Warhammer Quest Darkwater is finally here, taking a band of adventurers deep into The Jade Abbey to face off against Gelgus Pust, The Prince of Sores. But what is the latest Warhammer Quest like and is it worth the price tag? In this full review we’ll be checking out Warhammer Quest Darkwater, seeing what you get in the box, painting up the miniatures and seeing what has changed compared to the previous games and what has been added to mix things up a little.

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us over a free early review copy 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 and review which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So without further ado, let’s head into the Jade Abbey and see just what lays awaiting us in Warhammer Quest Darkwater

Warhammer Quest Darkwater Review

Warhammer Quest is a game that a lot of people will know as their entry into the Warhammer World. The original was essentially a boardgame/roleplaying game hybrid that took the feeling of dungeon crawling with a band of adventurers, but doing it in the style of an accessible boardgame.

Since then we’ve had quite a few iterations of it – from Silver Tower, a Tzeentch themed game that brought Warhammer Quest to the Mortal Realms, Shadows Over Hammerhal, which took the mechanics of Silver Tower and married them with the RPG elements of the original Warhammer Quest to Cursed City, which while it did suffer from stock problems refined the Warhammer Quest Experience to make something really cool with an awesome Vampire flavour. We’ve even had a foray into a Blackstone Fortress along the way which finally game us a Warhammer 40k themed adventure.

Warhammer Quest Darkwater is the latest entry and does a lot of things differently to its predecessors. While it does have the same DNA, this is a very different game with different mechanics, but I feel they work well and thankfully it isn’t just the same game reskinned.

First things first is one that might be the deciding factor on picking up Warhammer Quest Darkwater – the price tag. RRP for this one clocks in at £160, which puts it in the same area as other massive boardgames. Cursed City was around £100, so this is a bit of an increase and I know a lot of people will have to have a good hard think about the game at that price. I feel £120 would have been the sweet spot, and if my maths is right this should be what you’re able to pick it up from 3rd party sites such as Element Games. That said, you do get a lot of stuff in the box, including some fantastic looking miniatures.

So what do we get? Let’s take a look!

First up we have the map. You’ll notice that this time around it is a book rather than sheets of tiles. Previous Warhammer Quest games had a lot of set up time, you had to find the scenario, set up the map by sorting through tiles and often the table surface needed to play was more than a lot of people had – which was especially frustrating after setting up half a map then realising you’d ran out of space. Instead in Warhammer Quest Darkwater we get a hardback book filled with around 20 pages of maps that make up the playing surface of the game. Now this isn’t a small book, its massive! As big as the box itself (thats about 17″ by 11″) and folding out into a 17″ by 22″ playing surface it’s still a decent sized board but a little more contained. The other nice thing about using this book is that the scenarios can be themed for a specific environment rather than having to rely on a limited pool of map tiles to make up the dungeon. All of the key mission specific stuff such as initiative tracks and round markers are also printed on the page – this is very cool as it means they can make different maps more or less difficult by giving you more or less time to complete your task. We’ll chat more about how quests work later in the review, but we managed to rattle through a load in a single night with each taking about 30 mins once we knew what we were doing – and that included the time to set up the scenario!

Thats not to say there’s no card componants at all – we still get a couple sheets of tokens. Some of these are alternate hexes that mix up the map when a couple of missions use the same map, while all the initiative, wound and some special ability tokens are all card tokens. I’d recommend getting a couple of sandwich bags to put these tokens into, as unfortunately the box doesnt include any bags to put them into.

You also get a massive stack of cards across a number of different decks. These are all sealed for each act, leaving the encounters and gear a surprise until you get to that stage. In addition to this you also get a couple of sets of bonus cards – these unlock some additional content after each chapter and have some pretty nice surprises. We’ll have a spoiler marked section later on where we’ll touch a little on what’s in these, but If you’re looking to play this yourself I’d try and keep yourself as spoiler free as possible in order to best experience Warhammer Quest Darkwater

Warhammer Quest games normally have some pretty good ways of saving the state of the game, and Darkwater is no different – you get a load of boxes here, and each deck of cards has a divider allowing you to sort the draw pile from the discard pile when you choose to save the game. Each character has their own box too letting you store what upgrades, items and health they have between games.

