Warhammer Quest: Darkwater – Questing & Campaigns Overview
Games Workshop talks shop about the encounters, skirmishes, questing, and campaigns of Warhammer Quest: Darkwater.
We got a quick look at the core rules of Warhammer Quest: Darkwater and today we’re getting a look at how the overarching structure of the campaigns will work. In essence, you’ll be playing with your characters through a linked set of skirmishes and encounters. But there’s more to it that just that. So let’s dive in to the campaign side of Darkwater!
“Kicking off a game of Darkwater is simple. The core campaign takes place across three increasingly difficult acts, and is designed to be extremely replayable. You can also just jump straight in for a skirmish if you want to play a quick encounter, or show the game off to friends and family… which could lead to you all playing a campaign together!”
Campaigns of Darkwater
Playing through a full campaign takes roughly 10 to 14 hours according to WarCom. You’ll kick things off by picking your characters and their starting gear. Then you’ll be making a deck for the act/encounters (with bosses at the bottom) and a second deck for rewards. Now, if you want to just play a simple one-off skirmish, you’ll just pick the encounter you want to try out and set that up. There’s even a scoring system for each skirmish so you can compete against your score to see if you can do better in later runs.
Next, you’ll need to grab your encounter cards — each one of these will help you determine mission you’re on and the set-up. These have the victory conditions and any other special rules. Oh and the map you’ll be using. That ones kind of a big deal.
For campaign play, you’ll start by grabbing two of these encounters from the deck you setup previously. Then you’ll choose one to actually play. In the example above we have the Cleanse the Spawn Pit encounter. You can see the victory, set-up, the map, and the extra rules for the mission. What’s neat about Darkwater is that each of the maps is included in a “lay-flat” map book. So you’ll just flip to the right map and you’re ready to set-up and play.
Each of these maps also supports multiple encounters so you might get the same map but with different enemies. Like Seize the Cache — same map, but with Pestigors now ready to battle.
Back to the maps for a moment. There’s more to them than just cool art…
“The first thing to note is the initiative track on the top right, which has four spaces for the heroes interspersed with enemy spots. The leader always gets to choose where to place themselves on the initiative track first, with other players deciding in clockwise order. At the end of the track is the timer icon, and when you reach that you’ll move the timer on the map down by one. The red spot indicates the final round, and not all maps have the same length of timer.”
Because these skrimished are limited in turns you’ll want to go in with a plan. Or at least be aware that time is ticking. Maps also have more info on them that will be important to process.
“There are also a variety of hex types on each map. Hexes marked by white outlines are obstacles you can’t normally move through, though some equipment can change this. Hexes with a yellow-dashed outline are snares that reduce a hero’s movement by one, and red-outlined hexes are lethal hexes that hurt you if you move through them or are placed on one.”
There are also spaces for things that relate back to the setup instructions. These will include things like mission specific tokens or even treasure markers — you like treasure, right?!
Scenario Victory (Or Defeat)
“If you manage to succeed against the odds and complete your objectives, you’ve won the encounter – congratulations! Your party heals a little, and you draw five reward cards – six if no-one was vulnerable – and each player gets a chance to pick one in turn. If you looted anything, you get to add that card to the pool when it’s your turn to pick a card. Each player only gets one reward, so you’ll need to choose wisely. Their rarity is also marked by colour, handy for those who just want the shiniest stuff.”
Everyone expects to get rewards after a successful run…but what happens when you lose? How DO you lose anyhow? The loss conditions are pretty straight forward: Run out of time or all the heroes become vulnerable. You can opt to discard four rewards to heal and try again. Or you can scrap it and just start a new campaign. Oof!
One more thing to mention is that the scenarios themselves are a mix of encounter-types. Not every mission is just a straight-up slugfest. Each Act Deck has 16 encounters plus the separate boss encounters so be ready for puzzles and combat! The Act Decks also have a few events and rest spots to encounter. Oh and don’t forget the rewards for completing the Act as well. The point being there’s a lot of replay value here already. Once you mix in the different heroes you can play, you could end up with a vary different campaign experience each time!
The campaigns can be a lot of fun and it’s also worth mentioning you don’t have to finish it all in one sitting:
“If you want to put a campaign on hold after an event or encounter, then never fear: Darkwater comes with a series of boxes for collecting all your cards and tokens. There’s one for each hero, one for the reward deck, and one for the act, which makes pausing and returning at a later date easy.”
So grab some friends and get ready for a long weekend of Darkwater OR plan to have them around for your weekly game night. However you decide to take on Nurgle’s followers, Warhammer Quest: Darkwater is ready for you!
See, even Warhammer Quest: Darkwater knows that it’s important to have a pause while you’re playing a campaign…
