I have played a few games of Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower this week.
Silver Tower:
I'm going to break this up into two sections, 1) the miniatures 2) the game because there is enough of each to justify taking them on separately.
The Miniatures.
There are a total of 51 miniatures in this set ranging from the little Brimstone Horrors (4) and familiars (8) all the way up to the massive Ogroid Thaumaturge (1).
As is usual with all Games Workshop products the figures are fantastic, the detail is great. They are relatively easy to assemble and paint up beautifully.
The set comes with 6 heroes. There is a barbarian, a dark elf teleporting warrior, a dwarf berzerker, a Sigmarite priest, a Stormcast Eternal knight and an elven sorceress of some description.
So far we haven't used the Elven "Mistweaver". The rest are great figures, packed with detail on some, all except the barbarian are dynamically sculpted and are really excellent little models. If you have forces that could use these they will fit right in with your Age of Sigmar stuff and my Stormcast knight will be joining the rest of my Stormcats army the next time it is on the table in a couple of weeks.
The Barbarian is the only one that doesn't really do it for me, which is a shame as he is a very well sculpted figure as far as the details go. He is in a standing pose, kind of looks a little bored and checked out. If he had been in more of a fighting stance he would probably be the best figure in the box.
My favourite of the characters is the Tenebrael Shard. He has clawed gauntlets and is trailing chains and some sort of leather skirt thing. He is leaping into battle and is dynamically posed without too much knick-knacks to get in the way of painting him quickly.
The bad guys have a variety of different models. The Grot Scrutlings are weird looking little guys. Someone else said they looked like a goblin with another goblin shoved up their butt, which is pretty apt. They have four legs and two arms and walk like a quadruped. They are pretty fast to paint but have weird spider webs on their sides that require a little more time to work on. With those the models would probably be better I think but they are pretty good as is. You get 2x 4 different poses for 8 total models.
Next up are the horrors. No surprises here really. There are Pink ones, which are the biggest ones. They have a bunch of jewelry on but are other wise naked. They paint up fairly quickly and are nice Pink Horror figures. You get two of these.
The Blue horrors are smaller and there are two poses x 2 for four total figures. These are also nice figures of their type. Both running and dynamically posed. Very little in the way of bits on them so they paint up very quickly.
Then there are the tiniest horrors of all, the Brimstone Horrors. They are adorable! Two little flaming guys on one base. Seriously though, they are nice little sculpts for what they are. They paint up very quickly and these were the second set of figures that I finished.
The familiars are next. Four neat little creepy things that can trail your magic users around and allow them to do all sorts of stuff. There is a fish one, a little dragon thing, a mobile book stand and a moon faced thing, maybe the little brother of the guy from Gwar.
The Tzaangors are pretty neat models. You get six of these in 3 different poses. They are differently armed, one with a great axe, one with two blades and one with a sword and shield. I think I like the great axe guy best.
These guys are my second favourite sculpts in the box. I was really happy to see them finally release some dedicated Tzeentch Beastmen and now they have their own boxed set that you can buy outside of this game. These will provide some variety to your units in Age of Sigmar.
They are neatly posed with well sculpted features and suitably weird looking to make you believe that Tzeentch was heavily involved in their creation. They do have sort of an excessive amount of bling and were some of the hardest non-character models to paint.
The Kairic Accolytes are my favourite models in the set. They have minimal bling. The poses of three of them are fantastic. You get a total of 8 in four different poses. Painting them is a dream and they look great when they are done. These also received a new box set that came out this weekend for Age of Sigmar. I will also be buying that before too much longer.
That brings us to the character bad guys.
We have a Skaven Death Runner, an Ogroid Thaumaturge and the Gaunt Summoner himself.
The Skaven Deathrunner was the biggest surprise to me. I'm not generally a fan of Skaven stuff but I really like this figure. He is supposed to be an assassin and he really does the job. He has throwing weapons and one of them is in his prehensile tail as well as a couple of blades. Cool figure.
