Warhammer 40,000: Regicide

~ the eulogy ~

Regicide is a real object inside Warhammer 40,000 fiction: chess, as played in a galaxy where chess counts as a gentle pastime. Hammerfall Publishing, a small studio in Sydney, got the license to actually build the thing and announced Warhammer 40,000: Chess - Regicide in May 2014. The opening existed because THQ had collapsed the year before and taken its exclusive grip on the Warhammer video game license down with it, after which Games Workshop began handing the property out to anyone credible who asked.

It entered Steam Early Access on 5 May 2015 and released properly on 8 September. There were two modes. Classic was chess with the pieces swapped for Space Marines and Orks and the rules left alone. Regicide was the other one: identical board, identical piece movement, and then an initiative phase layered on top in which the surviving units shot at each other, with abilities tied to faction and an execution animation for captures that ran considerably longer than a chess capture usually does.

Reviews settled around 72 on Metacritic. PC Gamer gave it 70 percent and called it a cute chess set for 40K fans. Mobile versions followed, iOS in May 2016 and Android that July. The Blood Angels campaign, fully voiced and with real writing under it, is the part people still bring up.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

Warhammer 40,000 is a hobby with an entry fee. You buy the plastic and then you buy the paint, and every few years the rulebook is replaced and you buy that too, and for most of the game's life you did all of it through a Games Workshop store. Turkey has never had one. The fiction arrived here through video games and translated paperbacks, so 40k was something you read about rather than something you assembled on a table, and a chess variant built for people who already knew what a Blood Angel was arrived in a country holding very few of them.

The Steam half of it is closer to home. In 2015 a cheap novelty strategy game with sci-fi soldiers on the board was exactly the kind of purchase that happens during a sale and gets opened twice, which is most of what Regicide was commercially, and there is nothing embarrassing about that.

~ the funny part ~

On 14 October 2022 the servers went off and the game vanished from Steam and both mobile stores on the same day. Nobody was warned. The announcement went up on Steam five days later, on the 19th, and read: "Unfortunately, we regretfully announce the immediate closure of the servers and will be unlisting the Steam Release, Google Play Store, and the Apple App Store from Today, the 19th of October, 2022."

That post was the first news update on the game's Steam page since July 2017. Five years of silence, then a notice announcing a shutdown that had already happened, phrased as though it were being decided as you read it.

~ what got buried with it ~

Hammerfall never gave a reason. The general assumption is that the Games Workshop license ran out and was not renewed, which is how licensed games usually end, and the licensing terms are also why nobody involved says so out loud.

Offline play still runs if you had it installed and never deleted it, so the single-player campaign survives on old hard drives as something that cannot be replaced or bought again. Everything else went, including the store pages that would have let anyone buy it at all. The 40k license is fine. It has been cut into more pieces than any board could hold since THQ died, and the pieces keep going off one at a time without notice.

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