At one point, in the early years of miniature wargaming, my Brother and I had amassed a collection of White Dwarf Magazines and read them over dozens of times each. The magazines had some truly unique things written in them and a focus on detail and exploration of miniature wargaming. As I grew older and more cynical, I caught on that the magazine was just a fancy catalog with a few articles of note. We both stopped buying and reading as we got busier and played less Warhammer, but it was something that I held in reasonably high regard.
Skip ahead a bunch of years later and changes were announced about White Dwarf going to a weekly release, offering digital versions along side the print versions. I thought this was something that could be great given Games Workshop’s non-existing online presence (until just late 2016 were they took an about-face). I picked up 4-5 different weekly articles with what I thought would be neat subjects, only to find shallow ‘articles’ and low resolution images to support them. One of the things that stood out about White Dwarf was the image quality and staged shots they took. The internet has long since replaced this kind of thing, but in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, this was a great source of gaming inspiration. The paint scheme on my Bretonnian army is directly from a White Dwarf article, the one that had the Jousting Mini game included.
White Dwarf has seen plenty of changes over the years, all seemingly with a downward trend in quality from my perspective, until late last year. They returned to a monthly magazine and produced some article types I really enjoy such as Temporal Distort and Blanchitsu. It highlights people and what they do with their armies and miniatures and even has images from the, once highly lauded, Golden Daemon painting competition. That competition still carry’s meaning, but many others have since taken it’s place and over shadowed what was once the pinnacle of painting and modeling.
Overall, this magazine is still a majority advertisement for the games Games Workshop sells and I don’t think they’re going to return to what the magazine started as back in 1977. What I do hope is they continue to push stories, bonus rules, scenarios, and add-ons to their existing games. This is what made it appealing in the late 90’s when I started buying the magazine and it’s what is drawing me back into it now.
