Warhammer Quest Silver Tower: first game

Hey everybody!
While not exactly planned, it’s the second of a two-part game day! Following last week’s first impressions of the new Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower boxed game from Games Workshop, over the weekend I got to play my first game with it, having spent last week building all of the miniatures. So I thought I’d come back here to talk more about the gameplay and kinda build upon last week’s blog.

First of all, as you no doubt know if you’ve read this blog for any great length of time, I’m a very big Warhammer fan. Warhammer fantasy is what got me interested in this universe, and I’m very much enjoying Age of Sigmar right now. So that kinda colours the perspectives here. I also enjoy a good dungeon crawl, so the stars have really aligned on this one!

The game plays pretty straightforward. I described the various phases last time, where you roll five ‘destiny dice’, discard any duplicates, then roll your hero dice and determine how you play your actions on your turn. In addition to the basic actions, each hero has a few abilities that make them feel somewhat unique, though a lot of this does feel like something of a dice-fest.

Combat was interesting to me. I say this because, whether it was purely down to my good fortune in the game or not, but I seemed to have a pretty easy time of things. The Knight-Questor has the capacity to deal a lot of damage in melee, and can pull as many as three enemies towards him to facilitate this (and make up for his otherwise ponderous gait). The Tenebrael Shard (that’s Dark Elf to you and me) has the ability to move anywhere on the board and then double combat damage dealt in the round, and one of his weapons does d3 damage. That was all pretty powerful, and often resulted in no adversary phase because none were left!

The renown track that goes up when certain conditions are met, such as your hero slaughtering enemies, was a nice way to pace the discovery of skills that can do things like increase speed and whatnot, though at times it felt like it was going up extremely slowly, as I kept drawing chamber tiles with no enemies placed on them! I was initially sceptical about the number of miniatures in the game at first – 45 enemies for a game as big as this seemed a little low, but then there is more to this than just killing stuff.

And this is what I liked about the game. There are all manner of different types of tests the adventure book puts you through, one of my favourites being trying to accomplish a number of dice-based tasks within a time limit. That was actually a lot more fun than I’m making it sound!

I must admit to being a little confused by how exactly you’re supposed to go through the whole trials thing – I made the mistake of just setting it up and beginning immediately, without thinking about any kind of campaign play. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a blast, and I really managed to get to grips with the rules and stuff in the game I had, but without going to the adventure book first, I think I ran the risk of actually just having an endless game of exploring the same tiles and killing the same enemies forever.

Though I guess you could argue that’s the entire point of the maddening Silver Tower of Tzeentch!

The miniatures are tremendous quality, and the game really is a lot of fun. There is a but coming, however, something that kept nagging at me while I was playing through the game:

This will only appeal to a very specific type of gamer: a Warhammer fan.

I can’t really think of any other reason why you would buy this. Dungeon crawl games in a fantasy universe of this calibre aren’t exactly ten-a-penny, but there is a whole lot of choice out there for board gamers these days. Descent and D&D Adventure System games are two that instantly leap to mind when I think of this genre and, while Descent uses a DM in the main game, there are official co-op variants available. The games are all very similar in feel and, to an extent, in style, but buying the base game for Descent will set you back £65 MSRP, while the D&D games come at £45 each. Paying £95 MSRP for Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower is only going to happen if you’re already invested in the world, if you’re interested in getting the miniatures to paint (and probably use in other games, notably Age of Sigmar), and likely not because you’re interested in a fantasy dungeon-crawl tabletop game.

I bought this game because I love the Warhammer setting, and have been thinking about using some of the miniatures in Age of Sigmar. The fact that it’s a co-op dungeon crawl is just icing on the cake, really. If you’re looking for a fantasy game with great miniatures that you just want to sit down with friends and play, then unless you’ve got money to throw around (and time to build the miniatures), I would honestly suggest you check some of the other games out.

But if you love Warhammer and are looking for something lighter than the full-on tabletop war game, then Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower might be exactly what you’re looking for!