Warhammer Underworlds

[Primarch]

What are the chances GW takes a page out of Wyrd/Malifaux's book and makes all the legacy model's new cards free to download? That would certainly grant them a lot of goodwill in the community and keep people playing.
On the other hand, it is GW so...

[Jye Nicolson]

What are the chances GW takes a page out of Wyrd/Malifaux's book and makes all the legacy model's new cards free to download? That would certainly grant them a lot of goodwill in the community and keep people playing.
On the other hand, it is GW so...

That's effectively what Legends is in the big games, as much as people gripe about that, so it'd hardly be out of the question.

It looks kind of like faction decks are going away as a concept and you just have the base rules for the team intended to combo with Rivals decks so it wouldn't be that much to print out per warband. OTOH there is 50 of them.

[Primarch]

Those new Skaven look fantastic. I love the little bomb-rat.

[The Other Dave]

Yeah, if "faction" cards consist only of one big card with warband rules and the fighter cards, it'd be relatively easy to make old warband cards available - my personal prediction is that's what they're doing for the old warbands they've got support for, those cards for a bunch of warbands bundled with the starter set. Realistically, I don't think printing and selling even that small amount of cards for five-years-out-of-print warbands is economically viable so I'm not holding my breath for physical product, but they've done free PDFs on big-game resets before (including just recently for AoS 4). Putting out rules for models they don't sell isn't really their thing these days, though, so I wouldn't be too surprised if they just put out rules for the ten or so warbands that are currently available for sale and leave it at that.

The skaven do look pretty boss, though! Mini doomwheel FTW.

[Jye Nicolson]

There will be rules for every current Warhammer Underworlds warband – all 58 of them. Most warbands will have free digital rules at launch, but 16 will be released physically shortly afterwards.

My guess is the ones that don't get print cards won't be tournament legal but looks like they'll all be playable.

[The Other Dave]

Crossposting: A nice clarification now that Community's back up. Looks like every single old warband will indeed get digital rules, so that's good! 16 of the old warbands will get new physical releases with cards too, and there'll be the two new warbands in the starter box plus two more new warbands coming along soon, for a total of 20 warbands with physical releases and 30-odd with only digital support. Not bad a'tall!

So the only question is gameplay. At first blush, the rules they showed on the Skaven warscroll aren't as "deep" as the bespoke rules for each fighter we're used to - it looks like fighter cards don't have any rules text at all - and no deckbuilding whatsoever removes what's always been an important part of the game, but OTOH as Jye says our local hasn't been doing a whole lot of deckbuilding play to start with, and I've usually only been doing it myself when using older warbands with dodgier faction decks.

Not going to lie, though, in principle I think streamlining the game and making it easier still to get into casually is a good move, as is making it definitively so there's only one play format. My interest dial is moving steadily towards the positive direction.

[me_in_japan]

I'm vaguely watching this, since I have a fair few warbands. No deck building is a bummer, as I do enjoy that, but since that also comes with a bucket of problems (not least of which is needing all the cards from every warband) I suppose I can live without it. I'm not fully intrigued just yet, though, as I suspect even the minimum buy-in will be beyond what my interest is willing to fork out for. I'm always happy to have ways to use models I already own, though.
Eh, we'll see what the future holds...

[Jye Nicolson]

Eh, we'll see what the future holds...

I expect it might hold a demo game before you have to make any decisions! Anyone with the starter will have four decks that will work with whatever warband so you could bring your own team, borrow a deck and play.

[The Other Dave]

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en- ... s-changes/

NGL, I'm liking pretty much everything I see here. The change to crits is extremely good and probably worth the price of admission all on its own, the introduction of the underdog mechanic is a nice smoother, board selection and placement always felt like a weird extra mini-game aimed squarely at the top 2% of players, and I'm coming around on the "warscroll for warband abilities" thing - you're giving up flexibility with deck building for a set of what are essentially a small selection of gambits that you always have in your hand and can trigger at will.

Hopefully they'll release a goodly number of rivals decks to keep things interesting.

[me_in_japan]

After reading over that warcom article, I'm inclined to concede that it does look promising. But then...I remind myself that this is GW we're talking about here, and it'll be furiously expensive, plus it's not like I need another game in my life

I'll keep an eye on it, nonetheless...