Welcome to another installment of Starting Hex, a series about Warhammer Underworlds. I’m approaching Underworlds with a focus on improving gameplay, building communities, and a maybe eventually painting some models. Let’s roll off and get started!
Some of you may know Warhammer Underworlds only as “the system where those cool looking models come from.” Maybe you looked into the game years ago and thought having to constantly buy every release just to play one warband was too much, so you passed on it (spoiler: this is not how it works anymore!). Or you may have no idea what this game is at all. This should serve as a quick overview of the game, what makes it unique, and why I find it so dang fun. Given that the new edition of the game has just launched, this is a perfect time to try it out and see if it’s for you. If you don’t want to take my word for it, the World Championship of Warhammer happened recently and Underworlds was streamed there – check out the fantastic coverage including commentators explaining the workings of the new edition over on the Mortal Realms YouTube channel.
What Is Warhammer Underworlds?
Warhammer Underworlds is a hybrid game that combines aspects of a board game, card game, and miniatures game. Given that description, the components of the game aren’t going to be anything too surprising. There’s folding board which is covered in a grid of hexagons. On this playing area, each player places and controls a warband containing three to nine models. Finally, each player also has two small decks of objective and power cards (around 12 and 20 respectively) that are used throughout the game. The dice used in the game are D6s, but with unique symbols on the faces instead of pips or numbers. Those bits, plus a couple of miscellaneous cardboard punch out tokens, are the full assortment of objects needed to play. As such, it’s a pretty compact game and I routinely fit everything needed to play two to three different warbands into a small backpack with room to spare.
I find the game’s turn structure to be one of the more unique and appealing parts to it compared to other games, particularly other GW games. The game is divided into three battle rounds. In each of these rounds, both of the players will alternate taking turns until each player has taken four turns. No more, no less. This means that a player is limited to merely twelve turns through the course of a game. A player’s turn in the game involve things along the lines of having a fighter move or attack. Some warbands have extra options in their own personal toolkits, but for the most part it’s a limited selection of potential actions for each turn. This limited amount of turns means you are incentivized to make sure each of them count.
As is the case in many games, the victory condition is tied to scoring points – in this case, they’re called glory points and they can be earned in a variety of ways. One of the most straightforward is bounty. Each fighter has a bounty characteristic on their fighter card which represents how much glory the enemy will earn if the fighter is slain. The other main source is through scoring objective cards which compose your 12 card objective deck. There are two main types of objectives – some will have the lightning bolt icon indicating they are surge objectives which can score immediately upon meeting their criteria, while others will lack this surge indicator which means they can only be scored at the end of a round. A few sample objectives could be controlling various amounts of treasure tokens on the battlefield or rolling certain results on dice.
Glory serves a purpose other than merely being a rebranded type of victory points in Underworlds, though. Half of your power deck (so 10 of your 20 cards in that deck) are upgrades, and these require you to have some glory before they can be used. These cards range from weapons that grant new attack profiles to magical armor that enhances your fighter’s durability to the willingness to burn your allies for power. Each upgrade has a glory requirement value, so you cannot play them until you have earned enough glory – either through scoring objectives or from earning bounty.
One important thing to note is that when you use your glory to play objectives, you’re not depleting your score. You just need to have enough “free glory” in your pool to meet the requirement of an upgrade. Playing upgrades is gated behind scoring some early glory, which makes those previously mentioned surges even more important. Getting some early seed glory means you can afford to play out these upgrades to enhance your team and ensure the rest of your game goes more smoothly.
The last remaining type of power cards are called ploys and they make up the other half of your power deck. These cards represent a wide variety of things thematically – strategic actions, maneuvers, explosive traps, and healing potions are all potential examples. If it helps, think of them like instants or sorceries from Magic: the Gathering, or perhaps as stratagems from 40k. These ploys provide a wide variety of effects that further your gameplan. The fact that they have no resource cost to use them, unlike upgrades, makes them potent at all stages of the game.
Warbands
One of the most eye catching aspects of Underworlds has to be the warbands. Games Workshop has spent decades perfecting their sculpting game, and in my opinion the sculpts of Underworlds are often the prime showcase of this. They’re full of character, have dynamic poses, and are just plain cool looking. An additional impressive fact is that they’re all the “east to build” variety of models that can be assembled just with the push-to-fit pegs and not require any glue. I’d not suggest actually doing that, but I imagine it’s an extra bit of engineering that goes into these sculpts.
Each fighter in a warband has their own fighter card with their game stats on it, as well as a warscroll that contains special rules for the warband. They’re basically baseball cards for skeletons and elves! These fighter cards tell you how far they can move, what attacks they can make, how hard it is to punch them in the face, how many punches their face can take, and how much glory your opponent gets when the fighter is eventually slain from all that face punching. Additionally, these cards are double sided. The uninspired side is where they start, but once a fighter meets their inspire condition, the card flips over and your fighter essentially levels up in RPG terms.