You also get a stack of dice, and existing Warhammer Quest players will spot that Darkwater does things quite differently here too – gone are the dice spending mechanics and instead we get a pile of normal dice for combat plus a pair of dice that control the actions of the enemies. We’ll chat more about how this works in practice later on in the review, but we found this a massive improvement on the logic tracks of previous games.

There is a full manual in the box, but in a nice touch there’s a very comprehensive guide here to setting up and playing your first game. While I would personally read the book before you play, this is really handy for showing you everything you need when you set up the game and most of the main mechanics. This also has a QR code for a full video tutorial too – at the time of filming this wasn’t live, but it’s good to see this as an option too. Many other games do this too and it’s really useful for learning how to play.

The most exciting thing in the box however are the new miniatures! There’s 49 miniatures in the box and they are all brand new. All are push fit models, so you can just push them together without needing any glue to get playing. That said, there were a couple of models I did have to use a dab of glue on just to stop them coming apart while painting and playing.

First up we have the initial 4 characters available to players starting the game. These are all very cool and cover a number of different styles – from the two heavily armoured Knights to the cloths of the Priestess and the Duardin Explorer there’s a lot of different textures here to play with. All of the models are great fun to work on and I found painting up the heroes a really nice palaete cleanser.

In addition to the initial 4 characters, there’s also 3 more characters that are unlocked after the first act of the game (Around 3-4 hours of game time). It’s cool that these unlock later, but it would have been nice if they were a surprise. It would have been ace if they had put the sprue for these 3 models in a sealed box that was opened up once you’d finished the first act so that you had a nice surprise for finishing the first 3rd of the adventure. I suppose on the other hand however, having access to the models from the start means you can have them ready and painted for when you do unlock them!

While the heroes are very cool, my favourite models in the box are the adversaries, and in particular the bosses you will be fighting along the way. All 4 of these models are absolutly fantastic, from the imposing bulk of the big bad Gelgus Pust himself to the horrific Slug witch Belga. All of these hero models will be getting rules in the upcoming Maggotkin of Nurgle battletome, which is a great touch – as they are all on a seperate sprue they are easily split for selling in their own box too!

The rest of the enemies are also absolutely gorgeous. Some of these are going to have rules for AOS, but not all sadly, which does seem a bit of a shame – hopefully there’s suitable units we can proxy the missing ones for though. The Cankerborn are very cool – where a Plaguebearer is a Daemon using a human host, the Cankerborn are what happens when a Daemon possess the earth itself, giving them an awesome new take on a chaos Troll.

The Pestigors in the box also have a very different look to the Age of Sigmar ones. Where the AOS take on them is nightmare fuel with an unsettling demonic vibe, the Warhammer Quest Darkwater Pestigors are dripping with nostalgia and are much more like the old Warhammer Fantasy ones. Echos of fantasy is something that seeps through all of the Darkwater artwork, so it makes sense for these to be a different herd with a more classic look. You get 8 models, so sadly you’ll not be able to use them in AOS unless you find a couple of proxies to fill the missing models in the unit.

Next up we have the Blight Templars, a new heavily armoured take on the Blight Kings. I really wish that these got AOS rules, as I feel there’s space in the world for a heavy elite infantry – that said these should easily make some nice alternate models to mix into your units.

Mire Kelpies are a new unit introduced in Warhammer Quest Darkwater, and are essentially animated pools of puss and corruption. The models are really nice with skulls dripping with the filth of the corrupted Jade Abbey, and you get 3 different poses across the 6 models. Again, I don’t think these are getting AOS rules sadly.

Finally we get the Pox-Wretches. These cursed individuals are mortals who have taken the first step to becoming Plaguebearers, and as such they have started to be affected by Nurgle’s gifts and have covered their eyes with cyclopean masks to better use their other senses to sniff out their prey. They will be getting a release for AOS with rules in the Maggotkin Battletome, which is ace!

