A Paperless World? : The Quartermaster App

This month has seen Games Workshop make a belated but smart move into the digital age, so I thought it fitting to mention my introduction to another tool for the 40k hobbyist, brought forth from the MCP (ahem... I mean Apple) controlled realms of Cyberspace.

Credit goes to one of the newest recruits to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Danny for giving us the heads up on this. It's an App called Quartermaster and whilst I haven't had a lot of time to play around with it yet, first impressions are that this is a great gaming aid.

Available from Apple's iTunes store and currently priced at £2.99, the App (created by a guy named Sean Rogers) is designed as an army creation tool for both Warhammer 40k and Fantasy Battle, working on iPad, iPhone and iTouch devices.


So good it could have been created by Larry, though he didn't create Frogger.

There are no Codex lists included on the App, I don't believe it is endorsed or affiliated in any way with GW and thus has to avoid copyright infringement. However there are generic sample lists to give you an idea of the finished product.

The App acts as a template for you to input the army list information from a codex, once complete you can use that template to quickly build lists from a very intuitive layout and by that I mean those Tech challenged individuals such as I, can use it without too much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Your list can then produced in an easy to read 'Published' format, either on your device, to a printer or via email; there is a forum code generator option and you can also export the template via email.

Now obviously entering a whole army list worth of information is not a five minute job and many of us, me included, would find that drain on hobby time prohibitive. However help is on hand from dedicated gamers who have already taken the time and effort to put together codex lists and share them with the rest of the community.

This very handy site QMTemplates appears to have most if not all the current lists; I wasn't able to download my chosen list directly via my iPad as Safari took issue with it (could very well be user error though) so I downloaded it via the PC and then emailed the list across. I was then able to open the attachment on the iPad directly into the Quartermaster App.

It is worth noting the potential for errors to be made by a list author when inputting information; but these lists can be edited by any user and the corrected information then fed back to the community.

So if you are part of the 'Apple Collective' (I'm not aware if the App is available to the free peoples of the Android Faction) and you are fed up with piles of scribbled lists cluttering your hobby haven (regular readers will note I've had to excavate the Man Cave twice in as many years) then this may be worth a look, at least until GW step up with a list builder themselves.