The Goonhammer Open was a weekend full of tournaments across the Warhammer ecosystem. Join us for an event report, from a player and the tournament organizer, from the one-day tournament of the ULTIMATE COMPETITIVE MINIATURES GAME: Warhammer Underworlds!

Saturday

Marquis of Peaches: Saturday was a long day for me! I spent Friday night on a slowly-deflating air mattress, and ended up not sleeping much past 4 AM or so. To add insult to injury, the hotel breakfast was about on par with the crappy free breakfast at any given motel, except we had to pay $20 for it. 

You can read about the majority of my Saturday here. The summary is: oh god Nuffle it was hot in that room. The only relevant detail to add is that a group of us had dinner at the nearby Guinness Brewery, which is apparently a big deal in Baltimore! Most of us ordered refreshing glasses of classic, freshly-brewed Guinness stout, but one of our number (who will remain unnamed) ordered a pilsner. At the Guinness brewery. Who does that??

Jake: Marquis of Peaches had a much earlier start to a much longer day than I did. I didn’t head over to the venue until well after lunch. My goal was to see how long the drive would take (shorter than expected!), see how the parking situation was (better than expected!), check out the venue (warmer than expected!), and drop off the Underworlds Organized Play kit that Goonhammer graciously provided for the event’s prize support. 

It was great to get to meet up and say hi to folks I had met at previous GHOs, as well as meet others in the flesh for the first time after chatting with them in the Goonhammer Discord for so long. This hobby is truly filled with a bunch of weirdos, but in a good way.

Afterwards, I did the less than 30 minute drive back to my house, took a cold shower, and slept soundly in my bed with the best pillow I’ve ever owned. Seriously, it’s one of those cooling pillows and when I lay my head down on it, it feels like it’s been in the refrigerator for an hour beforehand. I’m trying to not get distracted while writing this in the middle of the day, but now all I can think of is the brisk feeling of my pillow’s cold embrace on the nape of my neck…

Sorry. That got weird.

Marquis of Peaches: No please, go on. 

Jake: Since you insist… If I ever win the lottery, I’m going to buy a room full of these pillows and make them into a nest for me to curl up in.

Sunday

Marquis of Peaches: Last night at the brewery, I also picked up a 12-pack of game aids to help cool me off throughout the day, and to offer to my opponents. I figured that these would provide me plenty of carbs throughout the day (and really didn’t want to spend another $20 on crappy bacon), so I skipped breakfast and headed straight to the conference room. 

Jake: That’s the real Breakfast of Champions, folks. Meanwhile, I grabbed the bag that I had packed the night before and hopped into my car for a relaxing half hour drive into the venue. I was a little behind on some of my favorite podcasts, so I listened to the latest episode of What the Hex?! where, amusingly, they were plugging the event I was on my way to run. Thanks, guys!

Marquis of Peaches: Allegedly, some of the air conditioning in the hallway or the tournament room proper had been fixed. I am not convinced that this actually happened, because it was still real warm in there! However, because the Swelter Bowl was already over, we were contractually forbidden from mentioning the heat. It’s a tough job here at the Goonhammer offices. 

Jake: Yeah, it was… warm. I won’t bring it up again either after this, but I will highlight this goodie that I thought to bring. 

The original plan was to set it up at the head of the tables and have it blow down for all the players to get some relief. This was intended partly to make my players comfortable and also so I could make the joke later in the day that the Underworlds players were the coolest in the room. Unfortunately I didn’t take into account the issue of having a fan blowing across a table full of cards. In the end I just stuck it on the floor and selfishly hogged the flowing air. Occasionally someone would walk by, say “ooh!” and pause in front of it for a few seconds. I hope it helped.

Marquis of Peaches: I was waffling between bringing Hexbane’s Hunters and Grinkrak’s Looncourt to this event, paired with the Voidcursed Thralls deck either way. I’ve gotten very comfortable with the VCT deck, and know how to pilot it. I ultimately decided on Hexbane, mostly because of the dogs’ Reaction that lets me move one of them any time one of the humans moves. This is a super powerful tool, and it combos especially well with a few of the positioning-based objectives in the VCT deck. 