Finally a collection of different Loot tokens are also included in miniature form. These are really cool, capturing the grimdark feel of the Warhammer World while also serving a purpose as tokens to interact with. I really enjoyed painting these up, but my only criticism would be that they do occasionally get mixed up with the Mire Kelpies, as they are both a similar size. This did occasionally lead to us thinking that the friendly little treasure token was actually a monster we needed to kill. Thankfully they go on specifically marked tiles and do not move around the battlefield during a game.

The models are all a joy to play, and if you are a fan of Nurgle then it’s probably worth picking up the box just for the chance to paint them up! That said, a lot of these will probably be available seperatly in the future.

So how does the game play, and how does it compare to previous Warhammer Quest games? Let’s take a look!

Darkwater – The Rules

A full 36 rulebook is included in the book, which at first seemed a lot less pages than we;d had in previous adventures. But the big difference here is that all the actual questing content is contained within the cards.

At the start of an adventure you create a quest deck, this consists of randomly selecting the box you will be facing for that act, and then randomly generating a deck of cards that the individual quests are drawn from. In an attempt to limit the amount of times you might play the same quest, cards are drawn 2 at a time with the party leader selecting which one they want to play judged on the flavour text on the front of the card. There’s a lot of cards, and new cards unlocked in each chapter making these randomly generated quests varied and fun. We played 4 quests back to back, with all of them having very different aims. One had us trying to stop Pox Wretches from escaping off the board, another had us searching for a key to open a trapdoor, scrabbling around in the filth to find the key before finding that it was far to heavy to carry and so needed to throw it between us while getting in position to open the door. We even got to face the end boss Gelgus in a really cool scenario – the party was way too weak to fight him, so we simply had to hold him up for as long as we could before we could escape to the next mission. Each quest feels like a specific slice of an encounter, which makes them really thematic while still being fast paced. Warhammer Quest Darkwater mixes things up by having some of the “Pick your own adventure” style encounters along the way, in addition to rare “saferooms” that allow your characters to lick their wounds between encounters. As all damage suffered in one adventure carries over to the next, managing the health of your party is something you’ll need to do as the difficulty starts to ramp up.

When you draw a card it will tell you what page in the map book you have to use, along with the starting positions of any enemies, the win conditions and any special rules that are in play for that encounter. There’s lots of variety here and this is a much quicker way of setting up games rather than the more structured maps in previous Warhammer Quest games.

At the start of this review I mentioned that things work very differently to previous Warhammer Quest games. Darkwater ditches dice as an activation method and introduces something more like the card tapping resource system seen in games such as Nemesis.

Each hero gets a card showing their abilities, health and combat skills.

They also get a number of action cards. Players can make as many actions as they want on each of their turns, but every time they use an action they have to tap one or more cards, turning them 90 degrees to show they are expended. The cool thing here is that you can tap any card to use an action, but you cannot use the action on a tapped card. So you could example tap “Aid” to make a move action, then tap “Move” in order to make another move action. Now that Move is tapped you cant move any further that turn, but you still have an untapped Attack card, so could use that to Attack or use a special action your character has access to. Once you have your head around this activation system it works really well and almost makes each encounter into a little puzzle where you are trying to work out the most efficient way to get through.

And you’re going to have to be efficient, as most scenarios only last 4 or 5 turns – you can’t afford to waste much time and in all of our practice games we managed to get through by the skin of our teeth in the final turn. This makes encounters punchy and exciting and many times we were having frantic discussions on how to finish the mission before the time ran out.

With time being the main limiting factor in quests, death isnt the handicap it used to be. Having a character die isnt really a thing – instead, as you take more damage you’ll flip over your action cards to reveal less effective ones. Take more damage at that point and your cards become “infected” which means even your basic actions require you to tap 2 cards to use them. Finally you’ll end up with all your cards infected and you not able to do a lot each turn. But critically you can still do something and you can still make a difference in the final moments of a quest. Once you are on your last legs the monsters will stop focusing on you too, getting rid of the unfortunate spiral that used to exist when characters just became punchbags for the monsters.

