Welcome to another installment of Starting Hex, a series about Warhammer Underworlds. Games Workshop released a rules update for Underworlds this morning. Most of the changes are small in word count but huge in impact, so let’s take a look at everything that’s changing in advance of Spitewood’s release this weekend.

As usual, all of the documents can be found on the Warhammer Community downloads page for Warhammer Underworlds. We’re looking primarily at the Rules Update document and the Organised Play: Format Rules document. There’s also an updated Core Rules (which is just the rulebook with all the changes from the Rules Update baked in), the Warbands of the Grand Alliances (same as it was before – just with the recently re-released warbands removed from it), and the Organised Play Pack (no rules changes here – just a suggested outline of how to run events) but we won’t be covering those latter three since they’re mostly redundant.

As far as I am able to tell, all of the new or updated entries in these documents are highlighted with appropriate markers so it makes going through everything much easier. Thanks for the extra work on showing changes, Games Workshop rules updater!

Rule Changes

The Rules Update opens with two banger changes, and they’re both just striking through a sentence that was previously in the rules.

The first change not only reverts the token placement change from the Spring 2025 update, but it fully removes the requirement for a treasure token to be placed in neutral territory at all. All of the other old restrictions still apply – they can’t be in starting hexes, blocked hexes, stagger hexes, edge hexes, or within two hexes of another feature token. If it’s otherwise impossible to place one, they can be placed in an edge hex. And finally, there must be at least one treasure token in each player’s territory after the last one is placed.

There’s a few impacts from this. First off, Take and Hold strategies gain a little bump. They were hampered with the previous system because if you “won” the board roll off, you were restricted to only placing two tokens and one had to be in neutral territory. It was entirely possible to wind up with only a single token in your territory which made strategies based on holding multiple tokens substantially harder. Now it’s guaranteed that you can get at least two tokens in your territory no matter how the roll off went. However, bear in mind that neutral tokens are no longer a guarantee. If you’re taking cards like Shocking Assault from Countdown to Cataclysm or Slow Advance from Emberstone Sentinels, you have to be sure to place an early token into neutral territory or those cards will literally become unscorable dead weight in your deck. It also means that if your opponent places any tokens in neutral with these decks, you have a pretty good idea they’re running those cards and can plan counterplay accordingly.

Next up is an exciting change for the Nemesis format. No longer are you restricted to only picking a single deck with a plot card. This doesn’t open up a ton of new options, but the ones that it does allow are fascinating. Horde warbands are now able to take both Deadly Synergy and Edge of the Knife. If you want to enhance your melee accuracy to guarantee raids with Realmstone Raiders, you can now pair it with Raging Slayers. Countdown to Cataclysm has been a fantastic support deck for nearly any other deck out there, and now it’s allowed to pair up with even other plot decks.

This change is going to take some time for the players to really dive into the possibilities. I’m excited to see what shakes out and to try my own awful builds only to ultimately steal borrow ideas from better players!

Warband Changes

There have been a few small updates and FAQs to warbands, a minor but impactful tweak to another, and a sledgehammer (deservedly) taken to a final warband. I’m certain that I wasn’t the only one to submit a ton of questions to the FAQ email (be sure to send any questions you have to whunderworlds@gwplc.com) but it’s always satisfying to see things that are almost word for word what I sent in receive answers. Let’s look at the details.

Borgit’s Beastgrabbaz

This simply cleared up a timing issue that popped up in some games with regards to two pushes that happen at the same time.

The Exiled Dead

Coming in hot, the Exiled Dead aren’t even out and have already received a nerf. This warband had unparalleled action economy with Danse Dynamic – being able to move 4 fighters at once (and resurrect one that was slain afterwards) allowed some disgusting plays with feature tokens. Now those same conductive fighters can’t delve or hold treasure tokens, so they’re going to have to Danse elsewhere. Likely into combat which is still a frightening thought, especially when you consider they can take advantage of a double-plot pairing like Edge of the Knife and Deadly Synergy.

Jaws of Itzl

Pretty small change here and if you squint, you might miss it. The previous wording was dealing 1 damage X times where X is the number of successes rolled on the dice. This would be individual instances of damage that interacted weirdly with a few abilities, namely their inspire condition. Now it’s just a lump of damage dealt at one time. Technically it’s a small nerf to their inspire, but also allows this ability to actually kill a fighter equipped with Unstoppable from Wrack & Ruin.

