Verdict
With simple rules, varied encounters, and interesting tactical challenges, Warhammer Quest: Darkwater is a great middle-weight dungeon crawler. The models are typically excellent Games Workshop sculpts, something reflected in the game’s high price tag. I can easily recommend it if you want everything that this set provides - modelling challenges and all - but if you’re on the fence about any of the components, there are better picks.
- Varied encounters
- Quick to play
- Good replayability
- Gorgeous miniatures
- Miniatures aren’t easy to build
- Poor box control
- As expensive as board games come
Warhammer Quest Darkwater is the best dungeon crawler board game that Games Workshop has put out in years and, if we remove our nostalgia glasses about earlier versions of Warhammer Quest, possibly its best dungeon crawler ever. After several entries in the Quest series that built on the core rules from 2016's Silver Tower, Darkwater starts from scratch, and the result is fresh and energetic - ironic for a game that positively oozes with Nurgle's foul blessings. But the price is sky high, and Darkwater isn't quite at the top of the genre: read on to learn if it's the right game for you.
Games Workshop provided me with a review sample of Warhammer Quest: Darkwater. I've built the minis and run test games with players of various ages, skill levels, and degrees of caffeination. It's been enough to get a feel for the rules, the rhythm of play, and the kinds of experience the game wants to offer - but nowhere near enough to exhaust the content in the box.
The premise
The Jade Abbey was once a sacred temple in the Realm of Life, it was overtaken by the corruption of the plague god Nurgle. Alarielle, Everqueen of the realm and goddess of life flooded her temple to drive out the interlopers. That was long ago, and now the vile servants of the Plague God - led by Gelgus Pust, Prince of Sores - are pressing ever closer to its sacred core.
Up to four players control a band of four heroes - and it's always a band of four heroes, no matter how many players there are - as they delve into the lost ruins of the Jade Abbey to cut out the canker at its heart. What awaits them within?
What's in the Box
I hardly need to say it - the miniatures in Darkwater are gorgeous. Well, perhaps 'gorgeous' isn't the right word for the mouldering servants of Nurgle - hideous, repellant, and mangey are all more apt terms. The point is, Games Workshop makes nice models, and there are really quite a lot of them in this box, with seven heroes (and a pet fox spirit), and a veritable horde of unhygienic monsters.
These are what Games Workshop calls 'Easy To Build' model kits: once you've removed the parts from the plastic frame they come in, you can assemble them by pushing cleverly positioned pegs into sockets without using any glue. Sadly, Easy To Build models often aren't, since the tight fit of pegs and strange angles of sockets makes pushing them together much harder than simply slapping on some plastic glue. These are among the better Easy To Build kits I've built, but I still snapped a peg during fitting, and several times I almost snapped a models' ankle pushing a peg on his foot into a base.
It took me two evenings to build the kits - I could have gone faster if I'd been less scrupulous about filing down mold lines, or if I'd cut off most of the Easy To Build pegs and glued the minis together. If you're a board gamer first and foremost, expect to invest appreciable time in getting the components ready to play. Helpfully, the intro instructions point you at the few miniatures you actually need to build to play the tutorial scenario, and you can build as you go if you want to get started quickly.
Rather than modular tiles to represent dungeon locations, Darkwater uses a colossal, hardback map book, which is beautifully illustrated. The encounter cards, rewards, and even some of the cards for characters come in individually wrapped decks that are split between three acts, which you open one act at a time - so there's just the teensiest hint of Legacy gameplay.
What's conspicuously absent is a box insert to hold the figures. Sturdy little cardboard boxes let you store characters and the state of your campaign, tokens go back into the punchboard tray they came from, the map book precisely fills the box - but the miniatures are free to rattle and roll around inside the box.
Miniature wargamers won't be surprised by this - there's a segment of the audience that sees the 'board game' part of a GW board game as wrapping around a parcel of miniatures. But if you're a board gamer first and foremost, you need to find a place to store the miniatures where they won't get smashed.
Core rules
The core rules of Darkwater are pretty simple for a dungeon crawler. Each character has three action cards, which let them move, attack, or aid an ally. Using an action card requires you to spend energy, which you can get by exhausting that or another action card - once an action is exhausted, it can't be used for the rest of the turn.
So a character might exhaust their Aid action card to Move, then exhaust their Move action card to Attack, and finally exhaust their Attack action to Attack again. On top of that, each hero has unique abilities, attacks, defensive stats, and equipment, plus any Rewards you've collected. The different characters each have a clear set of skills and play differently, but you won't face a huge range of choices about what to do during your turn.
After a player takes a turn the enemies on the board get a go, using a simple AI dice to determine their behaviour: typically, they try to contact a hero and punch their lights out. Combat is a matter of rolling D6s and looking for a target number to score hits - heroes need to roll more hits than a target's Defense stat to deal damage, and can make 'save rolls' against their armor save value to try and deflect enemy hits. Once every player has taken a turn and the last enemies have acted, the round timer advances - repeat the process until you win the scenario, lose the scenario, or run out of time.
