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 Coenus Scaldingus wrote:
Wonder how the prices for the separately available models (released for AoS without the cards) will be affected. They previously remained the same when the Underworlds warbands went up, but either the full range or at least the newer releases may not stay that way for long then.

I could see them just keeping them at the 'with cards' pricing, especially now a lot of people are defending the price increases with, "w-well they're good value if you proxy them as Hero models!!!" which I started reading everywhere once people raised an eyebrow at the price increase.

Why wouldn't you use them as Hero models? The actual units tend to be exceedingly "meh".

Every time the price goes up, a few more people stop buying. It has happened before where GW realized they pushed things too far and had to step back. Every several years they forget and we go through the whole thing again.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Every time the price goes up, a few more people stop buying. It has happened before where GW realized they pushed things too far and had to step back. Every several years they forget and we go through the whole thing again.

Or they just keep pushing it as far as they can, take the losses, and steps back once they've hit that limit...

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Every time the price goes up, a few more people stop buying. It has happened before where GW realized they pushed things too far and had to step back. Every several years they forget and we go through the whole thing again.

Well, pause, perhaps. And not for very long. I can't think of many (any?) cases where they actually walked prices back.

 frankelee wrote:
Yeah, it's definitely a game where you need to purchase more than one warband, unlike say Necromunda or Warcry. You can get by with less, but your experience will be increasingly diminished, and as that experience gets diminished more players drop out. They also get plenty of sales from people who just want the models for AoS, or anything else, but if they hit a rough patch where the releases don't wow those model collectors, and they've choked out a significant amount of their player-base, then the execs are going to see plummeting sales and declare the product line dead.

This is what I’m afraid of. Underworlds is my favorite game. Before the pandemic hit we were building a nice little game group meeting every week and playing in tournaments. Many of those players were quite casual fans of GW, they’re going to come back and see a price rise of 43% on the product line (in the same time period our starters have gone from $75 to $100).
Our local store still has Direchasm coins sitting on the shelf (afaik only 1490 of those were produced worldwide). It’s not hard to imagine a situation where half our players are already priced out and GW’s management ends up binning the game for poor sales. I’ll be heartbroken if that happens because our weekly meet ups used to be one of the highlights of my week.

Voss wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Every time the price goes up, a few more people stop buying. It has happened before where GW realized they pushed things too far and had to step back. Every several years they forget and we go through the whole thing again.

Well, pause, perhaps. And not for very long. I can't think of many (any?) cases where they actually walked prices back.

They've always got their ways of evolving. After the DISASTROUS starting AoS releases came out ($33 for a slightly fancier Chaos Knight, $10+ for a naked dwarf) they just came out with more factions that were priced within what the market found acceptable, used the old WFB sculpts more, and managed to get some of that unselling stock of their hands with the Start Collecting kits. Necromunda came out split up into so predatory a style it would make Twitch girls cringe, so they spun it off as more of a high-end product with lots of Forge World releases and that ginormous $300 box set (not that those sold well, but it seemed like an idea to try). When their fancy new industrial 40K terrain was priced at around $500 to properly outfit a board, within a year they were repackaging that stuff into Kill Zone boxes and Sacristan Forgeshrines at around 50% off.

It could be Underworlds has fallen in popularity a lot since Shadespire, on the global scale, and they're just draining it for all it's worth now. I get the feeling their model is, once you've lost the iffy half of consumers, then you've only got the more dedicated half remaining, and they'll put up with significantly higher prices, because they're more dedicated. So you push the limits, the game eventually dies, and you come out with a new game.

 frankelee wrote:

It could be Underworlds has fallen in popularity a lot since Shadespire, on the global scale, and they're just draining it for all it's worth now. I get the feeling their model is, once you've lost the iffy half of consumers, then you've only got the more dedicated half remaining, and they'll put up with significantly higher prices, because they're more dedicated. So you push the limits, the game eventually dies, and you come out with a new game.

I believe every Underworlds event at Warhammer World proved more popular than the last one and a lot more places around my end were running dedicated Underworlds nights and tournaments, something I never saw prior to Beastgrave. Hell, I'd heard even some GW stores were running stuff for it, when to my understanding they pretty much never touch non-40k/AoS stuff for more than launch week.