Knives of the Crone

Yeah yeah, you thought you were so clever. “There’s nothing in the rules that says I can’t just pick all the prophecy abilities!” You know who you are. 🙂

Prophecies now just work the way they were intended to and how 99.9% of players played them anyway.

Zarbag’s Gitz

Holy hell. If you caught my initial review of Zarbag’s Gitz from the Gitz and Goliaths box then you know I had very strong feelings about this warband, as did anyone else with a pulse and even the most rudimentary understanding of the game. They received five different and substantial nerfs here, all of which are impactful and still I think the Gitz are going to be a perfectly fine warband to play and compete with.

Their inspire not only goes from after your third glory point to sixth, but you also only inspire one fighter at a time for each time you gain glory. This slows down the warband’s inspiring substantially.

Volley has a slight wording change but I’ll be honest, I can’t figure out if it changes functionality at all. The “immediately after the attack” clause is added to the start. If someone figures out how this actually changes gameplay, let me know!

Slippery Gitz picks up the exact same nerf that Scurry had to pick up in the original printing – limiting it to being used once per turn. No brainer change here that really should have been present from the start, but I’m glad it’s back.

Fungal Burst took a much deserved hit. This was an absurd ability to exist. It could have been a primary draw to another warband with incredibly weak other abilities and still carried them in it’s previous iteration. Now it’s not only limited to once per game, but instead of dealing a damage it’s just a stagger token. Much less insane.

Finally, Make Some Noise! adds a familiar restriction to the squigs after it’s used. For the entire remainder of the battle round, neither squig can hold treasure tokens or delve after they’re pushed. The two squigs retain their ability to be deadly meat missiles worth 0 bounty, but they can’t be used for cheeky feature token antics. This feels reasonable because you still have seven whole other fighters who can double move that still can.

Brethren of the Bolt

The previous rules update changed a rule saying that unless otherwise specified, abilities won’t end. This FAQ carries that same ruling forward to the Fulminating Hymn ability of the Brethren. Feel free to keep singing and singing, stacking up those buffs each round!

Digital Warband Releases

Unsurprisingly, this document also explicitly calls out that the old digital rules for Mollog’s Mob, The Skinnerkin, Zarbag’s Gitz, Thorns of the Briar Queen, and The Thricefold Discord are no longer valid. If you want to play any of these warbands, you have to use the newly released and updated rules. As such, all references in this document to their previous rulings and clarifications have been removed.

Rivals Deck Changes

A few cards in specific decks also received FAQ answers or even an errata in one case. There’s also an update in the Organised Play: Format Rules with regards to the Forbidden and Restricted (FAR) list.

Edge of the Knife

Nothing crazy here; just two clarifications on how to score the Calm Before the Storm and Power in Numbers objectives.

Pillage and Plunder

Continuing the trend of clarifying how objectives are scored, Lost in the Depths gets an FAQ answer. But wait, there’s more…

The only update to the Forsaken and Restricted list was the inclusion of Claim the Prize. Pillage and Plunder is now the only deck to have two restricted cards, both of which are pretty solid surges. I’m not crying over this because despite Pillage being an interesting deck, it’s also been played to death and I’m frankly sick of seeing it. Effectively, this is probably just banning Claim the Prize because Delving for Wealth is going to be the easier card to score most of the time. It also makes pairings of Pillage and Plunder with any other deck that has a restricted card a little more difficult which is fine by me.

Raging Slayers

The addition of “or more” to the end of this objective makes it a lot less painful to score. Technically, the previous version required your leader to be in range of exactly 2 other fighters – if there was a 3rd nearby, you couldn’t score it.

In an appropriate double whammy for this deck, Raging Slayers also has an FAQ for how Haymaker works. This upgrade has had a few questions crop up during gameplay due to its’ damage cap, and this question helps outline not only how this specific interaction works but (hopefully) answers most other questions about how the Lethal ability granted from Haymaker interacts with other modifiers.

Realmstone Raiders

Well dang, that’s a lot of questions. Fortunately they’re all super self explanatory, so I’m not going to go into them!

