Unnecessary randomness - my 3 pain points of Underworlds

Greetings! Today I wanted to talk about a few pain points that I’ve identified in Warhammer Underworlds. Those are the things that vary in their severity, but they can negatively impact the game experience. However, all of them are the things that could be addressed, and this, most likely, would benefit the overall gaming experience.

It is not a secret that Warhammer Underworlds is a game where randomness plays a significant role. We’re dealing with it almost in every aspect of the game. There are only a handful of actions you can take that don’t involve a random element. Those are: placing feature tokens (including lethal hexes) on the map, placing your fighters, making a move action, making a guard action, and taking an official pass action. Any other activity has a random element to it. Making an attack means you have to roll the dice. Drawing any card is an act of getting a random piece from an available pool. Finding who gets to place boards first is done via random roll-off etc. Overall, this is not a bad thing - an element of randomness adds flavor to the game. And a fair portion of the game is designed to help deal with some of the random factors. Those are the things like Innate, additional dice, re-rolls, card draw, etc. They're the mechanics that are considered valuable and often taken.

But are there cases where we’re simply having too much of that randomness? In my opinion - yes. Some areas are incredibly impactful to the game, and they are entirely random. What’s more important, there are no ways of helping your odds of success or protect you from terrible luck. And those are the pain points I would like to discuss today.

Pain point #1: boards roll-off

The way boards are placed can have a significant impact on the game. I think we all know this for a fact. So... having the ability to decide how the battlefield will be shaped is highly important. For example, objective warbands are likely to want to have 3 feature tokens in secure places, while aggressive ones will want to ensure easy access to their enemies. Right now, this is being decided by a roll-off. In a best-of-one environment, this is fair - both players have equal chances to win the roll-off. And since those are usually casual games, there’s no real issue - nor space to correct it, to be fair. However, things change in a best-of-three format. Losing boards twice, or even three times, might cost you the game. Having to fight an uphill battle many times in a row because of a roll-off in this format hardly seems fair. After all Bo3 format has been designed to reduce the impact of randomness and give a more fair read on who’s currently the better player in a given matchup. But having one player be in an advantageous position before the game even starts feels at odds with this idea. Imagine playing Hold 3 warband and being denied feature tokens every time in your match. Can you win the game? Yes. Will it be much harder than it could be? Definitely yes.

How can we address this? The most obvious idea is to let the players roll-off in the first game. The winner gets to decide who gets to place boards first. Then in the second game player that lost the roll-off will get to decide on boards. If the match goes to game three, there are two options: 

• the player who has won the roll-off in game one gets the priority again; 

• players do the roll-off again to decide who gets to make the call with the boards.

Option number one is more controlled, but it does give a lot more benefit to the winner of that initial roll-off. And that’s probably not something we would like to happen if we want a more fair and balanced match. Option number two is more random, but I feel like it’s the correct one to go for - both players got to make the call on how the battlefield will be looking like. If none of them managed to best their opponent, they’d get to roll a dice for that last priority call. That way, you’ll not find yourself in a situation where you’ve lost all the priorities, and at the same time, the first roll-off will not be as impactful. The player who won it will not play with the sense of security that if things go south in game 2, he will have an advantage going into game 3.

Pain Point #2: Do-overs

Drawing your objectives and power cards is an act that is entirely random and is so vital that it does decide how your game will be looking like. It is also an act that has one built-in protection mechanism: the do-over rule. The trouble is that do-overs are so prohibitive in the cost that opting for them is likely to cost you the game.

Having to discard your power hand can be painful, but it is the less impactful element. Having to do the same with your objectives might mean that you’ll not be able to win with your opponent - even if you’ve had a great game overall - because your glory ceiling was too low in comparison to your opponent. This mechanic is also a significant factor in the diminished value of the third end phase objectives. Drawing your 3rd end phase card in your starting hand means you’re effectively playing with only two objectives in your hand. You can still win, but your ability to go through your objective deck is significantly impacted. Your potential to score multiple cards is reduced, and it’s much easier to block your hand with end-phase objectives. 

You could skip the do-over and spend an activation to drop that 3rd end phase card, in theory. In practice, we’re getting an effect similar to do-over. We’re losing the ability to score our big scoring card at the added cost of losing one of the activations. In return, we get to retain 2 other objectives and hopefully keep our glory ceiling high enough to stay relevant in the game. It’s always a tough choice to make, and no matter the option, your game just got more complicated before you even got to place your models on the board.

How can this be addressed? The first thing is to try building resilient decks. It is something we’re all doing. The easier your objectives are, the less likely it is that you’ll need to go for a do-over. Does it always work? No. Is it good for the game? Not really. It kills the innovation, and some potentially fun decks are not going beyond the draft stage because they’re too risky in terms of your opening hand.

The best way to help in this department would be to alter do-over rules. The critical thing would be to avoid having to discard your hand and instead have those cards go back into the objective deck. Have it being re-shuffled and then draw again. Some costs for doing so might be appropriate. It’s not uncommon to add the cost to mulligans in other games, and I think it’s reasonable to keep them as a last-resort option rather than a tool for fishing for a perfect hand. Revealing your hand to the opponent, losing an activation, playing with one objective face down until the end phase... or things like that could be attractive options to consider. The positive impact is that you’re not auto-losing your game on a terrible draw. And that would be a massive quality of life upgrade to the game.

Pain Point #3: Initiative Roll-offs

This one is for sure the least painful out of the three. But it’s also the one that annoys me most often, as I’ve got the tendency to chain-loose those roll-offs. In general, I don’t like how the game gets interrupted at the start of every round. Not knowing who will go next interrupts the planning of your final moves in the previous round. You don’t know if you’ll get to go first; you won’t know if you’ll get to play your ploys before you are forced to make an activation. How often you've had a clutch game state, and that initiative roll-off was decisive for the game? Not to mention that losing the roll 3 times in a row does suck.

Instead, I would prefer a solution similar to board roll-offs. If Player A had an initiative in round 1, then Player B will have it in round 2. Round 3 can be either given back to Player A or rolled for. This way, the game is a little bit less random. And you get to pre-plan a bit more of your game coming from round 1 to round 2.

Again, this is probably the least impactful of the three, but I feel like those roll-offs have been added here needlessly. They do add to the excitement in many situations, but at the same time, if you’re on a bad luck streak, they can simply add to your frustration. And the game could be better without them.

So… this is it! What are your thoughts on this topic, guys? Do you feel those things I’ve highlighted are real issues? Is there anything else you consider being harmful to the game? Do you have some other ideas on how to fix those things? Let me know!