Warhammer Underworlds is an excellent tactical miniatures game. It has balanced deck building and tactical board game components. It’s a game that rewards repeated plays as you come to understand more and more of its complexities.
The digital version is a faithful reproduction of the first season of Warhammer Underworlds, which offers a nostalgia kick for existing fans of the game and a simple introduction for newcomers. If you are familiar with the physical game, you have probably been following the development of the game for months, and already know whether you want to get involved. Warhammer Underworlds was first released in 2017, and we are now in its third (2019-2020) season. There are two aspects to the game. The board game pits two small warbands of fighters against one another in hex-based arena combat. There’s also a deck-building component, which is carried out prior to the game. Two decks are built, one of “Objective” cards and one of “Power Cards.” You gain glory (victory points) from completing your objectives. Your power cards are the tools you use to power up your fighters on the tabletop to help you meet the objectives in your objective deck.
The game comes with a tutorial that describes the deckbuilding aspect, and there are many facets to it. Discovering these and working out combos between different cards is part of the joy of the game. You have to make two decks in the game. The Objective Deck and the Power Deck. They both have specific functions. Both decks can be made up of universal cards, and cards that are specific for your chosen warband.
Your decks are how you win games. The currency of the game is “Glory.” Whoever has the most glory at the end of the game, wins. There are two ways to obtain glory. Killing your opponent’s fighters is one, this is a combat game, after all. Depending on your opponent that tactic is not always viable, some warbands only have 3 fighters. If you rely on killing, you won’t score very much glory and you won’t win many games against those warbands. That’s where the objective deck comes in. There are whole variety of different objective cards, that have some sort of required goal to be completed. These score in the region of 1-3 glory. The more glory you can score from a card, generally, the harder it is to do so.
There are three main types of deck. 1. Aggressive decks: These score additional glory when hitting and killing stuff. 2. Objective-based decks: The play arena has 5 objective markers on it (these are placed by players at the start of the game). Objective decks score glory by controlling these objectives at different points in the game. 3. Defensive Decks: Score glory for not dying. Warhammer Underworlds: Online is turn-based. After the initial set up, in which you choose your half of the playing arena, place where the games objective tiles will go, and draw your cards, the game is ready to start.
Games are broken down into three turns. Each turn is broken into four activations per player. Between each activation, there is a power step where you can play your power cards. Between turns, there is an End Phase, where you can score cards from your objective deck, add upgrades to your fighters, and draw new cards. At the end of the 3rd end phase, whoever has the most glory is the winner.
During one of your activations, you will normally activate a single fighter. In which case you can move, attack, or move and attack (charge) that fighter. Charging is powerful, but that will mean that fighter won’t be able to be activated again that turn.
Combat is carried out using dice, and as a general rule, the more dice you’re slinging, the more chance you’ll have to be successful. The game uses two types of custom dice; attack and defense dice. Some symbols appear more than others on these dice. Adjacent fighters can support each other both offensively and defensively, so fighter positioning is another important consideration when planning your attacks.
Warhammer Underworlds is very much about stacking the odds in your favor, whilst also trying to fulfill the goals on your objective cards.
In conclusion Warhammer Underworlds: Online is a good turn-based tactics game for any fan of that genre. It is also a great starting point for anyone wanting to get into the board game and learning the basics in a fast and cheap way (compared to buying the miniatures and painting them before playing the board game).
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