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!

Last Time, on UnderBall Z

It’s been a little over two weeks since we last examined the Warhammer Community teasers for the upcoming Embergard release. I spent that time on a very much needed family vacation, but Games Workshop didn’t cut me any breaks and there’s a ton of stuff to cover while I was kicking my feet up by the pool (and chasing my small child around Disney World).

Since then, we’ve had a livestream demonstration of the game and a slew of very impactful articles revealing key aspects of the new edition. Since we’re all still twiddling our thumbs waiting to get hands on the new edition, let’s dig into these morsels!

Gameplay Stream

Nick and Alex, a pair of Warhammer TV personalities, took the game for a spin and answered a few questions from the viewers. The key takeaways here are mostly just from watching the game being played, with a few tidbits of information being dangled in front of us by Ed during lulls in the gameplay.

It starts off strong by showing how different the “pre-game” actions are. In the current, 1st edition of Underworlds there’s a fairly lengthy process involving multiple contested rolls before the game starts. It’s enough of a lengthy process that I have a cheat sheet in my phone that I refer to because I still find I mix up a step here or there unless I do this.

Luckily, Embergard is cutting down the pre-game steps to get to the gameplay faster. The exact details are still up in the air until we can get hands on the rulebook, but it seems like the process is:

1. Draw starting hands and decide if players are doing any redraws (aka mulligans).
2. Roll off to determine who places the board and determine starting sides
3. The player who did not pick their starting side places the first treasure token, which must go in neutral (no one’s) territory. Players then alternate placing treasure tokens until all five have been placed.
4. The player who placed the last treasure token places a miniature on a starting hex first. Players then alternate placing fighters until all have been placed.
5. Players roll off to determine the first turn. Winner of the roll off chooses who takes the first turn, and the loser of the roll off (regardless of who takes the first turn) draws a power card.

Additionally, we were treated with some nice up close looks at a variety of cards – fighter cards and cards from the Rivals decks. I won’t be going into detail on those here, but one takeaway is that some decks will have cards of the same name (Healing Potion, for instance). Fighters also have more health than they did in the first edition of Underworlds, while damage profiles look to be fairly similar to how they were before.

As for rules, there are various runemarks that appear on certain weapon profiles. These include some returning classics like Cleave (ignore Shields in the save roll), Ensnare (ignore Dodges in the save roll), and Grievous (+1 damage) as well as new weapon abilities like Brutal (ignore Flanked and Surrounded results on save rolls) and Grapple (instead of driving the target back, you can push them 1 hex). It was stated that you have to pick a single weapon ability when making an attack, so there’s going to be a little more restriction when loading a single fighter up with enhancements. One very interesting thing is that if the developers change all the bonus damage upgrades and gambits to grant Grievous, they inherently cannot stack and also won’t stack with other weapon abilities.

The lethal hexes on the board no longer damage fighters. Instead, they grant stagger tokens to any fighters who pass through them. On a related note, fighters can now have both stagger and guard tokens where previously they would overwrite each other.

I know the removal of two boards and the mini-game of board placement is a hot button topic, but I’m quite pleased by how much quicker the process is to get to playing the game. When running teaching games for new players, I’d often wind up placing the boards straight on and doing an event distribution of objectives for them so we could get into the game a little quicker, especially since a first game of Underworlds will already have enough moving pieces to not need to introduce more.

That said, there are a few things I’m less keen on. The restriction of requiring the first treasure token to go in neutral territory feels like a heavy handed approach and removes some agency from the player placing the first token. I’m also a little hesitant about the automatic power card going to whoever loses the roll off regardless of who goes first – it feels like the default approach is going to be wanting to lose the roll, because then you are guaranteed an extra card and can hope that your opponent makes the wrong choice in choosing who goes first.

In watching the game in action, the change to critical results on dice rolls was definitely felt. I’m cautiously optimistic on this mostly because it makes that single critical defense roll less swingy. Likewise, the new Overrun and Stand Fast abilities came up just enough that they’re worth keeping in mind and showed they can have impacts on how the game plays out.

Playstyles and Rivals Decks

The majority of the article released on the 14th was taken up by crisp and clear images of cards from the new decks. There’s nothing terribly revealing about these sneak peaks, but it’s fun to get a glimpse at how the four decks will presumably play. I’m going to wait to talk about any particular cards until we have the full deck lists available, but hopefully that will be soon!

What I will talk about is how excited I am for the Countdown to Cataclysm deck. This is the first Mastery deck we’ll have a glimpse at, and it seems to also be the only one of the four with a plot card. There have definitely not been enough of the deck contents showcased yet to make any judgment calls on how good it will be, but I think it’s thematic as hell and having a deck where the majority of the cards in it gain power as the game goes on is an innovative twist.

The mechanics to advance the Cataclysm tracker lends itself naturally to certain play styles. Getting to advance the counter the first time each round when a friendly fighter dies could be leveraged to disincentivize your opponent from going after a forward treasure token holder (or more likely give you a small boon when that inevitably happens). Perhaps a warband could be set up to missile one fighter into the midst of the enemy territory each round – normally this over-extension can be punished by taking out the stranded fighter, but if you’re able to do enough damage in an alpha strike you could recoup that loss.

You can also gain a large bump in tracker increments by playing a sort of anti-hold gameplan. Either killing the enemy fighters who stand on treasure tokens, or just bullying them off so you can stand on them yourself to kill two birds with one emberstone!

