Black Friday Miniature Paint & Wargaming Deals

The biggest savings live right now

Hand-picked from our partner shops' clearance pages, biggest saving first, shown against the maker's RRP · checked 8 September

Every deal, every category: the full weekly check.

How Games Workshop discounting actually works

Games Workshop's own store is not where a Black Friday saving comes from. GW discounts almost nothing on current product at any point in the year. What it does in late November is put out seasonal bundles at full price and clear last-edition stock at the price that stock was always going to clear at. Neither is a sale in the sense the word is used everywhere else that week.

The discount on Warhammer comes from independent stockists, and it is not seasonal either. Of the 1,555 Games Workshop kits where we hold both a maker's RRP and a shop price, 1,300 are discounted by exactly 20% — not "up to" 20%, and not for one week in November. That is simply the everyday price of a GW box at a discounter, and it is the number every Black Friday banner has to beat before it means anything.

So the test is short. A "25% off Warhammer" sticker is a five-point saving dressed as an event. A genuine Black Friday deal on GW product is either a clearance line — last edition, discontinued, damaged box — or a bundle that beats the sum of its parts. Our box pages price the contents separately for exactly that comparison.

Which shops actually run a sale

Most miniature retailers do not run a Black Friday event at all; they discount the same way in November as in June. Three of our partners run clearance that has produced real savings in the price data we keep, and they are the ones worth watching as the week approaches.

• Green Stuff World's outlet — the maker clearing its own overstock, so the saving is against its own list price rather than a reseller's. Paints, texture rollers, tools and basing materials, and the rows we have judged run 40–60% under RRP. It is the one European partner whose sale bucket is consistently worth the postage.
• Loaded Dice's sale collection — a UK independent whose clearance rows go well past the usual 20%, especially on paint sets and Speedpaint. Their ordinary shelf price is already 30–45% below maker RRP, which is the point worth holding on to: the sale is a discount on a price that was never RRP to begin with.
• Wargame Portal's Games Workshop clearance — last-edition boxes and out-of-print kits, mostly for US buyers. Thin, but it is one of the few places a GW box goes meaningfully below the standard discount.

One caution about the crossed-out number on any shop's sale page. When we audited it, one partner's compare-at price had not moved on a single one of 233 rows in a fortnight — it is the maker's list price, not a price that shop was recently charging. We label it RRP for that reason, and 38 candidate deals whose entire saving was the word "was" were refused before they reached this site. Read every shop's "was" the same way you would read ours.

Judge a paint deal per millilitre, not per pot

This is where most Black Friday paint spending goes wrong. A Citadel Base pot holds 12ml. A Vallejo or Scale75 dropper holds 17ml, an Army Painter Fanatic or AK 3rd Gen bottle 18ml, a Monument Pro Acryl bottle 22ml. Thirty per cent off a 12ml pot can still be more expensive per millilitre than the full price of an 18ml bottle, and the shelf edge will never tell you that.

Every paint page here prints the price per millilitre beside the price at each shop, so the comparison is already done: browse by brand, or read the per-ml comparison of the main ranges.

The same arithmetic decides sets, and sets are where a November discount genuinely compounds: a boxed range at 30% off is a saving on top of a per-pot price that was already below buying the colours singly. Our paint sets index ranks every set by price per millilitre with its exact contents listed, so you can tell a discounted set from a discounted box of colours you will never use.

What to do before the day

• Build the list now. The worst Black Friday purchases are the ones decided at the moment of the discount. Work out the colours a scheme actually needs with the paint matcher, and take that list to the sale rather than the other way round.
• Know the normal price first. We re-check every seller weekly and date the figure. A banner means nothing without the number it is discounting from — that is what the deals page is for.
• Check the code before the sale. Several partners issue a standing discount code that works all year, and a sale price is not always the better of the two. The verified ones are on our voucher page.
• Watch the postage. A 40% saving on two pots is undone by a courier. Our shop pages carry each partner's delivery terms and where they ship to.

Black Friday questions