Warhammer Ancient Battles

It is a rulebook for historical wargames developed from the popular Warhammer Fantasy Battle by Jervis Johnson, Rick Priestley and the Perry brothers.

[8] Games Workshop eventually brought the project back in-house, with Rob Broom running the Warhammer Historical Wargames department that promoted an increasing number of books.

[9] The game rules were heavily based on the fifth edition of Warhammer, with magic dropped and more detail added for ancient weapons and formations.

[10] Following the success of Warhammer Ancient Battles Warhammer Historical branched out into other areas: The rules are written for individually based figures and this approach was in marked contrast to the element based rulesets current amongst ancient historical wargames when the rules were first published.

[14] Changes include allowing cavalry to make march rules despite infantry and capping bonus troops in melee for the number of ranks of the formation to 2.

In Issue 19 of The Ancible, Robey Jenkins compared Warhammer Ancient Battles to Warhammer Fantasy Battle and noted that this game "cannot provide an epic spectacle to compare with the large-scale fantasy battle games (war elephants cannot, ultimately, compete with dragons and giant spiders), but it can still speak to a player's armchair general with more clarity and reality than the finest fantasy game precisely because those bells and whistles no longer exist to act as a crutch.