Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game Review
Oh, Warhammer Quest. Warhammer Quest became an obsession of mine 6 or 7 years ago. I was too young to experience its original release in the mid-90s but came across blogs discussing, expanding and painting it during the twilight years of my Games Workshop hobby. My imagination was caught with the exploring dungeons and telling long campaigns, full of glorious miniatures. I stayed up late into the night printing off scans of rulebooks and campaign supplements, I collected a big pile of miniatures
Modern equivalents of the original box contents. Hell, I even started building my own 3D dungeon
So when I say that Warhammer Quest had a special place in my heart, you’ll understand what I mean. Sadly the game never quite lived up to those expectations: more a gruelling and random slog through endless waves of enemies than anything strategic and interesting. So eventually I moved on, discovered modern board games, and settled down with a blog. But that doesn’t mean that deep down I don’t still long to grab my broad sword, slip into my fur loin cloth, and delve deep into the secret places of the old world once again. Can Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game give me the sense of adventure it promises?
Players: 1-4
Time: 30-60 mins
Ages: 14+
Now, some of you may be aware that Fantasy Flight, publishers of this game, and Games Workshop, owners of the Warhammer license, have had a parting of the ways and thus Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game is due to disappear from shop stores at the end of February. Is it, therefore, worth grabbing now before that happens?
Ooo what’s in this cave?
Lifting the lid on Warhammer Quest: The Adv – you know what? I’m not writing this title out every time. We can cope with WHQ: TACG right? Good. Lifting the lid on WHQ: TACG you discover a heap of cards of various sizes, a molehill’s worth of tokens and 6 chunky custom dice. You have a 5 quest campaign, including special bosses, locations and items, 4 brave heroes including 2 females though sadly a warrior priest instead of the barbarian who should have been there! (Nostalgia kick) You have, once again, an eclectic mix of orcs, goblins, rat-men and generic wildlife to combat, and a pile of treasure to collect. The elements are here and they are already better than the original game’s counterparts (minus the minis of course), but how do they go together?
Each player gets a hero and a set of 4 basic actions: explore, aid, catch your breath and whack with sword (or other sharp implement). Each of these is slightly different for each hero. The fiery bright wizard offers opportunities to take damage in exchange for boosted actions, the warrior priest is a competent healer, etc. Each turn you do one of these actions and then exhaust that card. You can’t use it again until you take the action that lets you reset, which is again different for each hero. Even though fundamentally the changes between characters are relatively small, they feel different to play. The Waywatcher can attack every turn, putting out a hail of arrows, but that attack is weaker than that of the other heroes. On the other hand, her aid card not only helps boost another character (as aid always does) it also puts a wound on an enemy regardless of defence.
The aid action is the key source of co-operation amongst the heroes. Performing it lets another hero add a pile (hopefully) of success tokens to whichever actions they like. These can be spent to boost that action spectacularly. Aid also allows that hero to refresh one of their exhausted actions. Thus, aid allows heroes to focus on one element of the game so long as the other heroes are able to help them, but means you don’t want to aid a hero immediately after they’ve refreshed. It creates an efficiency challenge, the challenge that is at the heart of WHQ: TACG. Get it right and you’ll be a ruthless band of heroes wheeling through greenskins like a ride along lawn mower through absent-mindedly forgotten gnomes. Get it wrong and… well, you’ll be closer to the gnomes in that analogy.
Delving Deep
The game does not make it easy for you. Each time you play takes the form of a scenario, with an associated scenario card whether it is the generic Delve Quest or one of story driven campaign entries. All feature instructions for constructing a deck of monsters to face and a set of locations to explore. There are unique victory and defeat conditions too, often requiring you to face off against some powerful nemesis enemy. But there is also the relentless attrition of time. The peril track running through the centre of the scenario card will advance every round, demanding you make progress towards the objective, or face bitter consequences, even outright losing the game.
