Total Warhammer is my ultimate cozy game, fight me

Look, I need to get something off my chest. I’ve owned every single Total War: Warhammer game since the first one dropped back in 2016. Nine years. Nine years of building this collection like some digital hoarder, convincing myself that each DLC was exactly what I needed (Vampire Coast? Naturally. Chaos dwarfs? Take my money). And yet - and yet - I never actually finished a single campaign until about last year.

I’m that person who starts fifteen different campaigns, gets really invested in the narrative I’m creating in my head about why the dwarfs and the filthy elves have formed an unholy alliance, and then… just… stops. The mid-game hits, suddenly I’m managing thirty settlements, the AI is throwing doomstacks at me from three directions, and I find myself staring at a new campaign screen. I have lots of playtime clocked in on the new campaign screen.

But here’s the thing that’s been slowly dawning on me, creeping up like a Skaven ambush: Total War: Warhammer III has become my ultimate cozy game. No, really, it’s true.

What’s Total Warhammer?

For the uninitiated - Total War: Warhammer is what happens when you take a historical battle simulator and inject it with a gloriously unhinged fantasy setting. Imagine commanding thousands of units in real-time battles, except instead of Roman legions fighting barbarians, it’s dinosaurs riding bigger dinosaurs fighting vampire pirates with ship cannons strapped to giant crabs. I am not making this up. There are dragons, too.

This is the turn based campaign map of Total War: Warhammer III. City building, army management, and diplomacy happen here, while the battles happen on separate real time maps.

The game is split between two modes: a turn-based campaign map where you’re building cities, moving armies around, and pretending you understand economics, and real-time battles where those armies smash into each other in glorious, physics-enabled chaos. Think Civilization meets Command & Conquer. The whole trilogy (because yes, they made three of these behemoths and smooshed them together into one mega-map) gives you this absolutely absurd sandbox covering everything from the icy Chaos Wastes to fantasy China, with every conceivable fantasy race in between. We’re talking dwarfs with helicopters, Egyptian skeleton armies, rat-men with gatling guns, and elves. Ugh, so many types of elves. Gross.

It’s simultaneously the dumbest and most brilliant thing. A game where you watch an angry man with an axe delete 200 zombies because he’s having a bad day. Where diplomatic negotiations with the wood elves break down so you decide the only reasonable response is to burn down their sacred tree. It shouldn’t work. It’s too much, it’s over the top. And yet here I am, hundreds of hours later, writing about this game with a burning passion.

Defining “cozy”

The other day, a friend of mine - Patrick (hi) sent me this email about how funny it was that I found Frostpunk stressful. For him, it’s like putting on a warm sweater. He boots it up every winter, builds his little fascist ice city, and finds it deeply relaxing. Meanwhile, I’m over here having actual anxiety dreams about frozen children and that goddamn “YOU SURVIVED… BUT AT WHAT COST?” screen that haunts me like I personally murdered those children, which I didn’t.

Frostpunk is brutal, but there are some people out there for whom it’s the ultimate cozy game.

And that’s when it hit me: cozy games don’t have to be about turnips (that’s an Animal Crossing reference, look how smart I am).

Cozy is about coming home. It’s about that feeling when you know exactly where everything is in your kitchen, even in the dark. You know exactly what you’re in for.

The lizard-brain joy of spectacle

There’s this moment - and if you’ve played these games, you know exactly what I’m talking about - where you zoom in on a battle and just… watch. Not commanding, not strategizing, just watching as your unit of demigryph knights (horse-sized angry roosters) plows through elven ranks (can you tell I don’t really like elves?). Bodies flying. Dead elves everywhere. It’s glorious.

I don’t need photorealistic graphics. I don’t need every blade of grass individually rendered. What I need is to watch a dinosaur (thank you, lizardmen) pick up a chaos warrior and, as the kids aptly say, yeet him across the battlefield. It’s perfect.

Maximum power Tzeench spells are ridiculously powerful and over the top - look at these orcs flying! This looks silly, but it’s real fun to watch, and I’m here for it.

Often I’ll start battles I know I’ll win just to watch them play out. It’s like having a fish tank, except the fish have artillery and strong opinions about territorial expansion.

The absence of consequences

You know what games aren’t cozy? Games where a single mistake means starting over. Games where your palms sweat because you haven’t found a save point in forty minutes. Games where other humans are waiting for you to make a move while calling you slurs.

