The Instagram account shared by miniatures recreation designer Bryan Ansell and his spouse Diane has introduced that he died at residence along with his household on December 30, 2023. He was 68 years previous.
Ansell is called the founding father of Citadel, the miniatures arm of Video games Workshop, which he created in 1978. On the time Video games Workshop distributed and supported roleplaying video games in Europe, in addition to documenting them in its journal White Dwarf. The creation of Citadel was adopted by the wargame Warhammer Fantasy Battle, designed to utilize its line of miniatures. Warhammer’s success led to Ansell turning into managing director of Video games Workshop and ultimately shifting its focus fully onto the tabletop wargaming pastime, which it nonetheless dominates at the moment.
As a designer, Ansell was accountable for the 1980 sci-fi wargame Laserburn, a proto-Warhammer 40,000 with bolt weapons and energy armor. In addition to co-creating Warhammer Fantasy Battle, he led the writing of Warhammer’s Realm of Chaos dietary supplements, which not solely detailed the setting’s Chaos gods however laid down a lot of the heavy metallic horror-fantasy tone that might outline them sooner or later.
Not every thing Ansell did was so well-received. As managing director of Video games Workshop he was accountable for closing its London workplace and shifting the enterprise to Nottingham, the place Citadel was primarily based. The editorial employees of White Dwarf journal, on the time run out of the London workplace, responded to this by writing an acrostic within the contents web page of concern 77 that learn “sod off Bryan Ansell”.
Ansell left Video games Workshop in 1991, having overseen the corporate’s increase. In later years he ran a smaller producer of historic miniatures referred to as Wargames Foundry, which he’d initially created to offer his father one thing to do after retiring. Ansell himself retired in 2005, and his household nonetheless runs Wargames Foundry at the moment.
