Warhammer Quest: Darkwater delivers a tense and desperate adventure pitting a collection of heroes against the forces of Nurgle, with a mystical spring capable of healing injuries and granting immortality at stake. The new board game, the latest in Games Workshop’s occasional line of Warhammer Quest games, delivers both a fun hobby experience and a game that can be enjoyed as either a replayable campaign or as a standalone battle. Its hefty $255 price tag will dissuade many casual players. But it comes with so many top-notch minis that almost certainly will be usable in Age of Sigmar!
The Warhammer Quest line provides room for smaller stories than the expansive army versus army-style gameplay found in Age of Sigmar. In Darkwater, a group of heroes converge on the Jade Abbey, the home of the mystical lifegiving Everspring. It was once a place of pilgrimage in the Realm of Ghyran. However, a corrupt priest called Gelgus Pust attempted to take over the Jade Abbey with the powers of Nurgle. Sadly, he left it as a ruin filled with rot and corruption. Gelgus Pust hasn’t corrupted the Everspring itself. However, he’s slowly descending through the lower caverns of the Jade Abbey with Maggotkin under his sway. Things have become dire to the point that a band of heroes from all walks come together to beat back the forces of Nurgle. They aim to cleanse the Jade Abbey once and for all.
The Warhammer Quest engine iterates on the classic Warhammer gameplay style of using pools of six-sided dice to determine the success of various attacks. Players control a group of four heroes that individually activate between enemy rounds. Each hero has access to three basic action cards plus some kind of hero ability that’s explained on their hero card. Each action card also doubles as a source of energy, which a player needs to activate an action. Once an action card is used for its energy, it’s no longer available as an action. Functionally, this means that players have three actions per turn.
One of the key choices in this game comes from deciding whether to expend each action card’s energy on its own listed action, or to use to activate another action twice. For instance, a player can choose to spend their Move energy to Move. Or they can spend it to attack. However, once the Move card’s energy is expended, the Move action becomes unavailable for the rest of the round. I really liked this style of action economy. It provides both flexibility and a series of tough choices during every character activation.
Enemies activate using a rudimentary dice system. On an enemy turn, one player (designated as the leader) activates each group of enemies present on the field and rolls a pair of dice (one black and one red) to determine an enemy’s action. The black die typically involves movement of some kind, while the red dice provides attack options. Attacking is very similar to a typical game of Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. Enemies roll D6s to hit and players then roll D6s for saves from damage. Heroes, automatically damage on any hit they inflict on enemies, except for when enemies have a block statistic that auto-deflects damage.
Gameplay itself moves rather quickly – an average session takes about an hour to play through. The hero turn tends to move much quicker than an enemy turn, in part because there’s less dice rolling. I wish there was a way to switch initiative order in between rounds to make things a little more varied. While the game supports up to four players, Darkwater is probably at its most engaging with two players. Each player can control two heroes, which means less sitting around and waiting for the next round to start.
Darkwater offers a variety of different missions, with a variety of maps, enemies, and objectives to complete. (Darkwater features a book of maps, a big upgrade from the tiles of previous Warhammer Quest games.) A campaign consists of a mix of missions and events. Players create a deck of random events and then choose between two at the start of each session. Some events offer needed reprieves and a chance to regain health (as health carries over between campaign sessions). Others offer side quests or the chance to gain rewards like one use abilities that you can activate during battles. I love that Darkwater seems to have a lot of replayability. It’ll take multiple campaigns to get through all the missions, and even the boss fights have multiple options to choose from. This means that there’s lots of variation.
Of course, this is a Warhammer board game and that means that there are tons of miniatures to build. There’s over 45 minis in Warhammer Quest: Darkwater, which are the same high quality as your typical Warhammer: Age of Sigmar miniature. Luckily for novice builders, these minis are push fit miniatures. This means that you can technically complete them without any glue. Building this many miniatures may seem like a daunting task. But most of the miniatures consist of three or four pieces. To be honest, I had the help of someone brand new to miniatures. We were able to crank through the entire box in a matter of hours.
Because they are push fit, some of the miniatures do have small gaps showing from where the pegs don’t quite push into holes smoothly. I cheated a couple of times by using plastic glue to stick together a couple of pieces, but you can also slice off a small of the peg to ensure a close fit.
My biggest complaint about Warhammer Quest is the lack of storage within the box. You’ll need to come up with your own organization options, because there’s precious little in terms of inserts within the box itself. Sure, there’s a few options for saving your campaign mode. However, there’s no bags for components, dividers and storage for cards, or even a place to put your lovingly-crafted minis. I suppose that other Warhammer games leave the storage up to the player. But it’s really disappointing that the board game doesn’t have better storage solutions.
Poor storage aside, Warhammer Quest: Darkwater is a fun board game experience with top-notch miniatures and a surprising amount of replayability. If you’re looking for a fantasy-themed campaign board game with top-notch miniatures or love Warhammer in general, this is a solid purchase. Plus, if you’re looking to jumpstart your Nurgle army, you can buy Warhammer Quest and then augment it with the upcoming Maggotkin of Nurgle line refresh that will likely be coming out in the next couple of months
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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