Welcome to another installment of Starting Hex, a series about Warhammer Underworlds. I’m approaching Underworlds with a focus on improving my gameplay, building communities, and a maybe even painting some models. Let’s roll off and get started!
The Changer of Plays
Change is scary. Humans are creatures of habit. We seek patterns and find comfort in the known. If there is change, we prefer to be the cause of it — choosing to move house, change careers, or pick up new hobbies. If it’s forced on us, that’s much less desired and the immediate response can be defensive, negative, and anxious even if it could ultimately be for the best.
On a completely unrelated note, it looks like there’s a new version of Warhammer Underworlds on the way!
Showcased as the first item in the Warhammer Day Preview on Saturday, October 5, Embergard is kind of a big deal. We are very early in the stages of this new edition of the game but there is still a decent amount of information that can be picked out of the two videos and single Warhammer Community article that are available. That said, there is also a lot of information we do not have, and I’ve noticed some folks filling in the blanks in the style of some kind of doom spiraling Mad Libs. Let’s take a moment to reflect on what we do and do not know so far.
Games Workshop is no stranger to releasing new products and stringing along previews to build up hype. I think it’s safe to assume that this won’t be any different, and we can expect to receive a plethora of drip fed sneak peaks in the next few weeks. Until then, our only sources are the Warhammer Day Preview article on WarCom, two accompanying YouTube videos released by Warhammer’s account (one and two), and the Biggest Rules Changes article. Let’s go over what is explicitly stated in the videos and articles first, then hit on some frame-by-frame things a weirdo would notice if they watch the videos repeatedly (but who would do that??). Everything in the next two sections, until we get to my musings, is objective fact as presented by Games Workshop.
The Known
Between the videos and article, we have been told some clear facts about Embergard that are not ambiguous in any way.
Embergard Core Game Box:
- The new setting is “from beneath the ruins of Embergard” which is a city in Aqshy that has had some rat problems lately.
- This is a completely new edition. A “total reset” where the game is redesigned.
- The Embergard Core Game is the starting point for the entire edition; no new season starter boxes every six months.
- The box will contain models for The Emberwatch Patrols (Stormcast Eternals), Zikkit’s Tunnelpack (Skaven from Clan Skrye), and four universal Rivals decks (Blazing Assault, Emberstone Sentinels, Pillage & Plunder, and Countdown to Cataclysm).
- The two board system from current Underworlds is not returning. Instead, there will be a single double-sided board that both players use.
Cards and Decks:
- There are different playstyles that have been officially labeled – Strike, Take and Hold, Flex, and Mastery. Each of the Rivals decks will fall into one of these categories.
- Fighter cards have been significantly redesigned and feature a new stat — Bounty — which states how much glory each fighter is worth when taken out of action.
- Warband decks are no longer a thing.
- Power, Objective, and Fighter card art have been changed to feature photos of miniatures instead of traditional artwork.
Warbands:
- Instead of warband decks, every warband now has a warscroll card with the unique rules for that warband including their Inspire conditions.
- More warbands are on the way, and if any warbands are legal for organized play then they will be available from warhammer.com or your FLGS.
- Free digital rules will be available for “most warbands … at launch” and 16 will then have physical releases “shortly afterwards.”
- Between the 16 returning warbands, the 2 new ones showcased in Embergard, and 2 more brand new ones, this will be a pool of 20 warbands available at the start of Embergard.
- Current edition cards and boards will not be compatible, but all 58 existing warbands’ miniatures will be.
Rules:
- There are different formats to play. You can still “open a pre-built deck, shuffle, and play” or have the option to “fully design your own deck.”
- A new action called Focus has been added, which rolls the previous Strategize and Venture actions into one action before dialing it up to 11. Instead of drawing and discarding an Objective Card or drawing one Power Card, you instead discard as many cards in your hand as you want before drawing up the same number and type plus one additional Power Card.
- The impact of rolling a Critical result on dice has been dialed down while still having distinct and potentially cinematic impacts upon combat with the Overrun and Stand Fast rules.
- The Underdog mechanic makes an appearance in Underworlds, enhancing certain abilities or cards when the player using them is behind in Glory when compared to their opponent.
- The new rulebook is 36 pages long with 16 pages of rules. As a comparison, the current Wintermaw rulebook is 63 pages with 43 of those being rules.
The Glimpsed
I also put together a list of little tidbits that were shown, but not talked about. It ranges from pretty obvious things to slightly less obvious things – I’m not claiming to have deciphered a hidden message here, but I do think these are worth looking at even if they didn’t get a blurb in the article or videos.
- Fighter cards have names in three alphabets, but no other words.
- New keywords and symbols are spotted on some cards — including the lightning-bolt-in-a-hexagon symbol that used to mean a reaction, but now signifies a Surge ability.
- Many familiar components are showcased — glory, wound, move, charge, stagger, guard, and raised punch outs are seen in the videos. Likewise the numbered hexagonal tiles that were previously called Objectives are shown, but they were referred to as Treasure tokens in the video.
