The Quiet Farewell to Citadel: A Small Rebrand With a Big Echo

Games Workshop is rebranding their paint range, Citadel Colour, as Warhammer Colour. On the surface, it’s a small, administrative change of the kind that most people won’t register until they pick up a new pot and realise the label looks slightly different. The paints are the same. The names are the same. The ranges are the same. Nothing material is shifting.

And yet, it still feels like a moment.

Citadel has been part of the hobby’s vocabulary for decades. Long before Warhammer became the all‑encompassing brand it is now, Citadel was the practical backbone of the company. Citadel Miniatures was the casting arm. Citadel Colour was the paint line that supported it. The name carried a sense of the workshop, the idea that things were being made, not just marketed. It was one of the last remnants of the older, slightly scruffier Games Workshop ecosystem, back when the company felt like a cluster of related ventures rather than a single, unified identity.

Over the last ten years, that ecosystem has been steadily tidied away. Stores became Warhammer stores. Forge World was folded into the main site. Specialist Games returned under the Warhammer banner. The company has been consolidating itself, smoothing out the edges, and presenting one clear, consistent face to the world. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense. From a hobbyist’s perspective, it’s simply the direction of travel.

But the disappearance of the Citadel name still lands with a faint sense of finality. Not because the paints are changing (they aren’t) but because the label was one of the last holdovers from an era when Games Workshop felt a little less like a single, polished brand. For those of us who grew up with that patchwork, the shift reads as another quiet sign that the company we remember has fully grown into something else.

It’s not a tragedy. It’s not even particularly dramatic. It’s just the end of a small chapter that had been left open for a long time. Most people won’t notice. Newcomers won’t care. But for anyone who remembers the old Citadel logo stamped on metal blisters, or the first-generation paint pots that dried out if you looked at them wrong, the rebrand is a reminder that the hobby moves on, even in the details.

Citadel isn’t being erased so much as retired. The paints continue. The hobby continues. Only the name changes. But names carry history, and it’s reasonable to feel the faint echo of an era closing as this one slips quietly into the archive.