I don't think it's the popularity of the game waning, I think GW just saw their profits skyrocket despite of (or perhaps because of) the Covid pandemic and figured that, if they could sell more stuff than ever IMMEDIATELY after a price hike (I think it came around April?) then they'd be willing to pay even more. One needs only look at the price of things like the Mega-Gargant, Lumineth and Primaris stuff - and it regularly going Temporarily Out Of Stock - to see why a GW exec would say, "Just crank it higher, they'll pay it lol."

 Kanluwen wrote:
Why wouldn't you use them as Hero models? The actual units tend to be exceedingly "meh".

Well yeah, my point was more that the price increase on Underworlds stuff tends to be defended as, "you can proxy them as Heroes, therefore Underworlds stuff is still great value even with [every] price increase!" ignoring that not every warband is suitable for that (Grymwatch) and that most people probably already have the 'proper' AoS model to represent it, making it redundant.

Voss wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Every time the price goes up, a few more people stop buying. It has happened before where GW realized they pushed things too far and had to step back. Every several years they forget and we go through the whole thing again.

Well, pause, perhaps. And not for very long. I can't think of many (any?) cases where they actually walked prices back.

There's a couple of 'subtle' cases such as the Magmadroth and I think the Carnosaur where they cost the same as the initial Start Collecting boxes (prior to them being a thing) and just gave you the whole SC if you ordered one.

Based off this week's preorder video, are they going to show off one of the savage orruks? I don't know if they mean by "upcoming warband", they're just going to go over mechanics of the seraphon or soulblights, or actually show off something we haven't seen before

 GaroRobe wrote:
Based off this week's preorder video, are they going to show off one of the savage orruks? I don't know if they mean by "upcoming warband", they're just going to go over mechanics of the seraphon or soulblights, or actually show off something we haven't seen before

Have they previewed the Lizardmen cards/playstyle yet? If not I'd guess them.

 Arbitrator wrote:

Voss wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Every time the price goes up, a few more people stop buying. It has happened before where GW realized they pushed things too far and had to step back. Every several years they forget and we go through the whole thing again.

Well, pause, perhaps. And not for very long. I can't think of many (any?) cases where they actually walked prices back.

There's a couple of 'subtle' cases such as the Magmadroth and I think the Carnosaur where they cost the same as the initial Start Collecting boxes (prior to them being a thing) and just gave you the whole SC if you ordered one.

Originally the Magmadroth was $110, which then then bundled with Vulkite Berzerkers ($60) into a SC box for $85. Literally half price overall, and a ~25% price cut for the Magmadroth even if one just threw out the infantry it now comes with. Other models, like you said, were reboxed to be SC boxes at the same price but with a bunch of extra miniatures. They also reboxed a number of early AoS releases to be twice the models per box but only 50% higher in price. And more importantly the new kits they were releasing suddenly had lower prices than equivalents from the previous year.

The prices of GW miniatures are a weird combination of "plastic value" and "in-game value" thats why you can buy a single Hero for about 60% of the price of a whole unit.
So for me the only way to decide if something is cheap or not is to compare them to similar products. And thats why I consider the "Start Collecting!" pretty cheap.
With the WU warbands we usually get a little less than half the miniatures of the AOS unit box for a little more that half the price. Add the cards and I guess even the prices for season 4 are kinda ok.
Whats annoying is that they raise the prices every year just because they are greedy.

WU at this point is a game like any online videogame that releases new characters.
They see what it costs to create an new warband and they decided on a price based on that cost.
So that price should not change unless something changes in the production or the product. I believe they did add more cards in Season 3 so that raise is kinda understandable but other than that i dont see a reason that explains the raises.

If they continue like this instead of 2 season 5 warbands you can get 3 season 1 warbands for the same price (of course they dont sell them anymore) and for many people I believe that means they are gonna skip more warbands.

In AOS they can sell the same miniatures in all kind of different boxes but the only thing they can do in WU is to sell all the season warbands together with a price cut but that is only good if you want to buy all the warbands of the season, so i dont see the prices getting any lower.

 Arbitrator wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'm not really familiar with the game, isn't a Warband box basically all you need to play the game, or is there an expectation of expanding beyond that?