Speaking of the monsters, Games Workshop have cooked up a new way of controlling them. Just like with Characters, the adversaries also have their own cards and their own sequence of actions that they take. Red and Black dice with a number of unique facings are used to see what they do, and with a cool touch the actions that are caused differ between the two dice. This allows the monsters to feel a little more organic and realistic. So for example, the first time they activate they might roll a black dice (Which normally moves the monster towards either the nearest or furthest model they can get towards) then the next turn they might roll a red dice which triggers most of their combat abilities, and then on their third turn they might trigger a special ability such as trapping a nearby hero in filth that they need to spend an action on clearing off them.

This reminds me of the sorts of patterns that you see in video game bosses, and means that you can start to factor in their future turn sequence into the strategy for facing off against them.

This all feels more much natural than the older activation sequences that we saw, and with every monster type activating after each player activation, it makes combat brutal and fast paced too.

Warhammer Quest Darkwater does brilliant things with this in encounters, and I feel leaves the door open for future expansions too that can add new mechanics and adversaries to face to mix things up even more.

Progression is an important thing in Warhammer Quest, and Warhammer Quest Darkwater mixes things up a little here too. Generally speaking, you’ll only be getting to keep a piece of loot at the very end of a quest. Over the course of an adventure you might find loot, or even earn some for doing side quests – but all of these go face down. Players will unlock a number of loot cards after finishing a quest and then each player will get the chance to pick a single one to keep – they are able to add the loot cards they have picked up themselves to this, essentially meaning that if you find look you’re going to have more chance of getting a better quality reward when you finish the quest.This makes the power ramp up of the party more gradual, and this has a nice curve to it as each act of the game also unlocks more powerful look. It feels very much like how loot would work in a video game, with the harder acts offering better chances of better gear

There’s some more progression hidden within the sealed card packs that are opened up after each act too – click the spoiler button if you want to be spoiled and learn what is in them.

All of this makes Warhammer Quest Darkwater really replayable and combined with the fast set up makes it so much easier to rattle through a good chunk of an act in one sitting!

I reckon it would take 12-14 hours to get through all 3 acts (including set up time) which I think makes it much more manageable to actually get through a full campaign.

For those who want to play but not be tied to a continuing campaign the game also has rules for playing one off games without all the story linking elements – but honestly, I think the campaign stuff is where the game really shines and is well worth trying out.

With the book and miniatures approach I also expect we’ll see some supplements here, as it feels this will be much easier to do compared to the previous Warhammer Quest games. There’s lots of scope for a 4th Act with a smaller assortment of maps and some new heroes and monsters, and I think there’s actually a lot that can be done from a community point of view for even inventing new scenarios that use the existing map pages.

Summary

So what do I think of Warhammer Quest Darkwater?

When working on the review, on my initial reading of the rules I was a little concerned that this was too big a departure from the Warhammer Quest format and that the smaller maps and limited scenario time would make for boring or repetitive missions. On actually playing the game I found that the opposite was true – Darkwater has exciting and punchy adventures that always feel to the wire and that wasting any time could lead to the downfall of the party. Progression is fun and it feels like your hero is slowly getting stronger as they unlock better gear and abilities. Enemy action feels more natural and realistic, and make each quest feel like a puzzle that has to be solved rather than simply rolling dice and combat.

The book of maps works really well and means you can get a game going in no time at all! And from a storage point of view everything fits back into the box once built and painted as long as you take the card boxes out of the cardboard spacers that hold them for shipping. For previous Warhammer Quest games I had to find a storage solution for the miniatures – With Darkwater’s box being deep enough I can simply store it alongside my other boardgames and not have to worry about it.

I do think the price is a tad on the high side at £160, but I do feel that if you can pick it up for below RRP from places such as Element Games then it’s 100% worth picking up. There is good value for money if you are going to play it often too, with each individual encounter taking around 30 mins this is a great option for a fast paced game without having to spend an hour setting up the table to play.

This is an excellent addition to the Warhammer Quest range, and I’m already looking forward to continuing my adventures over the Christmas holidays!

Warhammer Quest Darkwater is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 13th December

Games Workshop provided Sprues & Brews with a free copy for review purposes.

Published by Matt Crowther

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