Jake: One thing that I really lucked out on for this event was that I knew the vast majority of the players. Whether they frequented the same LGS as me or the same Discord servers as me, I had conversed with plenty folks prior to this day. The ones who were new to me also turned out to be incredibly pleasant people! I’ll say it again later, but thank you to everyone for being so chill.

Once everyone had found the Underworlds tables and checked in on BCP, I busted out my event notebook and gave a short briefing. I joked that I was certain everyone fully read the player pack beforehand but just in case, I wanted to highlight a few things. In particular how the rounds were timed (120 minutes for a best-of-three format), what happens if time is called (the player who went second in the game will finish their activation and power step; no End Phase unless it’s the last activation of the round), and how this event was capping Glory Point differentials (+/- 7 for each game). I felt some of these would have come up naturally through the event, so this way I could answer questions ahead of time.

With the pre-event briefing out of the way, it was time for pairings!

Round 1 

Marquis of Peaches: vs Jeremy – Hedkrakka’s Madmob/Breakneck Slaughter

This was a really tight set of games, and I absolutely loved the format for it! This was actually the first tournament I’ve played with the GW-recommended matches of 3 games. My local Underworlds scene has some very, very good players in it, which counterintuitively means our tournaments are usually more casual formats. The focus is on growing the game and building a community, which means a lot of Rivals events where everyone plays everyone. This isn’t a bad thing, but Underworlds can be incredibly swingy and sometimes the dice and/or cards just aren’t there for you.

This was very much in evidence as Jeremy and I played! He pretty much blew me out of the water in the first game, with a 21-14 win. He mentioned that this was the most Glory he’d ever scored in a single game, so uh. I guess I’m happy I could do that for him? Hedkrakka’s Madmob are, as far as I know, the only warband that still interacts with the old, old Primacy Token mechanic. Basically, if you kill a fighter from full health or kill the enemy leader, you get the Primacy Token. Whoever has the token at the end of a round gains an additional (spent) Glory token. Jeremy got all three possible Primacy Glory in this game, mostly off the back of killing my dogs – 2 wounds doesn’t go very far against the beatstick orcs!

The second game was lower-scoring, but very much a blowout in the other direction: 19-11, my win. This is where the 3-game format really came into its own. We each had a pretty good idea of what was in our opponent’s decks, so the third game was a tense affair – not least because we only had about 30 minutes to play it! Both of our warbands had the potential to spike serious damage after a couple upgrades, and I had killed his archer and wounded another orc by the end of the first round. He scored exactly 0 Glory in the first round, and we both thought this game was going to be a third blowout.

Reader, it was not. All of the cards that Jeremy was missing to really power up his warband appeared as he discarded and drew in the first end phase, and he went on an unholy WAAAGH through the rest of the match. I simply ran out of fighters to score my objectives, and he won 19-13.

Results: 2-1 match loss, -6 Glory differential

Jake: Hell yeah. Congratulations on putting this guy in his place, Jeremy.

Shortly after round one started was when I remembered I had some stuff I was supposed to pass out to the players. One of my favorite bits of needless bling for the game is the old Beastgrave Gift Pack – this was released years ago and contained some cards (which aren’t legal for Rivals/Nemesis/Championship anymore), a hard plastic “playmat” with places marked out for your decks and discard piles, but most importantly it came with three chunky double sided tokens to mark the turns. I like the size, heft, and feel of these big ol’ tokens.

I thought something along those lines would make for some good event swag, so after checking in with some of the Head Goons at Goonhammer, I got permission to slap Gregbot’s ugly mug on some poker chips. I wound up giving everyone four instead of three. This way they could be used as turn tokens or as activation tokens. 

Round 2 

Marquis of Peaches: vs Chris – Domitan’s Stormcoven/Force of Frost

Underworlds is a game all about the action economy. More fighters means more options, so the designers have to find a way to balance warbands with fewer fighters. Several of the Stormcast Eternals warbands get multiple attacks, a more powerful Range 1 attack and a longer-range chip damage attack. This versatility is what lets them compete against more numerous warbands.

Unfortunately, a Voidcursed fighter cannot make attack actions at Range 3+. This means any VCT deck that leans into Voidcursing your opponent’s fighters is essentially a hard counter to warbands like the Farstriders and Domitan’s Stormcoven.