Technically yes, but in practise it's one of the only games GW actually pushes as a competitive game (as opposed to everything else where they'd really, really, really prefer you just do narrative so they don't have to think too hard about writing the rules). It's often described as a 'LCG with models' and it's not that big of an exaggeration, as cards useable by every warband are included in every new expansion, therefore making them lucrative for those who play the game with a bigger circle than two of their friends.

Previously if you did want to keep up with Da Meta it wasn't too bad, because £17-20 every month or two (originally warbands came out in pairs every quarter) isn't bad by GW standards. The problem now is that price is being cranked up literally every year and those 'little' price increases add up (consider that in three years it's now £8 more expensive per warband, so you're looking at about £48 increase versus Shadespire). If this were 40k where the paypiggies will cough up money for literally anything and still have millions of players that'd be fine, but Underworlds is one of those games GW can very easily tank by their own ineptitude when the newblood dries up and the existing players get disenfranchised.

Ah okay, I didn't realise it was basically a card game, figured it was just a skirmish game.

So do people in general like and play the game, or more just buy it for the models?

It's mostly a card game with minis as markers, which is something I don't really care about, so when I buy them is exclusively for the minis.

Which means that I've been buying a lot less as the price rises.

 Albertorius wrote:
It's mostly a card game with minis as markers, which is something I don't really care about, so when I buy them is exclusively for the minis.

I disagree vehemently with this. There is a collectible aspect to the cards, yes, but the game isn't any less a miniature game than 40k is where you sometimes have to buy a new book to get more stratagems for your faction too. And the decks have been getting more coherent with time, I barely touched them last season.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Arbitrator wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I'm not really familiar with the game, isn't a Warband box basically all you need to play the game, or is there an expectation of expanding beyond that?

Technically yes, but in practise it's one of the only games GW actually pushes as a competitive game (as opposed to everything else where they'd really, really, really prefer you just do narrative so they don't have to think too hard about writing the rules). It's often described as a 'LCG with models' and it's not that big of an exaggeration, as cards useable by every warband are included in every new expansion, therefore making them lucrative for those who play the game with a bigger circle than two of their friends.

Previously if you did want to keep up with Da Meta it wasn't too bad, because £17-20 every month or two (originally warbands came out in pairs every quarter) isn't bad by GW standards. The problem now is that price is being cranked up literally every year and those 'little' price increases add up (consider that in three years it's now £8 more expensive per warband, so you're looking at about £48 increase versus Shadespire). If this were 40k where the paypiggies will cough up money for literally anything and still have millions of players that'd be fine, but Underworlds is one of those games GW can very easily tank by their own ineptitude when the newblood dries up and the existing players get disenfranchised.

Ah okay, I didn't realise it was basically a card game, figured it was just a skirmish game.

So do people in general like and play the game, or more just buy it for the models?

I really like the game from the little I’ve played (mostly with my brother or friends, who aren’t into wargaming). It’s quite easy to pick up and fast paced, but fairly deep tactically I think. It’s pretty well received generally too, as far as I know.

I don’t think calling it a card game is overly fair either. The models play a big part. The cards are more to customise your models and for what objectives you’re trying to score. You can’t play it without the models or anything like that, and the models are doing most of the work in the game.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Albertorius wrote:
It's mostly a card game with minis as markers, which is something I don't really care about, so when I buy them is exclusively for the minis.

I disagree vehemently with this. There is a collectible aspect to the cards, yes, but the game isn't any less a miniature game than 40k is where you sometimes have to buy a new book to get more stratagems for your faction too. And the decks have been getting more coherent with time, I barely touched them last season.

Deck building and card using was the most important part of it, in the games I played, by a significant margin. But of course, YMMV.

You can't win with a bad deck but you can't win with bad tactics on the board either - choosing who to activate when and what to do with them, target priority, deployment etc are all just as important. It's a really elegant little game.

It's a combination. So its has the good of both worlds and the bad of both worlds. If you dont like one of the two you probably wont like it. But if you like both like me it's really good.
You have the miniatures with their own stats (like any other miniature game(although you cant customize them at all)), but you also have the cards to upgrade your fighters (like magic the gathering and other card games) and to score victory points (cant think of a game that has this).

