Games Workshop unexpectedly revealed a new dungeon crawler board game on Monday, likely in response to rumors and leaks circulating online – Warhammer Quest Darkwater. With only that title and the box art to go on, not much is known about this mysterious game, but one thing is for certain – Games Workshop has to do a better job with this one that it did with the last Warhammer Quest, 2021’s Cursed City, or fans are going to be pissed.
The cover art for Warhammer Quest: Darkwater suggests that we have a lot of exciting miniatures to look forwards to in this box set. First there’s the party of four heroes: a white-robed sorceress wielding a sword that seems to be streaming elemental water; a Freeguild knight with a baroque golden helm crest; another knight with plate armor and a two-handed sword; and a duardin ranger equipped with paired axes.
They’re facing off against a tide of the servants of Nurgle. There are bestial Pestigor, bloated Putrid Blightkings, a sorcerer or similar tucked into the background, and hulking figures on either side that could be plague ogors, or blighted troggoths, or massive variants on the daemonic plaguebearers.
Now strictly speaking, I’m being presumptive in assuming that GW is going to make great miniatures from those concepts. But it misses so, so rarely these days, and some of its very best minis are designed for standalone products like Warhammer Quest. The sheer quality of figures in Cursed City were a major factor in that game selling out on the day that pre-orders opened.
There’s a chance you’ve forgotten (or weren’t present for) the fever pitch of hype for Cursed City in early 2021. Though initial hopes that it might be a remake of Mordheim were dashed, the Warhammer Community team drummed up incredible enthusiasm for a game that turned out to be just a serviceable dungeon crawler with a drawn out campaign. But then that initial flare of excitement turned into a debacle.
For reasons that at the time weren’t clear, GW scrammed all of its marketing about Cursed City as soon as that first print run sold out, and announced the game wasn’t coming back into print. It took a full year for another run to be produced, and planned expansions were released belatedly and in a strange format, coming with rules and cardboard but missing the miniatures that they introduced to the game – those had already been released for the Soulblight Gravelords Age of Sigmar army.
I’ve written about the probable causes of that bizarre turnaround before. As far as I can tell, it came down to Covid and cardboard. Social distancing measures squashed manufacturing capacity at the factories making the high end cardboard that Games Workshop uses for its most important box sets and for board game inserts. With the launch box set for Warhammer Age of Sigmar third edition due to release mere months after Cursed City, GW had to make hard choices about which to print more copies of, and it picked its flagship fantasy wargame.
COVID is thankfully not the factor it was in 2021, but there are still production limitations on how many copies of Darkwater GW can make. The firm has finite casting machines, finite staff, finite warehouse space, and there’s finite time in the production schedule of firms making cardboard packaging. But the biggest limiting factor on copies of Darkwater is going to be GW’s risk appetite.
The firm has a long institutional memory, and it has never forgotten the mistakes it made in the 1990s, when overproducing foreign language editions of smaller games almost tanked the company. While that kind of catastrophe seems unthinkable today, the firm still aims to make its production runs as close to demand as it possibly can.
If we were talking about a general consumer product, I would caution that consumer buying power has degraded in the last four years, thanks to economic downturn caused by factors like COVID globally, Brexit in the UK, or reciprocal tariffs in the USA. But Games Workshop has seen buoyant sales and rising profits despite all of these factors.
So unless something really whacky has happened in the Warhammer design studio, and the models for Darkwater are inexplicably goof troop bad, demand for this is going to be even higher than Cursed City. Games Workshop, please – stock your warehouse accordingly.
Did you get hold of Cursed City? What did you make of it? Did you play the expansions? Come and chat about it in the official Wargamer Discord community!