The Ogroid Thaumaturge is another of my favourite models, also available separately as of yesterday. He looks like a beast, massive, bulky and powerfully built he really looks ferocious. His big horns stick out of his head from the sides of a most fierce looking face. He looks exactly like what he is supposed to be: an engine of destruction on legs. He doesn't quite come out like that in the game but that is for a later discussion.
The Gaunt Summoner. There are two of these models out now for AoS independently. One on a disc of Tzeentch and then this exact model. This is one of the coolest sorcerer type models I've seen in a while. It not only looks magical and twisted it looks kind of scary and also like it is in agony at the same time. A great horror model and could feature in any number of fantasy games as the evil mastermind.
The Game:
The game itself is a pretty straight forward dungeon crawl. It can be played with 1-4 people playing characters and possibly one more as an ump/playing bad guys.
The idea is that a group of heroes has been dragged into the Silver Tower by one of the nine Gaunt Summoners of Tzeentch. They are sent on a quest to find the broken shards of an amulet that contains the Summoners true name and will each be granted a boon when they find it.
There are several different quests the heroes can go on. To go on a quest you look up the quest you want to go on in the adventure book and it details which tiles and cards to take to assemble the dungeon you will go through. There is typically one big room and that gets shuffled with two other cards and put on the bottom and then you take the other 5 or 6 cards and shuffle them and put them on top of those.
Players take turns doing things with their heroes, whether exploring new rooms, fighting monsters or jumping into bottomless pits.
There are a few little meta game things in the adventures. For example there is one room where you have to stack dice up or your model falls down. Another potion causes the model to become an undead revenant and can't talk unless they use an action die to do so and then they can only say 3 words per dice.
The games earlier this week were pretty quick affairs with only two of us going through it to learn the rules. Today I ran a demo game and we had four players and I was umping and then we had 6 people and one of the players jumped out and umped and I just mostly watched and guided.
They had a blast. There was laughter coming out of that room constantly. The Priest couldn't get it together to do anything until one turn where he went through a room of goblins and killed 5 of them in a single turn.
Unexpected stuff happened and it was all very enjoyable.
I won't really speak much to the mechanisms. There is nothing particularly clever or revolutionary in them. Dice are used to see what you can do and how successful you are at doing it. Players can move around, fight and so forth.
But it was a lot of fun. We all had a good time and there was even a guy who just stood there and watched for most of the game and he seemed to having a lot of fun just watching other people play a board game.
Two of the players left and he was able to join in although he didn't want to at first when offered a spot.
The other neat thing about it is that the game tries to turn the players on each other in little ways here and there, which is also entertaining. In one part the players were allowed to cover up a die with one side showing indicating which player's model they would like to sacrifice to the daemon offering them power for it.
If they put a 5-6 down it was no one. 1-4 was one of character, each one assigned a number. Well three of the players put down 5-6 and other, the Priest, put down a 3 which was the Exalted Deathbringer. It was a little awkward when the dice were revealed. I loved it.
So there was a little understandable bad blood between the Khorne and Sigmar aligned models after that, but everyone took it in good fun as, of course, the Simar player was only doing what he thought was right and "no harm came of it anyway, ha, ha"
Overall:
IF you want the models for AoS this game is pretty much a no brainer. If you are starting a Tzeentch army it is a great set. The Ogroid Thaumaturge and Gaunt summoner will cost you about $65 USD USD just for the two models and then you get a bunch of Kairic Acolytes and Tzaangors and Horrors, worth about $60 USD USD together.
Now it is $150 USD USD total so if that is all you are planning on doing with it it probably isn't worth it, but if you have any other AoS armies that you can use the models for, like Stormcast, Skaven or Fyreslayers then it becomes a lot more viable as the models there would be about $15 USD USD-20 each.
But if you want a nice dungeon hack game, as well as models for AoS it is a real no brainer. The game is a lot of fun, it has some really great looking figures in it and you can use many of them for AoS in addition to this game. I'm pleased with it and we had a very good time playing it today.
It was nice running a demo where I didn't have to cart a ton of figures and terrain down to the store and set up 45 minutes early.
