Warhammer Open Series expands to the UK with Birmingham and Newport events

The Warhammer Open Series is finally crossing into the UK, and it is doing it with two events that matter for very different reasons. Birmingham will get the first stop, then Newport, Wales will host the first standalone UK Warhammer Open, giving local players their first real shot at the circuit without having to travel abroad.

Warhammer Open: Birmingham is set for 29 to 31 May at UK Games Expo, the UK’s largest hobby games convention, spread across five halls of the NEC Birmingham and the Hilton Hotel. That matters because the Open will not sit in a vacuum. It will land inside a huge convention weekend, with open gaming, classes and the travelling Warhammer store all folded into the same experience. For 40,000 players chasing a Grand Tournament seat, the bigger prize is obvious: Golden Tickets to the 2026 World Championships of Warhammer.

Games Workshop is also using the Birmingham stop to give UK attendees first access to the 2026 event miniatures, Cadia Unbroken and Dawners Reward. That is the kind of detail collectors notice immediately, because the Open is not just a competitive funnel. It is also one of the first places in the UK where the event swag and exclusive products will be on the table.

The Newport event pushes the hobby side even harder. Scheduled for 14 to 16 August at the International Convention Centre Wales, it is being billed as the first Warhammer Open in Wales and the first standalone UK Warhammer Open. Alongside the Grand Tournaments, attendees can expect narrative gaming, hobby challenges, paint classes and nine classes run by three painters across three days. Games Workshop says class attendees can leave with up to 15 paints and a selection of artificer brushes, which makes the weekend feel more like a full hobby retreat than a scoreboard-only event.

That broader format is the point. Warhammer Community says the Open series is built as a three-day celebration for both casual players and top-tier competitors, so a newcomer can play narrative games and pick up painting tips while a tournament regular chases a World Championships invite. That balance is exactly what gives the series its pull.

The stakes behind those Golden Tickets are getting bigger too. The 2026 World Championships of Warhammer will be held from 3 to 6 December at the Fira de Barcelona in Barcelona, Spain, and Games Workshop says the event will be larger than before, with more qualifiers invited across Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Warhammer Underworlds and Kill Team. Last year’s championships drew 729 players from 48 countries, a scale that shows why the UK debut matters.

Games Workshop’s broader Open schedule also stretches through Maastricht, Dallas, Edmonton and Tacoma, but the UK dates are the ones that will hit hardest here. For the first time, British players can chase the same circuit, the same prizes and the same event culture that had previously felt like something happening somewhere else.