Mad About Underworlds: In This Case, I Mean Mad as in Angry

I see board games in the store and they always look so cool and then I buy them and bring them home, I’m so excited to open them, and then I play them, like, twice… This column is dedicated to the love of games for those of us whose eyes may be bigger than our stomachs when it comes to playing, and the joy that we can all take from games, even if we don’t play them very often.

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Longtime readers of this column will know that I’ve covered quite a lot of games produced by Games Workshop. The reasons for this are many and varied, but I’ve been at least on the sidelines of Warhammer fandom since I was a kid, which has left me with a soft spot for their games and settings.

I’m also the first to admit that there are lots of problems with getting into Games Workshop products. For starters, the hobby is expensive. The games and miniatures themselves often cost more than $100 each, with even small minis sometimes running in excess of $30. And that’s if all you want to do is buy them. If you want to actually put them together and paint them, then that’s its own hobby, with its own expenses. And if you want to actually play them, you’ll probably need books or cards or something, which are also spendy.

Of course, that’s referring to their various flagship wargames. Their assorted board games – which we’ve covered here many times – have their own costs and downsides and tend to go out of print in relatively short order, meaning that those who’re hankering after them have to pay outrageous secondary-market prices.

There are upsides, too, though and, for the most part, it’s hard to deny that Games Workshop makes pretty good games, and maybe even better miniatures, if you’re into that kind of thing. In addition to the assorted board games that I’ve covered here before (and others besides) I’ve also dabbled in a variety of the more involved tabletop wargames that the brand has put out, even while their flagships (Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar) are too labor intensive for me.

Of those, my favorite is one that sits astride a sort of middle ground between board games and traditional wargames – one that longtime readers will remember me discussing before. Warhammer Underworlds is the company’s smallest skirmish game, with warbands made up of between three and seven (or, in one rare, rules-bending case, nine) miniatures.

These duke it out across small hex boards that can easily fit on even a card table. Their miniatures are push-fit, making them easy to assemble. And the variety and flexibility of the game is represented by decks of cards which you can either play as they come out of the box or build and tinker with, a la a collectible card game.

There’s a lot to love about Warhammer Underworlds. It’s small in scope and the investment merely to play is much lower than just about any other major Games Workshop product. The warbands have a level of personality that larger armies simply can’t, with each individual model given a name, special rules, and some character that help it to pop.

The small scale also means that you can field warbands that are much more idiosyncratic than can be brought to a larger battlefield. My favorite is Mollog’s Mob, composed of one (1) foul-tempered troll and a few random “squiggly beasts” that follow him around, one of which is just a living stalagmite that can’t move.

Since its release in 2017, Warhammer Underworlds has existed as a series of “seasons.” These seasons were usually represented by a larger “start playing” type box which contained the rules, dice, boards, etc. that were necessary to play, along with two warbands – thereby making them all that was needed for two people to get started right away.

Along with these season boxes, the game would also release occasional standalone warbands which could be played with any of the various preceding seasons, at least theoretically. For those who wanted to be involved in competitive tournament play, there were rules about which cards could and could not be used, and usually only those from the most recent seasons were accepted, but the game’s compatibility extended through all the various releases with, at most, only a few minor tweaks.

As of this writing, there are in excess of fifty warbands that have been released across some eight or nine seasons of Warhammer Underworlds, not to mention who-knows-how-many cards to accompany them all.

There’s another problem with getting into Games Workshop games, if you want to do so as a hobby, though. Besides being expensive from the jump, Games Workshop has a tendency to release new editions of their games every few years. And these new editions not only scuttle the rules and options of the previous editions, they frequently make whole models virtually (or literally) unplayable and so on.

This is only a problem if you want to keep up on whatever the new edition is, or if you’re involved in tournament play or playing in public with others at your friendly local game store. But it’s also a problem if you want to pick up any new releases, which are, of course, only compatible with the rules of the newest edition.

None of this is news to the seasoned Warhammer player. It’s an accepted (if never particularly enthusiastically so) cost of doing business with Games Workshop. Thus far, however, Warhammer Underworlds had managed to avoid it. Sure, subsequent seasons tinkered with the rules as they had been established and, yes, technically only certain pre-existing cards were table legal. But, for the most part, you could play any of your old Warhammer Underworlds warbands with any of the new ones.

I guess GW finally figured out that they hadn’t yet visited this ignoble fate upon their best game, however, because as of the Warhammer Day preview show that took place on October 7, Games Workshop has announced a new edition of Warhammer Underworlds, one that completely rewrites the games rules (to some probable improvements and some, to my eyes, definite demerits) and separates the future of the game from the previous editions that came before.

Like any time a game gets a new edition, a fair assessment will probably reveal that there are real upgrades here that might make the game better, easier, or more welcoming for new players. And, of course, the game has merely been announced, not even released, so I can’t speak to what it’s actually like… and I will probably never be able to do so.

This is because I’m not its target audience. In corporate shill-style run-downs of what’s new in the new edition and the top 10 takeaways from it, GW has described a game that appeals less to me, specifically. And, perhaps more importantly, they have outlined a game that will drastically rewrite its compatibility with what has come before, though there will be downloadable (or purchasable) rules to play your old warbands in this new version. So, with the release of this new edition, my long love affair with Warhammer Underworlds is over.

Which is probably for the best, really. Warhammer is, as I’ve mentioned, an expensive hobby. And I’ve already got plenty of existing Underworlds warbands to keep me busy for a long time…

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.