Reckless Fury

Good ol’ Reckless Fury. Nothing beats Reckless Fury. This deck has been reigned in to be less of a problem than it was during release, but it still has a few new questions pop up here. Reckless Attitudes constantly puzzles some players, so seeing more answers here is probably ultimately good for the community. I also appreciate the continued use of the “triangle” explanation for adjacent fighters.

Wrack and Ruin

We’re ending this update with another trio of self explanatory questions. Gotta love it!

What Wasn’t Changed

There are a few notable things that aren’t included in these documents that I think are worth pointing out.

No warband rotation. Despite my earlier musings on the impact of warband rotation, we aren’t going to have to see how such a thing would affect the game. The Organised Play: Format Rules document was updated to include all the Spitewood warbands (no surprise there) but it also keeps the warbands with digital rules! This means the Farstriders, Ironsoul’s Condemnors, Brethren of the Bolt, Cyreni’s Razors, Spiteclaw’s Swarm, the Sepulchral Guard, Zondara’s Gravebereakers, and Daggok’s Stab-ladz remain legal for organized play. As mentioned before, all the warbands that were previously in this category but received updated rules in the Spitewood release now require you to use their updated rules, not the old digital ones.

No explicit rules on choosing which boards to use. I think most people are assuming that whoever wins the initial roll off to determine territories is also going to determine which board to use, but it isn’t spelled out anywhere in the rules. Even the updated rulebook document still has the same wording (“The winner picks a side of the game board to be the battlefield”) without a reference to picking the Embergard or Spitewood boards.

No clarification on whether Aqua Ghyranis tokens go on the Embergard board. This feels like it’s intended due to the wording in the Spitewood book about how the “limpid pool side” is used for the new Spitewood boards while the “lifewater vial side” more closely matches the aesthetics of the Embergard board. Why have a side that matches the old board if it’s not intended to be used there? However, I’m not sure that aesthetic flavor text should count as load bearing rules text, so I’d personally like to see this clarified. I’ll continue to play as if the Aqua Ghyranis tokens are meant to be used on each board in the meantime.

No FAQs for Blood of the Bull, Kurnoth’s Heralds, Deadly Synergy, or Hunting Grounds. This isn’t unusual given they were just released and there probably haven’t been too many questions submitted yet (although I’ve certainly sent some in!). Hopefully we’ll get documents for these four releases in a reasonable time frame.

Projected Impact of this Update

This is great. If I had to grade this update, I’d give it something in the B+ or A- range. It directly addressed Zarbag’s Gitz before they released and became A Very Big Problem, especially considering they would have wrecked the World Championship of Warhammer. It gave a gentle tap to Pillage & Plunder, a deck that’s been saturating the environment and I’d be glad to see become less prominent. Exiled Dead wasn’t high up on my problem list, but I was also probably just comparing everything in the Spitewood release to Zarbag’s Gitz so it’s possible my barometer was just so screwed up. Excitingly, the removal of plot restrictions for Nemesis deck building opens up some new options and it’s like Christmas all over again. Likewise, the reversion (and then some!) of the treasure token placement rules will hopefully give that style of play a shot in the arm and let us see more variety in what play styles show up at the table.

The only things that I personally were hoping for were clarification on the boards and Aqua Ghyranis tokens, which I expect we’ll either get shortly in a formal manner or at least as a World Championship of Warhammer ruling (that I am sure will trickle down into the community). Maybe, in my darkest of hearts, I was also hoping for another Restricted card to be added to Blazing Assault or Countdown to Cataclysm because I was hoping it would spur some new deck pairings showing up, but by removing the plot card restriction I think this was achieved in a less restrictive way.

I particularly foresee horde warbands benefiting greatly from the removal of plot restrictions — Thorns of the Briar Queen with Edge of the Knife and Deadly Synergy? Grymwatch with Countdown to Cataclysm and Edge of the Knife? Juicy! Elite aggro might be in for a tougher time, but maybe there’s something that can be done with the extra accuracy from Raging Slayers when paired with another of the plot decks? It’s the time of the mad scientist and everyone needs to start brewing weird builds to test. I know I’m looking forward to seeing how these changes impact my own games!

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