All is Shadow– A meaty three-glory objective card that scores when all your fighters are in enemy territory, and two or more are skulking in a Cover Hex or an Edge Hex. Beneath the rulebook and the assembly guide, safely sealed away in their own plastic shrink-wrap, are the two folding game boards that come with the set. We’ll look at these in more details in a few moments. Protect your Warhammer Underworlds cards in the depths of the Gnarlwood from blood, meat trees, and spilt tea with these sleeves. This set includes 15 sleeves for your Objective cards and 30 sleeves for your Power cards – perfect for whether you’re playing Rivals, Nemesis , or Championship format.* In the image below, the hex-shaped counters on the left are either gloom hex tokens, double-sided scatter tokens, or double-sided feature tokens. The silver and gold tokens in the top centre are glory point tokens. The square tokens on the right are Move/Charge tokens and Guard/Stagger tokens. The red counters and counters with gemstones on them are wound/generic counters. The little tokens with the Underworlds logo on them are activation tokens, and the final pile in the bottom-right corner are Raise tokens. The leader of this 4 model warband is Shroud Queen Slythael. She wears a faceless mask and seems to float on her cloak while it is turning to smoke, an impressive feat of miniatures design. Be careful with her staff though, this is one of the thinnest pieces of plastic I’ve ever seen. The other Shroudblades are armed with a mixture of blades and a crossbow pistol, which should make for plenty of gameplay options.

Rumours abound of powerful relics to be found in the ever-shifting labyrinth known as the Nethermaze, located in the deepest layers of Harrowdeep. At Morathi-Khaine’s command, the penumbral Shadeborn venture into the darkness to find remnants of the shadow magic used to construct it – but little do they know the devious Clans Eshin have their own schemes afoot.

It seems like it was only a few weeks ago I was reviewing Harrowdeep, the last Underworlds set that also heralded a new season of the game. Now, we enter Season 6 of Underworlds with another collection of new miniatures, new cards, and new rules. Lizzie’s fate was sealed when two of her remaining sighters – Sylarc and Valyssa – were both killed leaving only the glaive-and-dagger-wielding Drusylla Vyserax in the centre of the battlefield. Half way through the final Round, Lizzie had all but conceded. We played out the rest of the rolls and activations for the sake of completion, but she put her hands up and said that there was no way she could win. Chum the Waters– A two-glory Objective that scores in an End Phase if your opponent has one or more wounded Fighters on a feature token Meanwhile, sports fans can enjoy Blitz Bowl Ultimate Edition , a smaller six-a-side version of Blood Bowl. Below even Harrowdeep’s ocean-floor dungeon, the titular Nethermaze is a vast labyrinth, wrought by shadow demons from the moon, intended to lure in mortal souls for them to eat. Atits core (supposedly) is a realmgate portal that’ll take us to freedom – but where, who knows?

Regular readers will know that Lizzie absolutely hammered me when we had a go with the Harrowdeep set (and I’m still not over that useless bird the Stormcasts have on their side), so I’ve got a score to settle this time around. Set Up The Warhammer Underworlds: Nethermaze box comes with a pair of game boards printed to look like the swirling, spooky underwater depths that reside deep beneath Harrowdeep. The Warhammer Vault continues to grow with the addition of the lore sections from Imperial Armour: The Badab War – Part Two and White Dwarf issue 477. Finally, we have 36 Grand Alliance cards (these are the yellow ones second from the right). Again, these include gambits, objectives, and upgrades, just like the Universal cards did, but these ones can only be used by warbands belonging to a particular Grand Alliance. By the time I’d had my final activation and both of us had passed in the Power phase (the part of the turn where each player plays their cards), only one glory point had been scored – and that was by the Skaven. Lizzie and I both discarded the majority of our hands – both of us were concerned we weren’t going to be able to use the Upgrades we had and complete the Objectives looking at how the battle was going – and drew new cards. Round 2For new folks, however, the maze is a little more shadowy. A little more nether. Jumping intothis long-running, competitive game isno simpletask,with successive seasons adding new dice, new tokens, new rules, new phases, hundreds of new cards, and (naturally) lots of new warbandsinto an ever-larger morass of options.