![]() The games were fast, a little silly, and the mechanics didn’t really slow the game down Fights were resolved via dice comparison, vehicles had individual hit locations with effects that would spiral into glorious, complicated chains of actions – skids, out of control slams into terrain, trucks spilling Orks all over the harsh desert sands. ![]() The classic GW statline and 40k 2 nd edition DNA meant that granular detail was the order of the day, a far cry from the complex but semi-streamlined GW games we’re now used to. The rules, at all stages, were pretty complex and detail oriented. Gangs of 6-8 Orks divided into Kunninly Brutal Morkers and Brutally Kunnin Gorkers fought over the main campaign resource – scrap – while haring around the board on bikes, half tracks and trucks, getting blown up, shot, kicked off the side of moving vehicles, chopped to bits and then returning to Mektown for the campaign resolution. Written by the big names of the GW design team – Rick Priestley and Andy Chambers, plus an up and coming Gav Thorpe – it was light, fun, heavily randomised and all about your own ladz– Necromunda with a decidedly Orky twist.Īt its heart, it was a narrative campaign system bolted onto a very granular classic 90s GW model. Gorkamorka was a 40k spin off game, a weird, complicated, anarchic play experience set in the deserts of the Ork world Angelis, inhabited by gangs of truck and bike mounted gangs with names like Da Red Arrer Boyz, Da Spike Boyz and Burzuruk’s Bad Boyz. Da Roolzįor those of us who were solidly 90s kids, Gorkamorka isn’t (and perhaps never will be) the name of the Orruk God of destruction. Part two will look at the Hulk plummeting to Angelis, and the massive impact it had on the wargame landscape. Part One of this article will look at exactly what Gorkamorka was, how it came to be, and what we got out of it. Gorkamorka was the herald of the end of an era, of a style, a business practice, and the start of something new and very different. Their own internal pressures killed it, and went beyond, setting in motion some seismic changes. There’s no competitor here, nothing pushing GW to kill Gorkamorka from the outside. Unlike when we looked at Mongoose’ Starship Troopers, this is a story internal to GW. When that Hulk impacted, Games Workshop would be forever changed. That someone bet big on Gorkamorka, as big as the Hulk that brought Orks to Angelis. What remains interesting and important about the game is its end, and the rumours that surrounded it. This article isn’t just about that, though Gorkamorka is perhaps a little more important to the history of Games Workshop than some of the other boxed games that emerged in the late 90s and early 00s, even some of them that are around to this day. On its face that’s not much of a basis for an article, but it’s also a game I really liked. ![]() There are a lot of dead games out there, but Gorkamorka only lasted six months in the dying days of the second millennium. Gorkamorka is probably the most short lived of what would become the “Specialist Games”. By the time I noticed that there weren’t any more articles appearing in White Dwarf anymore, the game was long dead and buried. When Gorkamorka went away, I never asked what happened, or why, because I was too busy playing it and having an absolute blast. Badshag’s ladz endlessly grew in power, and mob rating, and teef, because I was ten, and I cheated. Badshag the Nob and his gang careened around a 4×4 bit of yellow painted chipboard precariously balanced on a kitchen table for a couple of years, constantly trashing my dad’s mob, made on kind sufferance. Ten year old me used a table at the back of the rulebook that came with it to innocently dub this Nob “Badshag”, and the bemusement tipped over into full on “what the Christ”. The first ever character I named was a Nob, much to the bemusement of my Dad.
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