Borgit’s Beastgrabbaz are a band of Grot hunters who are moving through the remains of Embergard looking for prey to capture – While the warband have had great success with poisons and traps, their new member Uglug the Troggoth has given them the chance to hunt for further glory…

Up for pre order today, Borgit’s Beastgrabbaz join the lineup of warbands for Warhammer Underworlds Embergard, and give players the chance to run a band of weedy but vicious gitz who have some sneaky tricks up their sleeves!

In this article we’ll be taking a look at the new warband, painting up the models and seeing how they preform in the game! We’ll also be taking a look at the Edge of the Knife rivals deck and seeing if it suits their playstyle.

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us free review copies to check out on the site, if you would like to support the site then why not order your copy through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We’ve also filmed a full unboxing video which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So without further ado, let’s dive right in and see what the new warband can do!

Borgit’s Beastgrabbaz Unboxing and Review

We had a couple of warbands released with the launch of the new edition of Warhammer Underworlds, along with some repacks of old warbands who have been given new rules for the game – but Borgit’s Beastgrabbaz are the first new one since then, dropping alongside their Gitmob brothers in age of Sigmar.

The models are ace and offer a nice mix of variety from the classic Goblin warboss style leader, to the pair of Grots dressed as a Squig and even a young Troggoth, there’s some really fun stuff to paint here!

I really enjoyed painting these alongside the Gitmob for Age of Sigmar, and it gave me a real urge to want to paint some more Gloomspite in future – my favourite model has to be the “fake” Squig though, just for how ridiculous the concept is!

This is a Flex warband with a focus on picking a target to hunt and using your own grunts as bait to draw them in.

Essentially, at the start of each Battle Round you pick an enemy fighter to be your target, and all your attacks gain +1 dice when you are targeting them. In addition, whenever one of your own fighters is killed, your leader gets to move towards the model that slayed them, a number of hexes equal to their health, and Borgit can hit hard when he wants to with Grievous, especially with that extra dice.

Inspiring is super easy, as soon as a model delves it inspires – which means you can get this going really early on in the game.

There’s also a trio of abilities that can be used once per game – Gittish Taktikz allows you to make the target of Uglug or Borgit’s attack give all friendly minions Grievous, Reassuring Presence allows you to move every minion 3 hexes after Uglug makes a Core Ability and Stab ‘Em Good causes damage on an enemy fighter that is ends up next to one of your minions, making it a danger to come near them.

There’s a nice mix of stuff here and it rewards some careful positioning to make the most of them all

With them being a Flex Warband, there’s also an accompanying deck getting released alongside this box.

Edge of the Knife is a Flex deck with a mechanic revolving around models that are “Tempered” – Tempered fighters are those with either 2 health on their profile, or 2 damage assigned to them. With the Beastgrabbaz having pretty low health across the board this means you start with a couple of Tempered fighters, though I think that a resilient warband that can take damage and keep kicking are probably a better fit for this deck.

A lot of the objectives revolve around getting tempered fighters into specific positions, taking out enemy leaders with tempered fighters or surrounding enemy fighters with tempered fighters. While Borgit’s Beastgrabbaz can do this, they do become a little fragile when they do, and it’s very easy to fail to score a card because one of your squishy gitz has been swatted away.

You do get quite a few tools in the power deck that can give you a little more control however – The Uprsing! for example lets you count all your fighters as tempered, allowing you to send in your more powerful and undamaged fighters to do some of the objectives that revolve around killing leaders etc, while theres cards that mitigate incoming damage like Death Throes which reduces the number of incoming dice by 2 and great Fortitude gives a fighter an additional point of health.

There’s also some great movement control here – Sychronised Effort allows you to switch the position of two friendly fighters, and Final Stand stops your own fighters from being pushed.

I had some tough games against the Sylvaneth with this deck, and found that while there is a lot of nice easy cards to score, the vulnerable state of my models often made it so that my opponent could quickly neutralise me before all the pieces got to the right place. I feel that with a more tanky and defensive warband you can happily take the damage to become Tempered and then wade into the locations you need in order to score, while using some of the nice upgrades to make them even more difficult to shift.

The nice thing about underworlds however is that there are decks for every playstyle, and while the way i used the Beastgrabbaz didn’t gell with me, that play style may do for you. One of the joys of the new system is that we already have a large pool of rivals decks, and with games of Warhammer Underworlds being quick and punchy it’s easy to get the feel for the one that clicks for you

Borgit’s Beastgrabbaz and the Edge of the Knife Rivals deck are both up for pre order today and are released Saturday 15th February

Games Workshop sent Sprues & Brews free copies for review purposes