Warhammer Quest was initially released in 1995 as a successor to HeroQuest. Since then there’s been numerous iterations of Warhammer Quest, with the latest landing in 2025: Warhammer Quest: Darkwater.
I should preface this by saying: Darkwater is my first time with any of the Warhammer Quest games. I’ve played extensive HeroQuest but it’s my first time adventuring in Games Workshops’ grimdark fantasy world. I’m also not a big Warhammer person. I’ve dabbled in 40k Kill Team, and I built and painted a 40k starter set about 20 years’ ago; but I know none of the lore. Something about this box appealed to me though. Maybe it’s the price. At £120 you get a lot for your money: 49 miniatures, over 300 cards, 180 tokens, the rulebook, and a gorgeous mapbook that you’ll be using in lieu of a board or map tiles.
Firstly the miniatures. They’re Games Workshop so the quality and moulding are very high quality as you’d expect. Comparing them to other GW minis I have they seem to lack a bit of heft, but I think that’s down to these being push-fit minis. They still require a good bit of assembly even without the glue: you’ll need cutters to get them off the sprues, and a craft knife to trim off the mould lines. You’ve got your 4 starting heroes, plus 3 more that you can unlock as you play, the bosses, and a load of minions. Honestly the minis are worth the cost of entry alone.
Then there’s the box. I’ve seen some complaints that it’s not got much of an insert, and this is true. But the packaging feels pretty premium. You get an array of storage boxes to keep the game’s many cards and tokens, and there’s actually enough space in the box to keep all of the assembled minis if you don’t mind them bouncing around in there.
The structure of the game is a little odd, but also probably the main selling point over other editions of Warhammer Quest. Rather than a series of modular tiles or a gameboard that you overlay with tokens coupled with a questbook, Darkwater comes with a mapbook that you lay out on the table and use as a board. It’s then possible to customise each map with different enemy layouts and tokens. It’s an interesting system, the mapbook is very good quality, and the maps within are well illustrated, if a little bland in some cases. I do question the longevity of it though compared to a cardboard board. I can imagine over multiple plays the pages will see some wear and tear.
As I previously mentioned, there’s no questbook with the game. Darkwater is a campaign game played out over 3 acts. Each act has a deck of cards, and you draw 14 of these cards to form an ‘Act Deck.’ Each game turn, you take 2 of these cards, choose 1, and that’s the encounter you’ll do. It might be a full encounter on the mapbook which typically take around an hour, or it could be a quick minigame where you roll a couple of dice and move on. At the end of each act is a boss, again one of several choices. All in all each act takes around 3-5 hours depending on your path through - so you can easily clear an act of an evening. There’s lots of replayability as each run is unique depending on the cards you choose.
The game is for up to 4 players, although I think it plays best with 2. You always play with 4 heroes regardless of player count, but the starting heroes aren’t very well balanced, and I found in 4 player games that quite often one of two members of the group wouldn’t get to do too much in certain scenarios.
Speaking of the heroes: You’ve got a fighter who can retaliate when he’s hit, a dwarf who can move through blocked hexes (very useful), another fightery class who can reroll one die once per turn, and a support class who can use water to block hexes for enemies and attack from range. The support class sounds really interesting (and the mini is a standout) but in practice their abilities are so situational, and their defence is so low that it’s best to keep them away from combat where possible, especially as you don’t heal fully between encounters.
The way encounters works is simultaneously quite easy (encounters really are quite breezy in Darkwater) but also there’s some needless complexity. You get 3 actions per turn, that are dictated by action cards. Move, attack, and aid. You ‘tap’ a card to use it, but you can tap any card to do any action, the caveat being once you’ve tapped a card you can’t use that card’s action again this turn. It’s interesting in theory, but in reality it means you might tap your aid card to move, then your attack card to attack. But if you miss that attack, you can’t attack again, only move. It leads to frustrating moments and I can’t figure out the thematic reasoning for it. We’ve commonly houseruled that you can just take any 3 actions on your turn, as action economy in Darkwater is low as it is - it’s not uncommon for an encounter to be won or lost on the final turn.
As has become common with campaign games, there’s sealed boxes that you unlock when certain conditions are met. I’m sure there are people that tire of this, but I’m not one of them. I love a locked box in my campaign games, and popping one open the first time you finish an act is massively satisfying. Other than that there’s no legacy elements, you’re free to experience everything this box has to offer over and over again.
Overall, Warhammer Quest Darkwater is a solid dungeon crawler. It’s got more complexity than HeroQuest, but much simpler than something like Gloomhaven. The components are high quality, the campaign experience is satisfying and endlessly replayable, and setup time is low compared to other games in the genre. But there are frustrating moments: characters aren’t well balanced, some encounters and events feel a little too random, and although the cost is reasonable for what’s in the box, if you don’t care about the miniatures the game itself isn’t really that complex.
Scores:
Positives:
- Great quality miniatures and components
- Easy setup and tear-down compared with genre contemporaries
-
Breezy structure - an act can be completed in a night so you’ll actually see the end of a campaign.
Negatives:
- Unbalanced classes can lead to sidelined players at higher player counts
- Not a lot of tactical complexity
-
A lot of RNG involved may put some players off
Overall Rating - 70/100
Artwork - 3
Complexity - 2
Replayability - 4
Interaction -5
Component Quality - 4
