Warhammer Underworlds occupies a unique place in Games Workshop’s lineup of boxed games. It’s essentially a skirmish game, with battles taking place over a small hex grid between warbands of (generally) 3-6 models. So far, so good. But wait – it’s also… card-based? Well, yes it is, though not in the same way other deck-building games are. But lets not get ahead of ourselves. Lets take a look at where Warhammer Underworlds began, and why this overhauled 2nd edition of the game is worth your time.Â
WHY A NEW EDITION?
When Warhammer Underworlds first appeared in 2017, it was a runaway success – it was quick to play, offered very dynamic gameplay thanks to its strict limits of how many activations each player had in a turn and the randomised nature of its objective and power cards, and came with easy-to-assemble but brilliantly characterful miniatures in coloured plastic. It was easy for beginners to get into, but had a lot of tactical depth for more competitive players. It was well supported, with new warbands and new ‘seasons’ of the game every year, each offering new tactics and gradually expanding the rules.Â
But that’s where the problems began – eight expansions and 50+ warbands became more of a burden than a boon, and even with warbands only being in production for a short time before being delisted the sheer amount of content was intimidating to newcomers, and increasingly difficult to balance. So Games Workshop decided to do that thing it often does when it comes to a major new edition of an existing game – pretty much wipe the slate clean.
WHAT'S CHANGED?
The brand new Embergard box is a complete overhaul of the existing Warhammer Underworlds game with cleaned up rules, tightened up tactics, and a revised approach to the way card decks are handled, with new themed Rivals decks that are now usable by any warband. Most of the old warbands are still playable, after a fashion, but only a limited number are fully supported and tournament-legal.Â
The change to rivals decks is probably the largest departure from the previous edition. Whereas in the past each warband had its own Rivals deck with unique cards and objectives tailored to that warband, the new format separates warbands from decks. Now there are 4 (with two more on the way) core Rivals Decks that can be used by any warband, allowing you to switch up your playstyle much more easily. You can still create your own Nemesis decks, but these must be drawn from just two Rivals decks, so there’s less to play with for those who like deck building.
The main rules are pretty much the same, but tightened up – gone are the Power dice for spellcasters, and special abilities have largely been consolidated down to a few universal abilities, whilst critical successes have been slightly altered – now they just count as a regular success, but can trigger weapon / attack abilities instead. An underdog mechanic has also been introduced, giving the player with the fewest Glory points a slight advantage to try to even up the game, and glory points are no longer ‘spent’ when playing upgrades – now they act as a limit for the cost of all your upgrade cards, so if a character dies you can upgrade your remaining characters back up to your glory limit. Oh, and you now earn glory by defeating enemies, too.
There is one other change that I’m less enamoured with – the switch to a single board means that – currently, at least – there’s no way to play Underworlds with more than 2 players, whereas the previous edition of the game supported up to 4.Â
GAMEPLAY
If you’ve played the previous edition of Warhammer Underworlds, you know what to expect here as the core game hasn’t changed dramatically. The board is divided in half with each player taking a side, then players take turn placing feature tokens – effectively objectives – in empty spaces before deploying their warbands and drawing their initial hand of cards – 3 objective cards and 5 power cards. From there you’ll play 3 turns, rolling off to determine who goes first, and in each turn a player has just 4 activations at their disposal, with play alternating between players after each activation.Â
When you activate a model, you can then perform one action with that model – move, fight, guard, or charge. Each fighter can (normally) only move once per turn, but can be activated multiple times, so you could theoretically use all four actions on the same character if you wanted to. Fighters have various attacks listed on their cards; normally an attack will be a case of rolling a couple of Underworlds’ unique Attack dice, whilst the defender rolls their Save dice, each trying to match the relevant symbols on their cards (some fighters count Hammer symbols as successes, whilst others count swords, for example), with some other symbols also counting as successes if the enemy is flanked or surrounded by your fighters. Weapons then do a preset amount of damage if the target didn’t save all of the attackers successes. If you don’t damage your opponent then as long as you at least draw with them you can push them back a hex, and this can be crucial to manoeuvring both friendly and enemy combatants around the board in order to score your objectives.
After each activation comes the Power step, where both players take turns to use Power cards from their hand. These can be special abilities and attacks that directly impact the game board, or upgrades that you can equip to your fighters to improve their prowess. Play then switches to the other player.
Your Objective cards are the key to winning the game, as completing the objectives on the cards earns you Glory. Glory determines how many upgrades you can equip, but also determines the winner of the game, so keeping track of your objectives is crucial. Each Rivals deck has its own themed set of objectives; the Sentinels of Embergard deck tasks you with holding treasure tokens and dominating the battlefield, for example, whilst the Pillage & Plunder deck rewards you for ransacking feature tokens instead.
The core rules are fairly simple, then, which makes Underworlds pretty easy to play if you’re looking to introduce it to a new player. The limited number of actions you can take in a round makes every single action important, and also keeps the play time brief – you can rattle through a game in about half an hour once you know what you’re doing. I was initially concerned that the removal of warband-specific Rivals decks would limit replayability, but even with the four decks and two warbands in the box it feels like theres a lot of room for figuring out your own strategies and game plans, and that’s without getting into the idea of constructing your own Nemesis decks.
COMPONENTS
As we’ve come to expect from GW, the game components in Embergard are very high quality. the two push-fit warbands are clearly the highlight, and whilst the trio of Stormcast Eternals are solid, the Skaven warband are a really fun collection of characterful models.
Elsewhere, the game board is a quarter fold, double-sided affair with nice enough artwork though not particularly notable. We do have a few concerns about how robust it will be in the long term – this is the only Underworlds game board usable in the new edition, after all – it does the job. The provided tokens are heavy card stock, and the warband card and rivals decks are attractively presented, though the unique artwork from the previous editions has been replaced with photography to mixed results; the photos are certainly very high quality, but some of the game’s personality has been lost in the transition. Games Workshop has, at least, provided a box to store the cards and game board, but this is pretty flimsy and you’ll probably want something a bit more robust in the long term.Â
CONCLUSION
Whilst I was initially sceptical that the removal of warband-specific decks and merging of game boards would make Warhammer Underworlds a bit too limited, it doesn’t feel so far like that will be the case. The mix of objectives available in the four bundled Rivals decks makes for some dynamic, tense gameplay, with overall command of the match swinging multiple times throughout each game. It’s also a pretty decent value box- okay, you only get 8 models, but they’re really good ones, and the box really does contain everything you need to start playing the full game straight away – there’s no ‘full’ rulebook or army lists to have to worry about, and even if you never buy any of the extra warbands or Rivals Decks there’s still plenty of fun to be had with the contents of the Embergard box on its own.Â