at the very end of the 41st millennium and the start of the 42nd. A giant tear in space called the Great Rift has split the galaxy in two. One of the Emperor's sons, Roboute Guilliman, has come back after ten thousand years and is trying to hold everything together. That's the "now" of the setting.
Who's fighting
There are three broad camps, and the full breakdown lives in our factions guide.
- The Imperium. Humanity's empire. This includes the famous Space Marines, the ordinary soldiers of the Astra Militarum, warrior nuns, tech priests and giant walking war machines.
- Chaos. Humans and Space Marines who sold themselves to the dark gods, plus the daemons those gods send into the world.
- Xenos. Everyone who isn't human. Orks, the ancient Aeldari, the robotic Necrons, the swarming Tyranids, the T'au Empire and more.
There are no clean good guys. The Imperium is the side readers usually follow, but it's a brutal theocracy. The fun is in seeing how each faction justifies itself.
The tabletop game
The core of the hobby is the tabletop game. Each player brings an army of models, usually around 28mm to 32mm tall for a human. You set up terrain on a table, take turns moving your units, shooting and fighting, and roll dice to see what happens. A typical game takes two to three hours once you know the rules.
The models come unpainted and usually unassembled. Building and painting them is a hobby of its own, and plenty of people never play a game at all. They just collect and paint. That's completely normal.
Games Workshop releases a new edition of the core rules every few years. The current one is the eleventh edition, which launched in June 2026 with the Armageddon starter box. Each army also has its own rules book, and those get updated often. Because the rules change, we don't cover army rules here. Check the current edition before buying any rulebook.
There are smaller spin-off games set in the same universe too. Kill Team uses a handful of models per side. Others cover giant robots or spaceship battles. They're a cheaper way in if a full army feels like a lot.
Books, video games and the screen
Games Workshop's publishing arm, Black Library, has put out hundreds of novels and short stories. The biggest single series is the Horus Heresy, more than fifty books that tell the civil war from every angle, followed by the Siege of Terra series that closes it out. You don't need to read any of them to play, but many fans come to the hobby through the books.
The video games cover every genre. Dawn of War is a classic strategy series. Space Marine 2 is a third-person action game. Rogue Trader is a long role-playing game with lots of dialogue. Boltgun is a retro shooter. You can enjoy any of them with no prior knowledge.
On screen, Games Workshop runs its own animation service, and a 40k short appeared in the anthology series Secret Level in 2024. Amazon is developing a live-action series with Henry Cavill, but as of October 2026 there's still no release date. In August 2026 Amazon also announced a separate animated 40k series spun off from Secret Level.
Where to start
There's no wrong door. Pick the one that matches what you already enjoy.
| If this sounds like you | Start with | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| You like painting and building things | The tabletop game | Pick one army you love the look of and buy a Combat Patrol box for it. Build it slowly. Nobody minds unpainted models while you learn. |
| You want the story first | The novels | Start with Horus Rising for the origin story, or Eisenhorn: Xenos for a self-contained detective tale set in the current era. |
| You play video games | The video games | Space Marine 2 is the loud, cinematic way in. Rogue Trader is the slow, story-heavy way in. Both teach the setting as you play. |
| You have ten minutes | The lore guides | Read who the Emperor is, then the factions overview. Those two cover most of the names people throw around. |
| You have friends who already play | A demo game | Ask to borrow an army for one small game. It's the cheapest way to find out if the hobby side is for you. |
If you're going for the tabletop game, the steps below keep it simple and stop you overspending.
- Choose an army by looks. You'll spend hours with these models. Pick the ones you like seeing, not the ones people online say are strong this month.
- Buy one small box. A starter set or a Combat Patrol gives you a playable force. Don't buy a second box until you've built the first.
- Get basic tools. Clippers, a hobby knife, plastic glue, a primer and a few paints. That's enough.
- Play a small game. Find a local store with a game night, or a friend. Small games teach the rules faster than reading.
- Read a little lore. Learn why your army fights. It makes painting and playing far more fun.
Words you'll hear a lot
- M41, M42: the 41st and 42nd millennium. The setting's "now" is the turn between them.
- Primarch: one of the Emperor's twenty super-human sons. See the Primarchs guide.
- Heresy: usually means the Horus Heresy, the civil war ten thousand years ago.
- The warp: the dimension used for faster than light travel, and home of Chaos.
- Xenos: aliens.
- Codex: an army's rules book. In the lore, the Codex Astartes is also the rulebook for how Space Marines are organized.
Corin Ashdown is the pen name of the editor who writes and checks every guide on Vorbelutrioperbir. How we write and check guides.