Speaking of inspire conditions, they are one of the things you’ll find detailed on the warscroll for each warband. These oversized cards also contain any special rules your warband will use during gameplay. These rules are a large part of what gives the warbands their unique flavor and feel when playing with them.
Since Underworlds is set in the Age of Sigmar universe, each warband belongs to one of the four grand alliances. In game mechanic terms this doesn’t matter too much, but it does allow us to take a look at the warbands in easier to digest chunks! I’ll pick out a few sample warbands in each of these super-factions and describe a little bit about their theme and how they play to give you a taste of the options available. I’m also going to focus primarily on the Organized Play legal warbands – these are just the warbands that are allowed in tournament settings and are the ones that have fully unique rules for playing them.
Death
Since this is my article, I’m going to start with one of my favorite grand alliances. At the time of writing, there are 8 warbands in the death grand alliance that are legal for organized play. Ghosts, skeletons, vampires, ghouls, and zombies – oh my! Some of my favorites here include:
Zondara’s Gravebreakers: One of the more recently designed warbands, this is a home run in terms of flavor and mechanics. A necromancer travels with her lover, Ferlain, who has been cursed and is trapped as a werewolf. She seeks to wrest secrets from the realm itself to find a cure, and has her zombie minions around to help dig up clues to the answer she so desperately craves. This is reflected in the gameplay by having her zombie minions delve treasure tokens to resurrect slain zombies or draw cards, and both Zondara and Ferlain have mechanics that reflect their Undying Love for each other.
Kainan’s Reapers: The Ossiarch Bonereapers from Age of Sigmar have representation in Underworlds in the form of this warband. Kainan is a massive model, towering over the rest of the warband with fighter stats that match. Kainan, Khenta, and the four mortek guard start off painfully slow but have some movement tricks that help alleviate their speed. While playing, you’ll want to find the right balance between focusing on Kainan being big threat and getting the rest of the warband in position to support your objective scoring.
The Headsmen’s Curse: This warband holds a special place for me since they’re the first ones I started with when trying to get the hang of the game. The leader of the warband is actually the sword that the Wielder of the Blade uses – all the ghosts are servants to the sword. The Wielder is also the hardest hitting fighter in the game, and the entire gameplan behind the supporting chainrasps is to… well, support the Wielder. Either simply by flanking the Wielder’s target, increasing its already formidable damage with the Sharpener of the Blade, or the Scriptor of the Sentence dolling out condemnations to the enemy to inspire your warband, all the fighters can do their part in helping Terminus claim heads.
Chaos
Closely after death in my personal rankings is chaos. If you’re at all familiar with the Warhammer settings, either Age of Sigmar or 40k, you can guess what’s in here. You’ll have daemon warbands of all four classic flavors, the mortals who throw in their lot with the daemonic forces, and an unhealthy smattering of rats from their various clans. There are currently 8 options legal for organized play in this grand alliance, among which are the following:
Thricefold Discord: These are the Slaanesh daemons who hate each other. They constantly bicker, and the mechanics represent this by having one of them inspire when another one fails an attack or save roll. Befitting of a Slaanesh warband they also can tempt an enemy fighter, destroying one of their upgrades and replacing it with one from the Thricefold Discord player’s hand. They’re one of the warbands with the lowest total health, but they bring plenty of tricks to stretch out that health pool and make life difficult for your opponent.
Ephilim’s Pandaemonium: Daemonic servants of Tzeentch, these models really nail down the feeling of the god of change. They sport far more ranged attacks than most warbands do, giving them inherent flexibility and adaptability and that’s before you even get to their warscroll. Card draw, fighter resurrection, and flexible pings (dealing damage directly to enemy fighters without having to make attacks) are all immensely useful tools to have when furthering the goals of the Changer of Ways.
Khagra’s Ravagers: Khagra leads a warband consisting of her sister, the sorcerer Zarshia, and the two chaos warriors Razek and Cragan (who used to follow Zarshia until Khagra usurped her own sister!). They seek to desecrate the lands and earn favors of the chaos gods in the process. In game terms, you have four solid fighters who are going to focus on fighting around the treasure tokens on the board in order to desecrate them to inspire and gain powerful effects from their warscroll.
Destruction
Clocking in at 7 organized play legal warbands, this is where you’ll find your greenskins of various weight classes. Hefty or sinewy orruks, goblins with a wide variety of funny hats accompanied by squigs, and ogors dressed as pirates are among the options present here.
Mollog’s Mob: Mollog the Mighty, a troggoth terror wielding a makeshift club, wades through enemy models giving them the thumpin’. He’s accompanied by some extra weird squigs and a dancing mushroom. Mollog is one of the biggest, toughest fighters in the game and the rest of the warband serves excellently as support pieces for the big guy. You’ll have to leverage using Mollog to bully the opponent while not leaving your squigs out in vulnerable positions, but if you can get the balance right you’ll be able to reap the rewards.