If you are playing for fun you can just but a warband's box and start playing with it. For competitive games I believe you need to make your own deck with cards from other boxes to have better/different strategy.

Technically you could replace the minis with cardboard standees or even tokens but that would look really dumb.
But the board position is just as important as your hand of cards so it’s more like a deck building board game. Except you prebuild your deck like a TCG/LCG.

A living card board game.

I guess it depends on the warband as to whether they’d be bought just for the models.
Vampires for instance will be, great character models.
Some are just line troops so not so much.

I always prescribe to the buy the warbands I like the look of most. Then playability second, but I don’t do tournaments.
So we still use all season universal cards (just minus the few unusables), it’s not exactly unbalanced - but I see why for tournament play you’d need to streamline it and such

It's definitely a card based game with miniatures. Before the pandemic, it was thr game i played most regularly and attended events for. I'd always prefer an underworlds tournament over any other game. The models are important, as you need to tell which fighter is which, but painting isn't required and the models are all pushfit. I've bought a warband on release day, and then played them in a tournament shortly afterwards in the same day.

As far as I'm aware, it's fair to say the miniatures do play a limited role compared to typical wargames, in that you for instance don't need them to be there to check line-of-sight from or to them, so their physical presence or attributes are largely irrelevant aside from looking nice and being more clearly recognizable than a flat token.

Customization of the models is an interesting one. On the one hand, they're supposed to be specific characters that should be recognizable as such, and they have no options in terms of wargear etcetera. Precisely because they have no options, however, you are presumably free to convert them a fair bit: there can be no confusion about someone having more or less armour or a sword instead of a hammer, as their stats and rules are fixed anyway, so it's purely for aesthetics. As long as the various warband members are recognizable, anything goes (presumably? I'm only interested in the range for the models, which are largely great and very useful for Mordheim and the likes). I've definitely seen some nicely converted warbands around.

All miniatures are just markers. You could play 40k, warmachine, or napoleonics with paper cutouts or blank bases and they'd work just as well (besides the occasional poorly thought out los rule where an antennae is targetable). It wouldn't look as nice, obviously, and that would turn a good chunk of people away, but it wouldn't change the game.

I'd say Underworlds has more movement based tactical considerations than 40k does (granted, that's not a crazy high bar), if that's what you're looking for in a game. The cards are important, as they're the way you customize the warbands, both for what they can do and how you win, but it's not really any different from writing a list and choosing a game plan (or objectives) in another game. Minus the random nature of drawing, of course, but you can mitigate that a bit.

As for needing specific cards, GW has high-ish res pics of each card on their deck builder. Just print out the ones you want and drop them in the appropriate sleeves. I do that, and I own almost everything, as I just don't want to bother deconstructing and resleeving a bunch of decks every time I want to bring out a different warband.

It is interesting to hear miniature gamers characterizing Underworlds. It is boardgame, as there is no free flowing movement and the miniatures are superfluous (as others have mentioned, a token would be just as effective).

Yet, it is specifically a tactical arena combat game and is one of many games in this subset of boardgames. For example, there are Dungeon Command, Aristeia!, Wildlands, Puppet Wars, Blitz Bowl, Godtear and several others (including a subset of tactical arena focused on the MOBA genre - see https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/103860/reviewing-moba-series). Look them up on Boardgamegeek.com if you're curious.

And Underworlds is not the first one in this genre of boardgames to focus heavily on card usage. Dungeon Command from 2012 was the first to include deck building, and it also had warband building instead of fixed models for a faction. Aristeia! also allowed team building and uses a small deck of cards that depends on the models selected for one's team, yet the cards are not as dominant. Wildlands provides an assymetric deck for each faction (no deck building), but here the deck is the engine that allows one to operate one's models, both movement and combat.

In the end, all of these games are focused on maneuvering a small team of individual models on a limited, grid board. Except for Wildlands, these games could function without their deck of cards (though Underworlds would be hamstrung particularly from the absence of the Objective deck, which is WU's unique contribution to this style of boardgames).

callidusx3 wrote:
It is interesting to hear miniature gamers characterizing Underworlds. It is boardgame, as there is no free flowing movement and the miniatures are superfluous (as others have mentioned, a token would be just as effective).