- The single board is 11 hexes by 9 hexes, but with the corners rounded off so it’s more like an oval shape than a rectangle. In total, it has 85 hexes. By comparison, two current boards lined up straight on are 11 hexes by 8 hexes for a total of 83 playable hexes.
- The photos for card art seem to be highly edited and dynamically shot. They are not simply product shots on a white background.
My Musings
There’s a lot to unpack here. I’m going to get into some subjective opinions on what’s been presented so far. The biggest takeaways are that existing cards and boards are going bye-bye, but all 58 warbands of models are going to get support in some way or another. If you have models, they’re going to get rules.
Speaking of warbands and fighters, the fighter cards are language agnostic now. This means GW won’t need to print multiple translations of each warband. This is a pretty large boon for them on the back end since, as far as I know, they still outsource all of their paper products so having only one set of fighter cards per warband would drastically reduce the product numbers they’d have to keep track of. Reducing printing costs, storage costs, and the chance of any mispacking (anyone else have a single copy of a Starblood Stalkers fighter card kicking around in a different language?).
All the basic stats from the first edition of Underworlds appear to be present on the fighter cards. They’ve got movement, defense, health, various attack profiles, and warband/leader/etcetera icons. The Bounty stat is a new one, though. This gives the designers another balance knob to turn. Also, it looks like they may have set it up so each warband is worth 7 glory total, which would be a nice boost to horde warbands who traditionally have bled glory strongly when fighting against elite, lower model count warbands.
What the fighter cards are losing are some of the nuanced and individual abilities they had. Things like Lady Harrow’s ability to push if another model is attacked, Gorath’s wound/hunger transfer spell, or Dromm’s enrage action look like they’re not making the transition to these updated fighter cards. Some of these could very well be ported over to the warband’s war scroll, which looks like it’s going to be a mixture of a plot card, overflow for some model specific rules, and guaranteed “in hand” gambit style abilities.
With the removal of warband decks, we’re going to be relying even more on the universal Rivals decks (which, sadly, don’t seem to have a new name). As GW mentioned, there’s going to be a pre-built deck format as well as one with deck building. We don’t have details (yet!) on how the deck building will work, but my unsubstantiated guess is that it’s going to be two Rivals decks combined, much like how today’s Nemesis format is a warband’s deck plus Rivals deck. One neat thing is that, if this is the case, the raw number of combinations for each warband is going to be much higher than it is now. Assuming we get to a point where we have 14 universal rivals decks again, we can compare that state to how it is now with the 14 decks for Nemesis. You can pair a warband with a single deck in current-Nemesis, which gives you 14 combinations for each warband. If the new deck building format is combining two universal decks, that’s 66 different combinations for each warband. With 20 warbands in the format and 14 decks, that’s 1320 different combinations of decks and warbands. No, they’re not all going to be equal but that’s a pretty staggering amount of options!
Board selection and placement is a big deal in the current version of Underworlds. Choosing a board that supports your gameplan via starting hex placement, hazard hexes, and space for objective placement is a substantial factor in competitive games of Underworlds. After the selection is placement, and that’s a whole ‘nother beast because the arrangement of straight on, offset, or longboard can really shake up how a game plays.
Embergard is nixing this aspect of the game and replacing it with a single board that both players share. I’ve seen talk about this removing strategic decisions from the game and honestly that’s true. It’s a shift for sure. I don’t think it’s completely removing that element of “turn 0” decision making from the game, though. The distribution of starting hexes of the two boards happens to have 7 available on each half of the board regardless of how it’s oriented – we may still have the variance between long and short boards, just not quite as long as it used to be. The total board size isn’t going to substantially change either – if going by raw number of hexes available on the boards, it appears to be going up by two.
On the topic of hexes, I’m going to be pretty happy if Objective tokens are getting renamed to Treasure tokens. I’ve had a few teaching games lately where I’m talking about how Objectives don’t inherently matter unless your Objectives say they do and that’s a pretty dumb sentence to have to say. Having two things in a game with the same name is silly, and making that lexical change fits in with the “wounds” renaming in AoS so GW is being consistent here.
Games Workshop specifically highlighting the availability of tournament legal warbands is a relief. I have mentioned in a few conversations about how it would be a pretty awkward look for someone to win the World Championship of Warhammer Underworlds with a warband that GW hasn’t even sold in years. Looks like they’re getting ahead of that bad look before it happened. WCW optics aside, it really stinks to have tournament legal options that are unavailable unless you scour Facebook Marketplace or eBay. Promising their players that any of the 20 organized play factions will be perpetually available gives me some warm fuzzy feelings about how dedicated GW is to the health of this game with the revamp.
I’m waiting with bated breath for more hints of what’s to come. GW’s promised a release roadmap “soon” and a series of in-depth articles covering the changes. Expect more coverage from Goonhammer when that happens!
As excited as I am about new Underworlds content coming out, I’m just as excited to be married to my lovely wife. She’s looking to get started with Headsmen’s Curse in the near future, so that’s even more great news!
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