The objectives almost always require you to choose between fighting off the multitude of monsters assailing you and actually making progress on the scenario, typically by exploring locations to move forward. Each location spawns a bunch of monsters so the logical thing to do would be to methodically dismember the monsters, explore it and advance. But the advancing peril track (and the way action cards refresh) make this boring option fortunately untenable. The alternative of Leroy Jenkins-ing it, running through the monsters and just exploring is also doomed to failure as, unsurprisingly, the enemies aren’t just going to stand there while you search through their stuff. In fact, their not going to stand there for anything.
Resolving each action involves rolling dice: nice helpful white dice, and nasty, horrible, black dice. You roll one of these black dice for each enemy in front of your hero. If you roll a scratch, you’ve been hit and take damage from the enemy, starting with the strongest. A skull symbol is even worse, as the nemesis sticks his big ugly nose in and applies his effect. Your white dice at least feature shields to count these wounds, but rolling these means you aren’t rolling those precious successes. Each pair of hammers is a wound dealt to your target, a wound healed, a point advanced on the location, depending on what action you are performing. Those aid actions grant you success tokens you can add to a given action. But by the time you have three enemies in front of you, you’re virtually guaranteed to be taking hits. The game shifts and flows between periods of intense concern when faced with a room full of enemies, nemesis cheering them on, to the calm of knowing you have things back under control, a moment of respite to heal and prepare for the next storm. The dice, while they can feel traitorous bastards at times, ensure you never feel completely safe but won’t leave you feeling like it was all up to them either. A dramatic improvement on the classic game!
Light at the end of the tunnel…?
Adding yet more to the challenge (hey, you didn’t think this would be easy did you?) are the quests themselves. The peril track doesn’t only act as a timer, it adds its own twist on things as the marker advances. These small selections of rules have a dramatic effect on the game. I don’t want to go too far into spoilers here as discovery is part of the joy of playing this game, but expect clouds of poisonous gas, exciting chases and one really big beastie! They are implemented brilliantly, have wonderfully dark and amusing flavour text to set the scene and are linked together to form a narrative campaign. The biggest issue is that there are only 5 of them (plus the generic fight-the-baddies delve quest) and there won’t ever be anymore, unless you make them yourselves. Is there enough game here to make it worth the money?
I don’t like commenting on monetary value generally. Trying to speak for everyone on such a matter is impossible, we each have our own priorities. However, I can say that you get enough plays out of this box to make for a good plays-to-money ratio. The key here is the difficulty. These scenarios, even though they are the first and only scenarios released, are properly challenging! It will typically take more than one attempt to get through it and then you have multiple heroes to try out. In the solo game especially, different combinations of heroes make for different ways of playing and figuring out how to make two heroes work together well on the fly is a lot of fun. Playing as a larger group will lose this element unless you pick up some of the character packs too.
The biggest issue the game has, for me, is that the theme gets lost under the weight of its mechanics. Don’t get me wrong, those mechanics are fantastic. But when something cinematic is happening, I only notice it after the fact. Like in a recent game, my bright wizard unleashed a super-powered fireball that incinerated the boss monster. That’s epic! But it was only after I’d added up my successes and shifted some tokens around and exhausted my action card that I realised what it all meant. Likewise many of the location effects are great, they really fit the theme. Like being lost in a magical staircase. But with so much stuff to keep track of I find myself applying the mechanical effect and moving on… then catching myself as I realise what that mechanic meant. The game suffers from a complexity issue: there is so much to keep track of with your hero’s capabilities, enemy effects, location effects, quest effects, that the story just gets lost beneath a mountain of keywords. It’s there if you look for it. But you do have to look.
Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game is a fantastic game. Each play is a fascinating puzzle of selecting your actions efficiently and pushing your luck against sometimes overwhelming odds. It’s incredibly challenging but rarely feels unfairly so. It is a mechanical puzzle first and foremost as, while the setting I excellent, the theme only occasionally shines through. Frankly, it’s a tragedy this game won’t see future expansions but it is still well worth checking out before it disappears forever!
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