In Total Warhammer III, if I accidentally march my legendary lord into an ambush, I can just… load a save. If a battle is going sideways because the super-expensive enormous monster I just recruited gets melted by arrows in seconds, I can try again. Hell, I can slow down time to 0.5x speed and direct the world’s most violent ballet.

There’s no leaderboard shaming me. No seasonal ranking that’ll reset if I don’t play for a week. Just me, my armies, and all the time in the world.

The part where I get weird about faction mechanics

Stay with me: the game has dozens of factions, and there are over 100 legendary lords in this game. Each one plays differently. Not like “this one has +5% to damage” differently, but like “this faction literally doesn’t use money and instead eats people” differently.

And yeah, Creative Assembly charges for each DLC, but I largely found the price of admission to be worth it for the fun I get out of this title (see my take on predatory vs perpetual pricing)).

The opponent brought swords to a gun fight. That’s why The Empire reigns supreme. Glory to Sigmar!

When I’m feeling adventurous, I’ll boot up Tzeentch and play 4D chess with reality, teleporting armies around the map, cackling like a madman, swapping enemy cities just for fun. When I want comfort food, it’s back to the dwarfs, where I turtle up in my mountainhome and dare anyone to come at me through multiple lines of artillery (they won’t make it). And need I tell you again about my glorious zombietide run?

And this is what’s really cool about games where you can control your own level of difficulty. Yeah, there are resource and army damage sliders, but choosing which campaign to play makes a huge difference. I can turn my brain off and rampage as Taurox the Brass Bull (um, he’s a massive minotaur, who gets stronger the more he fights). Or I can boot up Khalida’s fallen empire - weak army, powerful neighbors, no friends. That’s one tough campaign.

It’s like having a restaurant where you know every single item on the menu, but the menu is a 100 pages long, and sometimes they add new pages just for fun. And some dishes can be really spicy if that’s your thing. You can order your usual, or you can try that weird thing on page 97 that involves dropping a nuclear bomb on a city.

Yeah, this fantasy game lets you nuke cities.

Down the lore rabbit hole

Warhammer has lots of lore. Rulebooks, novels, YouTube videos, podcasts. Every faction, every named character has stories written about them.

This is Tamurkhan, the maggot lord. If you know the lore, you’d actually know that the plague ogre in front of you isn’t Tamurkhan. It’s actually a demon maggot inside a dead body.

One minute I’m playing as Cathay, the next I’m reading about how their entire lore was basically invented for this game because Games Workshop never fleshed them out in the tabletop.

Then I’m watching a two hour video about history of the Chaos Gods. Then I’m on Reddit reading someone’s 10,000-word dissertation on why Nagash did nothing wrong (Nagash is insufferable, he did everything wrong, he’s the fantasy wizard Hitler).

This isn’t just a game anymore - it’s a living, breathing world. I love when games spill outside the medium - Elder Scrolls does this too, with lots of lore and theory crafting. Warhammer lore occupies my mind when I don’t have the time or energy to play.

One more turn

The turn-based structure is basically meditation for people who think meditation is boring. There’s a rhythm to it:

Check settlements → queue buildings → move armies → forget to conduct diplomacy → fight battles → end turn → watch the AI do its thing → repeat

I don’t fancy myself a tactician: a reliable dwarf box often works against highly mobile armies.

It’s hypnotic. It’s predictable. In a world where people can just decide to call my phone (don’t), there’s something profoundly comforting about a world that only moves when I tell it to.

The ultimate cozy game

I’m not growing turnips. I’m not befriending villagers. I’m not decorating a house. I’m orchestrating the complete annihilation of the Chaos forces while giant rats build nuclear weapons in the sewers.

But when I load up Warhammer III, my shoulders relax. My breathing slows. I know exactly what I’m getting into. I know that for the next few hours, every problem will have a solution, every crisis will wait for me to address it, and every victory - no matter how small - will be mine to savor.

Your cozy might be different. Maybe it’s Dark Souls (you psychopath). Maybe it’s actually Stardew Valley (valid). Maybe it’s Frostpunk (you’re Patrick).

But this is mine. In the grim darkness of the Old World, where there is only war, I found my happy place. Now if you’ll excuse me, Skarbrand the Bloodthirster isn’t going to launch himself into that Empire artillery line without my help.