The new edition of Warhammer Underworlds is a great time to join the game. With a roadmap of releases, smartly revamped rules, new deck design and the four new playstyles, there’s a lot going on.
Organised Play is a particularly popular way to get involved in competitive gaming – though by no means the only one. This might mean top-table tournaments at the World Championships of Warhammer, or it might just be a group of friends throwing dice at a gaming club, but if you’re a group of players looking to crown an overall champion after a few days or weeks of gaming, you might be participating in Organised Play. You can use the preconstructed decks of the Rivals format or the custom-built decks of Nemesis, but for Organised Play, the pool of warbands and decks is restricted. This prevents players from being locked out of a powerful warband or deck which they can’t buy, and helps maintain proper competitive balance.
At launch, there will be 33 warbands in rotation for Organised Play. Twenty of these will be those warbands with physical rules available for purchase: the two in the Embergard boxed set, two yet to be revealed, and 16 existing warbands split across four new Grand Alliance boxes.
The other 13 in the rotation are warbands that were recently available for purchase. If you bought a Warhammer Underworlds warband in the last few months, we want you to be able to use it in Organised Play. While all other previously released warbands are getting free rules to download and use with the new edition, it’s just these 13 which will be usable in Organised Play.
The same goes for Rivals decks: only those decks currently available for purchase will be in rotation. At the start of the edition, there will be six of these: four from Embergard and the two more decks coming shortly after.
Of course, this is only a concern for those hoping to run or play in a tournament or league.
All new warbands and decks released in future will be added to the Organised Play rotation. Eventually, other older warbands will be rereleased with new rules, and the Warhammer Design Studio is looking to bring back as many old warbands as possible.
There will be Organised Play rules for the Rivals and Nemesis formats, available to download as a central source of truth. In addition, there will be a Tournament Companion document intended to help organisers run a successful event.
The Warhammer Design Team is also working on other formats, including one for multiplayer games – expect changes from the current multiplayer format! Next week we’ll be flipping the first feature token in our roadmap, and revealing treasure as we take a look at the next two warbands for the new edition.