Morgok’s Krushas: Unlike Mollog’s Mob, the brawling ability is spread out pretty equally among all three of these orruk fighters. They’re looking for a fight because fighting makes them stronger – being attacked or making attacks generates Waaagh! counters, which are spent to inspire fighters and perform various utility effects on their warscroll. Despite being hard hitting (and hard headed) Ironjawz, they have solid tactical abilities available including the closest thing Underworlds has to a Counterspell from Magic: the Gathering.
Grinkrak’s Looncourt: The Looncourt is no less offensive, but perhaps not as direct as the other two options listed here. A merry band of loonknights set out to undertake a variety of quests, each of which are tracked on their warscroll. Undertaking a quest grants certain benefits, and completing the quests yield even more. Eventually, you’ll be able to dub one of the loonknights and seriously elevate their prowess in combat (well… from the baseline of a git’s prowess). They’re not exactly knights in shining armor, but they’re trying their best!
Order
Order has the most warbands of the four grand alliances, clocking in at 10 legal for organized play. Much like in Age of Sigmar, to me it feels like a less defined theme and more “all the folks who don’t fit into the previous buckets and/or hate chaos a whole lot.” As such, there’s a ton of variety found here – Stormcast, elves, humans, dwarves, and lizardmen are all present.
Cyreni’s Razors: I have to give a special mention to this warband because one of their fighters is the entire reason I looked into this game. Cephanyr the squid is such a charming model. The rest of the warband is cool too if you like soggy elves. They have a tidal themed inspire mechanic where they inspire and uninspire throughout the game, Cyreni has the ability to fire off her Hammertide and deal damage to enemies without having to roll dice, and both of the thralls are surprisingly competent fighters.
Ylthari’s Guardians: Elf spirits piloting tree mechs with strange bug buddies. This should be all it takes to sell you on the warband, but the models are also gorgeous. The mechanics of this warband are another case where flavor is really tied into how they play on the board – you wind up planting seeds (placing cards from your deck face down) and they gain growth counters on them as the game progresses. When they grow enough, they bloom (and go into your hand) and your fighters inspire.
Jaws of Itzl: Three dinosaur-like Seraphon, decked out with massive weapons and shields, are accompanied by a cute little pile of reptiles (a rept-pile?). Lizardmen were a hit when I dabbled in Warhammer Fantasy decades ago, and seeing these brand new models reignited the enthusiasm that the little dinosaur loving kid I used to be had. So far I have only played a few games with them, but they’re sporting solid stats that will let them brawl with any of the other heavy hitters in the game and a handful of useful tricks to help play to various play styles.
Gameplay Formats
If you looked into Underworlds in the past, the way the game is structured now may look very different than what you recall. The biggest thing, and the entire reason I wound up getting into the game instead of passing on it, is that the card chasing element has been removed. I’m not going to go into too much detail on how the game used to be, but a common complaint from people who checked out the game before dipping out was the annoyance they had on having to buy every single product that came out just to get the one or two cards in it to add to their deck. That’s not how the game works anymore, and you can very reasonably get by with just the core box and the occasional warband or deck purchase if they interest you.
There are two main gameplay formats and the only difference between them is whether you want to do any deck customizing or not. In both of these formats, you’ll be bringing your warband’s models and their fighter cards, a 12(ish) card objective deck, and a 20(ish) card power deck. These decks are released either in the Core Box or as stand alone releases and are referred to as “rivals decks”.
Rivals: In Rivals, each player will bring their fighters and a single rivals deck. This format is the most approachable as a newcomer because it contains zero deckbuilding. You just put together your warband models, open up a deck, shuffle up, and start playing.
Nemesis: Similar to Rivals above, this format instead has you build your decks using the card pool created by combining two different rivals deck. This means you’ll choose 12 of your 24 objective cards to make your objective deck. Likewise, you’ll choose 20 of your 40 power cards to make that deck. You can mix and match between the two as much or as little as you want. This allows you to do some limited deckbuilding to fill in weaknesses or double up on your warband’s strengths. Currently, this is the format that GW is supporting the most. It’s the most common format to see events run as in North America. It’s also the format that the World Championship of Warhammer runs.
The Core Rules are available for free over at the Warhammer Community download page if you’d like to check them out for more details about the game. If you have any questions about the game, please don’t hesitate to ask. You can do so in the comments here, or if you’re a Patreon supporter for Goonhammer you can hop into the Underworlds channel in the Goonhammer Discord and ping me or any of the other incredibly cool people who hang out in there. I’m also in many of the various Underworlds related Discord servers as “Jake 🐙” and will gladly talk to you about this game any time!
I’d also like to give a special shout out to my wife because she’s an amazing lady.
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