Warhammer Quest: Darkwater vs Cursed City Rules Comparison
Both are Warhammer Quest but their rules work very differently. Let’s see how they stack up.
We’ve been looking over the new rules previews for Warhammer Quest: Darkwater and something is very clear. Darkwater is going to play differently than Cursed City. Which makes sense. It’s been a few years since that game came out and GW has updated things. One thing that is also kind of funny is that you can still search for Cursed City on WarCom to find their coverage from 4 years ago, too.
Now, I don’t have the new Darkwater rules in front of me. However, GW has shown off the character card for the Manitcore Knight. They also showed off the basic mechanics. Plus we’ve got some enemy stats, too. We can use those to compare them to character cards from Cursed City to get a sense of exactly what’s different.
Darkwater vs Cursed City Character Rules
Above we’ve got the Manticore Knight’s card. Pretty clean and straight forward. Now, let’s take a look at one of the characters from Cursed City:
Jelsen Darrock Character Card from Cursed City
Right off the bat, you can tell Cursed City had a lot of things going on with the character cards. The stats are different, the dice are different, there’s places for equipment cards and tokens — and even dice to be placed on the card. There were some design elements borrowed from Age of Sigmar (the round stat circle for example). But what really through me off were those extra dice in the game. It wasn’t just a D6 system.
In fact, Cursed City used those four squares on the character cards for you to place D6s on them. You’d then spend those dice as activation dice to power your actions. It’s not completely different from the card mechanic used in Darkwater, as you’re spending resources either way. But the resources are cards vs dice.
I don’t know if I’d call this an evolution in mechanics or not — but it’s certainly a change. Conceptually, I don’t think they are that different. But I think the cards might favor the players a bit more as it gives them set options vs the dice activations where you had to spend dice that met or beat their action cost. It’s kind of a “roll dice first to see what you can do” vs “roll dice after you decide what you want to do to see the results” and I think that does give more agency to the players.
Maps!
Another big change is the map system in Darkwater. First off, the maps are “fixed” in that you don’t have to set them up or arrange tiles. I liked the tile system from Cursed City because you could really have some funky layouts — but that could also span your tabletop. With Darkwater, it’s the same footprint every time. Darkwater also moved from a square movement/range system to a hex-based one. This kind of feels closer to Warhammer Underworlds if you ask me. I don’t think that’s a bad thing!
Campaign Structure & Enemies
Both of these games can be played as a campaign with linked adventures for your group. Cursed City had an interesting mechanic with the Day/Night cycle which fit the setting. That was mostly because “Vampires!” after all. The enemies had different behaviors based on the time of day:
Bat Swarm card from Cursed City
Comparing that to the enemies of Darkwater, you can also see there’s quite a difference in how the enemies function:
Both enemy types are simplified versions of the Player Characters. However, I think the Darkwater cards are a bit easier to understand visually. There’s a LOT of text on those Bat Swarm cards. Both card-types throw a lot of information at you but I think I like the streamlined Darkwater rules.
Executioner trait from Cursed City
When playing in Campaign Mode, players in Cursed City would also level up and get more abilities/skills and gear. Now, GW has teased that will be the case for Darkwater as well, we just don’t have all those details yet.
However, it does seem like getting new gear and upgrades is going to be a key feature to make progress in Darkwater. The end conditions are also different as well. In Cursed City there was basically a journey booklet you had to progress through. Players had to reach at least level 4 with 4 characters to even attempt the final encounters.
In Darkwater, players will have to play through an encounter deck that’s broken down in to three Acts. Failure of a mission means players have to sacrifice gear to restart or they can scrap it and start a new adventure.
Steamlined vs Crunchy?
Looking back at the Cursed City rules and comparing them to what I know about Darkwater one thing is clear. Warhammer Quest: Darkwater seems a lot easier to approach and just jump into. This isn’t a dig on Cursed City because I do think that it had a LOT going for it (aside from supply issues).
But that was also one of the downsides to Cursed City — it was a LOT! A campaign of Cursed City was a commitment if you wanted to finish. There was a lot to track and keep up with. However, it was engaging and having the hidden card at the end really gave you a reason to play and a goal to shoot for. It was good crunchy fun.
Darkwater isn’t exactly a “light” game either. GW said the campaign can take 10 to 14 hours for a full run through. Hopefully that’s a long weekend or at least a couple of weekly game nights. However, Darkwater also has a “one-shot” skirmish playstyle that encourages people to just bust it out and give it a run. Now that could turn into a campaign…but you don’t have the same commitment level there. Things seem more streamlined for Darkwater overall. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing either.
If you’re curious about Cursed City, you can always search for our coverage or visit WarCom and checkout their articles. Unfortunately, the Cursed City website doesn’t exist anymore and finding copies of the game in the wild can be…challenging. If you played Cursed City let us know what you thought of it in the comments. And let us know if you’re looking forward to playing Warhammer Quest: Darkwater!
Really hope we get a pirate character expansion…