Compared to Frosthaven - not just the best dungeon crawler but one of the best board games ever - this is an incredibly simple combat system, with vastly fewer interesting choices to make based on your abilities. But if we're comparing it to Frosthaven, it's only fair to point out that Darkwater is more accessible to people without any experience of tactical games, and it's much, much quicker to set up and play. Once you're familiar with the game, playing an encounter should only take about 30 to 45 minutes, giving you the time to run through two or three in an evening, or to re-rack a mission that you fail and try again for the win.
Encounters and campaigns
There are interesting choices to make within the scenarios - they just show up on the macro level of how the four players use their different abilities to achieve the mission objective within the limited time available. The combat encounters I've played have all been genuinely interesting, each one distinctive and curated, and presenting a puzzle that the players must recognise and deal with in just a few rounds.
First, the heroes startled a gaggle of lowly cultists, and had to slaughter them before they could flee and sound the alarm. Next, we had to race through a maze of passages blocked by burly Pestigor, trying our best not to get hit by hurtling boulders careening at random onto the board. After that, we got an early encounter with the boss of the first act, chasing him through a spiral of slimy pits while he summoned minions to slow us. Most recently, the party was trapped in a superating sinkhole of plague filth, and had to batter its way past putrid guards to try and escape.
Darkwater does a lot with a little - in fact, it makes a virtue of its simplicity. The lightweight rules allow the designers to modify or abandon them entirely for a single encounter, and have all the rules text fit onto a single index-card sized encounter card.
In the first scenario I played, the cultists' attempts to flee were represented by a simple change to the AI rules that made half of them run towards the nearest exit each time they activated. In the slime pit scenario, attacks stopped dealing damage, and instead turned into push-backs - the players could batter the Pestigor guards out of the way to break out of the trap, while the Pestigors tried to hurl the heroes back into the pit which would then digest them, Saarlac-like.
So far, the variety has been excellent, particularly compared to the repetitive Warhammer Quest: Cursed City. The difficulty of the encounters varies unpredictably, and the tougher ones seem to require seriously engaging with the victory conditions and each hero's abilities to succeed, or an unreasonable amount of luck. That makes for a more rewarding game for tactically minded players, but could result in problems for younger players or adults who're just playing to socialise. They'll be able to pilot their characters easily enough, but may struggle to get enough traction on what the scenario needs from them to actually win.
Losing is an expected part of the experience, particularly when you're playing a campaign. The penalty for failing a scenario is to lose four Reward cards (the prizes and upgrades you earn by completing missions) - then every character heals six damage and you attempt the scenario again, now with a better knowledge of the risks and strategies. If you ever run out of Rewards to discard, that's the end of your campaign - but starting from scratch shouldn't be a bore.
Darkwater doesn't have a fixed progression of encounters, or even a branching tree. Before you embark on an act, you construct an Act Deck of 14 cards that you will work through before facing one of three possible variants of the Act's boss. To start the campaign, you reveal the top two act cards - which could be combat encounters, small minigame events, or a much needed rest - read the flavor text of both, and decide which one you'll face. Once that's done you repeat the process until you beat the Act boss, die horribly, or decide you're going to pack everything up for the evening. You'll see roughly half of the cards in an act in a single playthrough, and only actually play through a quarter of them.
I like this roguelike approach. A single campaign through all three acts will take in the region of ten to twenty hours depending on how many times you have to repeat a scenario and how long your sessions are. That's short for a dungeon crawler, but I think the goal is that most players should get to the end of the game and have that final boss fight - and if they've enjoyed their time, they can replay from the start and get a substantially different experience.
With such a light rule set spread across so many cards I was primed for typos and rules contradictions, but to my surprise I haven't found any (yet). The rules are so light that you can house rule them incredibly easily - in fact, since I had limited time to play the game before the review embargo lifted and I wanted to see as much as possible, I dropped the rule that failed encounters must be replayed and put in an alternate system for partial success and failure. And the flexibility of the rules should make it easy for GW to expand the game with additional cards via White Dwarf magazine.
Verdict
This is a solid dungeon crawler with great art, fun missions, lots of variety, and gorgeous - if tricky to build - miniatures. The campaign promises decent longevity and lots of variety, some interesting tactical challenges, and some entertaining silliness. But the cost of entry is very, very high, and we have to compare it with other games on the market.
Gloomhaven and Frosthaven are more complex and more tactically deep games, with massive campaigns, and a similar price of entry (usually more for Frosthaven, usually less for the older Gloomhaven). If you're a hardcore dungeon crawler fan, you probably already own them - but if you don't, they're absolutely the games you should consider first if you're really interested in blowing a lot of money on a tactically rewarding dungeon crawler with an RPG-like campaign.
If you're in the market for a lighter, faster-playing dungeon crawler that still has some tactical bite, I can definitely recommend Darkwater, provided building (and perhaps painting) the models strikes you as fun. If that seems more like an obstacle, then I'd suggest you look at Bardsung - check my Bardsung review for my full thoughts. And for a lot less money, Descent Legends of the Dark or Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion are worth considering.
If you're a Warhammer fan, then you already know whether the quality of the figures is worth the price of entry to you, and you've probably been reading this review to decide whether or not to throw all the board game components in the recycling. You shouldn't - the game is good!