Event report: Warhammer Fest Underworlds clash

 I'm writing April's catch-up blog only one day into not-April, maybe May's blog will actually get written in May, who knows. Anyway, in this blog I'm going to do a write up of the one day Warhammer Underworlds clash at Warhammer Fest. 

It was a Rivals clash, and I think the first Rivals tournament I've played in. For people not familiar with Underworlds, Rivals is a game mode with no deck building element where you use decks straight out the box: you can either use your faction's deck that they come with, or one of the pre-built Rivals decks that any warband can use. Rivals is the most accessible game mode, so my guess is that Games Workshop made this a Rivals clash to encourage less experienced players to get involved. I enjoy playing Rivals just as much as I enjoy the other more complex game modes, so this was fine with me.

Before I get into my warband and the games I played, a few thoughts on the event format and Warhammer Fest as a whole:

• As many people on the internet have already reported, Warhammer Fest was a bit light on content for people not involved in tournaments, and heavy on queueing. But my main pre-event goal aside from hoping to do ok in the Underworlds clash was to have a fun time hanging out with friends, which I definitely did, so overall I enjoyed it. 
• Special shout out to the man who kept telling people queuing to see Golden Demon that it was not an official queue. Fine, but given there's not space for everyone to view the entries at once an unofficial queue very much felt like the fairest solution, especially for those of us who are vertically challenged and don't have the option to look at stuff over other people's heads.
• The clash was generally well run, it kept to schedule and the pairings all went smoothly. There was an active judging policy with judges being very visible and available during games to answer any rules questions, which was great.
• My main criticism would be of the timings: we played four rounds of best of three, and there was 2 hours 15 mins available for each round. That's significantly longer than at any previous clash I've been to, where the norm has been more like 1 hour 45 mins. I hadn't expected any of my games to take that long, but actually a couple of them did, and I think this was because with no time pressure people weren't incentivised to play efficiently and so the games expanded to fill the additional time. That's fine, but it did make for an extremely long day - the pre-tournament briefing was at 9am, and the awards ceremony finished at around 8:30pm. I would personally have preferred tighter round times, a shorter lunch break and an earlier finish. The timings were clearly signalled in the event pack though, so I knew what I was getting into going in.

My warband

I took Elathain's Soulraid, with the Daring Delvers Rivals deck. Soulraid have a decent enough faction deck, but I wanted to run something a bit different so I've practicing with them with the Daring Delvers deck for a few months. The idea of Daring Delvers is that your warband builds up 'exploration points', which you get by being on feature tokens (i.e. objectives or other hexes you can place during a game) outside your territory, or having fighters with explorer upgrades outside your territory. Your opponent can reduce your points by putting their fighters on objectives in your territory. There are also a few power cards that give you other ways to get points. You then have objectives that need you to have a certain number of exploration points in order to score them. The most exploration points you can have is 10, but to get that high a lot of things need to go right. In general I go into games aiming to get to 3 by the  end of round 1, and 5 by the end of round 2. There's only one objective that needs you have more than 5, so depending when I draw that and how the game is going I can make a call on whether to try to push for 10 points or not. As it turned out, I don't think I got to 10 exploration before the third end phase during any of my games at the event, though I've managed it a few times in practice.

Soulraid are well suited to Daring Delvers because they are high mobility, and have the Spinefin fighter who you can place anywhere on the board, and who while they can't hold objectives can get you exploration points by being on feature tokens in your opponent's territory. Your opponent doesn't score glory for taking Spinefin out, so they're not incentivised to try to deal with them.

I'd done reasonably well with the warband in practice, and went into the clash hoping to win more games than I lost.

I put way more effort into painting Duinclaw than the rest of the warband, so he's the one you get a photo of!

Match 1

My first match was against Colm, who was also running the Daring Delvers deck, but with the Starblood Stalkers warband. I'd never played a Daring Delvers mirror match before, but it presents some immediate problems in that you're both trying to stand on feature tokens, so your game plans are likely to be in direct competition with each other. In general I've found that Daring Delvers does best when your opponent doesn't care about feature tokens and you can play your own game and focus on scoring objectives, so there was potential for this game to be quite low scoring if we both denied each other's objectives.

It turned out that Colm had only ever played one game of Underworlds before, which i was very impressed by as I don't think I'd have had the courage to show up to an event with only one game under my belt. Given his inexperience he played really well, he knew the rules very well, played quickly, and used his fighters efficiently. However, Daring Delvers is a tricky deck to play without knowing the objectives well and being able to make good decisions on when to mulligan and when to ditch objectives, so I definitely had a strong advantage!

The first game was fairly cagey, I was a bit scared of his saurus's killing power so didn't want to be too aggressive. But I was able to build up a steady lead of exploration points and ended up outscoring him on objectives, 13-8.

In the second game everything went my way, I killed some skinks early on which gave me the glory to start putting upgrades down, and then I got a lot of exploration through using an upgrade where you can score exploration points when the upgraded fighter takes an adjacent fighter out of action. I'd taken out most of his warband including the saurus by the end of round 2, so I was able to sit back and focus on building up exploration and scoring my objectives. I took the win 17-3 for a 2-0 win overall.

Match 2

In match 2 I played Elliott with Hedkrakka's Madmob. This was a tough match up for me, Hedkrakka's have an aggressive playstyle and have a good faction objective deck, so they have potential to score a lot of glory by taking fighters out of action. So I knew that I'd need to try to either take his fighters out early, or find ways to keep mine away from his - I couldn't just get on with scoring exploration and letting him do his thing or he would probably obliterate me pretty quickly.