Yet, it is specifically a tactical arena combat game and is one of many games in this subset of boardgames. For example, there are Dungeon Command, Aristeia!, Wildlands, Puppet Wars, Blitz Bowl, Godtear and several others (including a subset of tactical arena focused on the MOBA genre - see https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/103860/reviewing-moba-series). Look them up on Boardgamegeek.com if you're curious.

And Underworlds is not the first one in this genre of boardgames to focus heavily on card usage. Dungeon Command from 2012 was the first to include deck building, and it also had warband building instead of fixed models for a faction. Aristeia! also allowed team building and uses a small deck of cards that depends on the models selected for one's team, yet the cards are not as dominant. Wildlands provides an assymetric deck for each faction (no deck building), but here the deck is the engine that allows one to operate one's models, both movement and combat.

In the end, all of these games are focused on maneuvering a small team of individual models on a limited, grid board. Except for Wildlands, these games could function without their deck of cards (though Underworlds would be hamstrung particularly from the absence of the Objective deck, which is WU's unique contribution to this style of boardgames).

By these standards Battletech is a board game, so I think we can stop splitting hairs.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

callidusx3 wrote:
It is interesting to hear miniature gamers characterizing Underworlds. It is boardgame, as there is no free flowing movement and the miniatures are superfluous (as others have mentioned, a token would be just as effective).

Yet, it is specifically a tactical arena combat game and is one of many games in this subset of boardgames. For example, there are Dungeon Command, Aristeia!, Wildlands, Puppet Wars, Blitz Bowl, Godtear and several others (including a subset of tactical arena focused on the MOBA genre - see https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/103860/reviewing-moba-series). Look them up on Boardgamegeek.com if you're curious.

And Underworlds is not the first one in this genre of boardgames to focus heavily on card usage. Dungeon Command from 2012 was the first to include deck building, and it also had warband building instead of fixed models for a faction. Aristeia! also allowed team building and uses a small deck of cards that depends on the models selected for one's team, yet the cards are not as dominant. Wildlands provides an assymetric deck for each faction (no deck building), but here the deck is the engine that allows one to operate one's models, both movement and combat.

In the end, all of these games are focused on maneuvering a small team of individual models on a limited, grid board. Except for Wildlands, these games could function without their deck of cards (though Underworlds would be hamstrung particularly from the absence of the Objective deck, which is WU's unique contribution to this style of boardgames).

By these standards Battletech is a board game, so I think we can stop splitting hairs.

I mean... Battletech is a boardgame. Among a lot of other things, but the core game is, very much, a board game. And I say this as a fan of it.

As to Underworlds, be that it may be, I did not care at all about the cardplay and deckbuilding aspect, whereas I did not have any problem with Aristeia (which, to me, didn't feel like a cars game), so, again, YMMV.

 Mr_Rose wrote:
Technically you could replace the minis with cardboard standees or even tokens but that would look really dumb.

Also true for any miniature game for that matter.

Heck the cards could be replaced with hand-written pieces of paper saying what they do.

Mr_Rose does raise an interesting point, in that Underworlds is a (seemingly pretty successful) mash up for board games, TCG and TTG.

As a product, it was a cunning move to target the centre of the hobby gaming Venn diagram. Pretty enough models for those into that, whilst being low in enough in number not to daunt the other constituents.

I feel like I've heard every possible iteration of the "is this a miniatures game/is this is a miniature or token" debate on this site alone, not to mention every other tabletop forum. And people often come to exact opposite conclusions using the exact same evidence. I don't know that there's much to the debate. It is semantics.

The more important question is, are the contents worth the price, all included? $40 for four models and two packs worth of cards is definitely pushing it. I don't really agree with the idea that just needing to purchase one thing (like one Necromunda gang) means that you should pay a high price for it, though that definitely has leeched into the community as a reasonable idea. I've had people tell me some miniature games with terrible price-per-mini were still excellent value because you only needed to invest $250 or so to have a full army, and be able to play. But if I ask those people if they'd like to buy my old set of gently-used dominoes for $250 and get literally everything they'll ever need to play they no longer seem to believe their own argument.

I think over-paying for one thing is much easier than over-paying for four or five things though. And so it does feel like GW is playing dangerously with the game's future.