I won’t go too deep into the details of this match, but I can pinpoint the exact moment that Chris’s spirit broke. In the second round of the first game, Chris only had Domitan left on the table. I had realized how powerful Voidcursing his fighters would be, so I had stacked a nasty little one-two combo on my leader: Thrallmaker and the Retractable Pistol.

For those of you keeping the box score, this allows me to make a Range 4 Attack action as a Reaction to an enemy fighter’s Move action, and Voidcurse the enemy fighter if it succeeds. This can be done in the middle of a Charge superaction, between the Move and Attack actions in it. 

Chris was already getting frustrated in this game, because his dice weren’t cooperating and he was running out of options. He went to Charge Hexbane with his last fighter, and Moved to 3 hexes away, I guess because the distance made him feel safer. I used the Retractable Pistol and succeeded in the attack, Voidcursing Domitan. If Chris had moved Domitan to within two hexes, he would have been able to use the non-magical Range 2 attack on the fighter card, but as it was he took a Charge token and was unable to attack.

I offered Chris one of my game aids to ease the passage of the rest of the round, but he politely declined. Never one to waste, I finished mine and started in on his!

Result: 2-0 match win, +14 Glory differential

Jake: It was great seeing you out here, Chris! Also I’m really sorry for bringing up the Thrallmaker + Retractable Pistol combo to Marquis of Peaches in a practice game a few weeks prior to GHO… 

Round two is as good a time as any to bring up the topic of judge calls. I was wearing the hat of both TO and judge for this event. This was one of the aspects of running the clash that had me the most anxious in the build up to the day. I am still fairly new to the game, having only truly started playing it in 2024. As of the weekend of GHO, I had just barely broken the 50 games played marker according to my handy dandy spreadsheet that I’ve been maintaining. I knew for a fact that most of the attendees have been playing far longer, so I was worried about making the wrong calls if asked.

Some of the online Underworlds communities I have joined have dedicated channels for rules questions. I started to make it a point to scroll back and read as many questions as I could and then keep on top of the activity in the channels. I think it helped significantly. 

Fortunately, a solid 95% of the calls were solved by reading the cards, the rulebook, or the player packet. If anything, the fact that I had only picked up the game in Deathgorge was a boon because I didn’t have previous versions of the rules bouncing around in my head. I can only recall one question where I felt like I had to make a judgment call, and both the players seemed to accept it in good graces and move on with the game. 

Interlude: Lunch

Marquis of Peaches: The hotel had kindly laid out a lunch buffet for us, but they were asking $20 for all-you-can eat cold cuts and inch-thick hunks of bread. I laughed and started looking for nearby fast food options, and saw a Chipotle within half a mile or so! I’m always keenly aware of how little exercise I get while at game tournaments, so I walked up to fill myself with a burrito.

I must have forgotten what country I’m in! The sidewalks were between spotty and nonexistent, crosswalks were literally nonexistent on the entire half-mile walk, and I ended up walking through parking lots for most of it just to stay off of the roads. It was high noon, 95 degrees F, and I was wearing jeans and a black Goonhammer Open t-shirt. 

The burrito was pretty great, though.

Jake: While you were out there braving the elements (cars are an element, right?) I spent lunch working with Goonhammer’s own Rob on paint judging. Rob is an old hand on both sides of the painting competition line, and I’m grateful he found time to not only perform the judging but to walk me through his thought process and point out a lot of details for what he tends to look for. Big “teach a nerd to fish” energy.

There was some stiff competition, but ultimately Kevin’s lovely – er… hideous? – Skabbik’s Plaguepack won best painted this year. The freehand on the hoods and the glowing smoke were particularly striking elements of this Pestilens warband. 

When designing the player pack, I intentionally included that there was no painting requirement for this particular event. Unlike in some of Games Workshop’s other games, there’s no inherent points bonus for having battle ready miniatures. Sure, requiring a minimal paint standard for 3-7 models isn’t much, but I wanted to keep it as open and welcoming to new players as possible. Besides, we all know painted models perform better.

I didn’t really do lunch – I had brought a mix of dried fruit and nuts that kept me going through the day. Cashews, pistachios, dried cranberries, and dried pineapples. It’s no Big Burrito, but it worked.

We’ll leave our authors fueled up and ready to finish the afternoon’s games next week! Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website, and more.