New year, new Steamroller! Steamroller is the official rules and scenario pack for Warmachine matched play tournaments. Updated every year, it includes rules and guidelines for scoring, objectives, setting up terrain, and deploying your armies, as well as balanced scenarios for fair games. Basically, if you attend a competitive Warmachine tournament, they’re probably using the Steamroller format. Get the details below and download your free PDF copy here.
Welcome, one and all, to the annual release of Warmachine’s new Steamroller! In this article, we’re focusing on what’s new for Steamroller 2026, with the help of Warmachine’s Creative Director, Mat Hart, and Jamie Perkins, game dev lead.
Updating Steamroller for 2026
As with any game updates, we rely on our experience and judgement to make appropriate adjustments, as well as the incredibly valuable data provided by our playtesters. We also keep a close eye on community stats and play rates.
We also established some key concepts that underpinned our approach to updating Steamroller for 2026. Let’s take a look…
Key concept #1 – Multiple strategies
Where possible, we prefer when players can approach scenarios in multiple ways. While “run up the middle and have a big fight” is a fun and direct way to play a wargame, it’s more interesting if each scenario allows both players greater freedom to adapt and attempt tactics like the refused flank, or even going for something riskier like splitting their forces in two.
Key concept #2 – Attacker / defender advantage
First off, we’ve renamed “first” and “second” player to “attacker” and “defender”, respectively. This should help clean up the language. For example, we can now explain that scoring begins on the “defender’s second turn”, as opposed to the more clunky, “second player’s second turn”.
Second, we’ve honed in on the respective advantages of being the attacker (going first) and being the defender (going second). Certain scenarios aren’t symmetrical in objective layout. While this may slightly extend setup time, it also carefully nudges the balance of those scenarios to provide a more even experience.
Steamroller 2025, and sometimes its predecessors, tended to strongly favour consistently choosing to go first or second. Our goal here is to make that more of a choice, depending on each player’s plans at the table.
Key concept #3 – No cap on objectives
Very simply, we wanted to lift the cap on objectives to allow more freedom of scenario design. This means for 2026, as we already revealed in the preview, your objective set will need one extra 40mm objective and one extra 30mm flag objective.
Key concept #4 – Seven scenarios
Steamroller 2026 includes not six, but seven distinct scenarios to choose from. Where possible, we always recommend tournament organisers avoid repeating a scenario over the course of a single event.
With Warmachine tournament numbers growing by the day, 7-round events are becoming ever more possible. Having seven scenarios ensures you’ll still get a unique experience each round. In events with fewer rounds, tournament organisers now have more freedom to choose which scenarios they’ll run.
Returning scenarios
There are four scenarios sticking around from Steamroller 2025:
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Trench Warfare
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Two Fronts
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Wolves at Our Heels
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Payload
They’ve had some minor adjustments but kept the same overall flavour.
Brand new scenarios
Which of course means there are three brand new scenarios for Steamroller 2026!
New scenario – Pressure Point
Pressure point started as a theoretical exercise: what would happen if we created a scenario of “just” flags?
Why? Because a flag can be scored by any model type, which makes it the perfect objective type to use multiple of. Flags are also the most replayable objective type, because they sit on different terrain pieces and types each time you play on a new table. You can play the same scenario but have an entirely different experience.
That theoretical exercise eventually became Pressure Point, which has four flags, all placed by the defender. There’s a single 50mm objective in the centre that’s slightly on the attacker’s side of the board, worth 2 victory points. There aren’t any other special rules, so it’s also nice and simple to remember and set up.
New scenario – High Stakes
We’ve always been fans of giving players tough but interesting choices. High Stakes takes that concept and makes a whole scenario around it.
For this scenario, take two flags, two 40mm objectives, and one 50mm objective. The 50mm and flag objectives each start the game with five countdown tokens.
At the end of each scoring turn, one or more countdown tokens are removed. When those objectives have 0 countdown tokens remaining, everything nearby takes a POW 14 magical blast damage roll!
The catch? Well, after an objective reaches 0 countdown tokens and causes an explosion, it’s worth 1 additional victory point for the remainder of the game.
Will you cause your opponent’s objective to explode first? Making it worth double points afterward? Or will you blow your own objective up?
New scenario – Fault Line
A simple concept with high reward, Fault Line is an exercise in temptation. The more of your own objectives you score at once, the more bonus points you’ll also score. Will you consolidate in a small area of the battlefield, or risk overextending and covering a wider area and going for the big score…?
Share your experiences
As always, we’d love to hear how you’re getting on with the new scenarios, so remember to share your battle reports in the Discord!
Now updated for 2026, Steamroller is available to download as a free PDF and is also in the Warmachine app.