It really reminds me of Voidcursed Thralls or Hungering Parasite in that there’s an additional mini-game to play with rewards for handling it well. I enjoyed playing both of those decks in the first edition of Underworlds, so I am not terribly surprised to find myself already itching to learn more about the Countdown.

But now, for something really exciting…

Deck Building

As Nick coyly alluded to on the stream, this is the promised deck building article covering how Nemesis will function in this brave new world. And… it’s basically how it works now!

Fortunately, how it works now is a solid foundation. You’ll still be combining two Rivals decks into one, but this time there won’t be a warband deck in the mix. One thing I’m excited about here is how this change opens up more combinations for each warband.

In the current system, a warband is always locked into its warband deck and can add one universal Rivals deck to build a Nemesis deck. As first edition draws to a close, that means any particular warband has 14 different options for building a Nemesis deck. We’re going to ignore that some of those options are worse than others – that’s kind of obvious and will always be the case – but it gives us a starting point.

Going into Embergard with only four different decks, any particular warband will already have 6 different options. That’s nearly halfway to the current ecosystem (which grew over years) in one single release. Spoilers for later in the article, but Games Workshop has already shown a roadmap indicating two more Rivals decks shortly after Embergard’s release. This brings the total combination for any particular warband (ignoring plot card restrictions) to 15. Ta-da, we are nearly at the same amount of options available shortly after the revamp as we are after years of building up the Nemesis pool in the current edition.

Let’s get silly and imagine there are 14 decks like we have today. That’s 91 combinations. I don’t know about you, but this tickles me and I’m ready to start brewing decks already.

I think it’s important to clarify that the different play styles (Strike, Take and Hold, Flex, and Mastery) are all just labels. There’s nothing restricting you to taking decks that match your warband or match each other. Go hog wild. Mix and match to your heart’s content.

Let’s Talk About Boxes of Stuff

Really saving the best for last here. We finally got information on how the “other” (non Embergard box) Organized Play legal warbands are going to be released and it’s a doozy. There’s not as many things to extrapolate off of in here, but the details we get are quite relevant to anyone interested in the options available in the game.

To start with, we’ll have four boxes available right after Embergard’s release. These will be a re-release of classic warbands plus their updated fighter cards and warscrolls. If you missed out on getting these in the past, this is for you! They’re also potential box splits to do with a friend (or eBay) if you only want a portion of the warbands available in a box.

“But Jake,” a theoretical reader asks, “you are a colossal and obsessive nerd who already has all the warbands that have ever been released. Are you going to have to buy four boxes of models you already own?”

No, and that call out was a little harsh but not false. There is another, alternative product available for those of us with large model collections already. The Warbands of Embergard are going to contain all the same updated fighter cards and warscrolls, just without the plastic sprues. Also, can we take a moment to appreciate how great this box looks? Folks have already pointed out what snazzy design this box and some of the Warhammer Community articles have, and I definitely agree. Kudos to whoever is on the GW team doing image layouts and product design.

But wait, there’s more! Two more Organized Play legal warbands will follow in this same vague “shortly after Embergard” window, along with two more Rivals decks. We already knew that all the remaining warbands were going to get updated cards and warscrolls, but also be shunted off to a Legends status like other GW games have – you’re welcome to play these warbands with your friends or at casual game nights, but for any organized tournaments (unless otherwise stated) it’s going to be limited to the OP legal ones above.

What we didn’t know yet was that Games Workshop is also promising to re-release many of these Legends warbands in the future with updated cards and rules “in due course” but time will tell on what that actually means in terms of a release tempo.

Buried way down at the bottom is perhaps the nicest bit of news for anyone who wants to play the game competitively. The Design Studio is committing to releasing quarterly balance updates from now on. These have come out sporadically in the past, but having a (somewhat) firm schedule in place and the promise to try and keep the game in a healthy state is reassuring for sure.

But They Were, All of Them, Deceived, for Another Post Was Made

Sure, why not. Right after the previous article outlining the shortly-after-Embergard-release schedule, GW followed it up with even more warbands being spotlighted as being Organized Play legal.

In case you don’t want to decipher the hieroglyphics of warband iconography, here’s a table presenting the full list (minus the two unknown wildcards):

Order

Chaos

Death

Destruction

I’ll be honest, this feels a little off brand from what has been talked about so far. There was a prevalent message of the 16 returning warbands plus 4 new warbands for a total of 20 warbands in Organized Play. But now we’re at 33 instead? That’s cool and all, but I thought the approach was to curate a smaller pool of warbands to keep the game manageable for newer players and reduce the amount of products.

Oh well, this is where we’re at instead!

Way back before we knew of Embergard, it was my pet theory that we were going to get warband rotation and it would be the last X seasons to give us a pool of warbands on par with the Rivals decks. This list of the 13 here are some of the most recent ones that were released, along with a few that made it into the four Grand Alliance boxes mentioned above, and that’s what I thought we’d be going into Embergard with as the legal options. That’s a lot of words to say we’re roughly at where I was expecting, just in a very roundabout method and with some extra warbands tacked on top. Which I guess isn’t a bad problem to have.

Phew, that was a lot to catch up on. We have already been promised even more drip fed information before Embergard goes on pre-order, so come back soon for more Underworlds coverage! If you stuck around this long, here’s your reward – some lazy alligators who have a pretty sweet life. My wonderful wife, cool kid, and I spent a day hanging out here and we had a blast.

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