The first game was very close. We both had quite bad dice, and the third round in particular was one of those rounds when it felt like our fighters were standing there hitting each other with rubber weapons. I was desperately trying to kill his fighter Wallop, to whom he'd given an extra wound making him a two glory kill, while he was equally desperately trying to take out my leader. In the end neither of them died thanks to a lot of defensive crits and bad attack rolls, and he just edged it 10 glory to 9. I scored low because I was trying to play keep away where I could, so couldn't run into his territory to stand on feature tokens and build up exploration points.

The first game had taken quite a while so we were now under a little bit of time pressure, and I let this get to me and played badly in the second game. I mismanaged my objectives round 1 and didn't come up a coherent plan meaning that I failed to score things that I should have done, and meanwhile my opponent played very well and was able to kill a lot of my warband and score a lot of glory. So I ended up losing 10-20, for a 0-2 loss for the round. That meant I went into lunch at 1-1 for the day.

I was rubbish at remembering to take photos of my games, so instead here's a photo of two of my friends playing their second round game

Match 3

In match 3 I played Colin with Hexbane's Hunters. I don't think I'd played against Hexbane before with this warband and deck, and it turned out to be quite tough. Hexbane's have a lot of ranged fighters so they are happy to sit back and let me come to them and then shoot me, and they have two dogs with a lot of mobility which had potential to deny me exploration either by blocking me from being on feature tokens, or by moving onto feature tokens in my territory.

The first game was again quite cagey. He killed my crab and Fuirann (one of my better fighters) early on, so after that I largely gave up on trying to kill him, and focused on building up exploration and scoring glory. Hexbane's have a very good faction power deck, but they don't have great faction objective cards so they can struggle to score glory if you can deny them kills.I came very close to getting the objective for scoring 10 exploration points, but I was fishing for a power card I needed to give me 1 more exploration point that turned out to be right at the bottom of the deck, so I wasn't able to draw it in time to put it to use. I took a narrow win 13-9. Colin had my gameplan figured out by now though, and had realised what he needed to do to stop me scoring exploration points and thus objectives, so I knew the rest of the match was going to be tough.

Game 2 went his way, he took control of the middle of the board early on, and used his dogs very cleverly to stop me scoring. He got the retractable pistol upgrade onto Hexbane early on, which gives him a reaction where he can shoot you when you finish a move close to him, and this proved difficult to deal with. My fighters are mostly fairly fragile, and Hexbane was standing in the middle of the board plinking away at me every time I did anything. I wasn't able to score exploration quickly enough to get through my objectives, and I lost 5-14.

Game 3 was very tight. I changed my game plan away from killing his hunters to trying to kill his dogs, since they were the main thing limiting me from scoring exploration points. The way Hexbane's warband works is that when fighters (except dogs) die there are ways to buff the remaining fighters, so while leaving them alive meant that he had more fighters to play with, they were also individually less effective. I got quite a lot of exploration points early on, and killed both dogs, but he was picking off my fighters, so by the end of the game I only had one fighter left alive and his were buffed up to the point where I couldn't really kill them. I did score a decent amount of my objectives though, and was able to eke out a very narrow win, 13-12, for a 2-1 match win. This could easily have gone the other way, it was a super tense game and the odd dice roll going differently could have swung it. In fact I think if I had managed to kill one of his fighters with the last roll of the game, it would have allowed him to score another objective that would have given him the win, so I definitely got lucky.

Match 4.

Match 4 was against Gary with Rippa's Snarlfangs. Rippa's are an aggressive warband, but only have three fighters so I was better placed to get board control against them than I had been against Hexbane.

I lost the first game 14-10, he killed the crab early (this happened a lot at this event, I usually set up the crab quite far forward as they have good defensive stats and so in theory have a decent chance of surviving if attacked, but it didn't work out that way!) and then was able to consistently score objectives and buff his fighters with upgrades. I had a good moment when I managed to kill Rippa (who had an upgrade making him a large fighter) with a power card, scoring me a 2 glory surge objective for an overall 4 glory swing, but that only reduced the deficit rather than actually making it close. He ended up taking out all of my fighters except the fish.

This is the only photo I managed of any of my games, and it's the end of a game I lost badly

In the second game, we both had sub-par dice and none of our fighters died for quite a while. I think at one point I rolled three double supports for an attack roll (the rough equivalent of a triple 1, unless you happen to have two supporting fighters, which I did not) and then Gary's next three attack dice rolls were also double supports. I was able to put wounds on a few of high fighters early on though, and then finished them off in round 2 leaving him with only one fighter, which wasn't enough to stop me from scoring. I took the win 11-5. 

Gary's strategy had been to run Rippa into me early on, because if I take the bait and attack Rippa it inspires his other two fighters making them stronger. In game 3 I had the choice of board layout and offset the boards so that he couldn't reach me quickly with all of his fighters. He charged in with Rippa as expected, but Rippa ended up close a board edge,. and I had a decent objective hand so I decided to leave Rippa alone and focus on scoring my objectives instead. This paid off - without the inspiration his other fighters weren't able to do enough damage, and once I'd take out one of them I ended up running away onto his board where Rippa wasn't able to get back quickly enough to do much damage to me. My objectives came out in quite a helpful order so I was able to score consistently glory while largely denying him glory, and ended up with a 14-3 win to take the match 2-1.

That left me with a 3-1 record overall for 18th place, which I was very happy with. All my opponents were lovely guys and fun to play against, and I enjoyed all the games. I think I'll probably bench the Soulraid for a bit now and pick up a different warband, but I do enjoy the Daring Delvers rivals deck so I might give that a go with another warband at some point.