I have enjoyed building, painting and playing campaigns in all three modern Warhammer Quest games, and decided to undertake a general comparison of the games. It is worth beginning with the advantage that the two fantasy sets have a huge amount of compatibility, being able to transfer heroes and enemies between the two campaigns to add variety, however Blackstone Fortress became the best supported with expansions. If you like the action dice slot mechanic used, then you will likely enjoy playing all of these games.
Theme, Artwork & Books
Sil
ver Tower is a little different to the original Warhammer Quest 1995 title, it is set in a tzeentch tower rather than a dark dungeon, with bold colourful tiles which often have some unique hero interactions built into them. You receive a relatively short rulebook and a separate quest guide from which you read passages as the story unfolds. The lay out of both tower books can occasionally seem a little muddled, but adventure tile cards will reveal which passages to read as you progress. Hammerhal is much more a traditional underground dungeon, a dark and grim theme, you will predominantly encounter khorne and nurgle chaos creatures. The main rulebook comes much thicker with loads of background storyline, plus a nice painting guide is included and is vastly superior to Silver Tower. The rules seem better organised, and each campaign dungeon is set out neatly in the adventure book for a gamesmaster to use. Blackstone Fortress split it’s books up into background, rules, combat and campaign, and are nicely presented and laid out albeit remembering which book you need is a pain. The space station campaign theme and docked ships is really strong in this set, with the fortress changing shape each time you play, and slotting in new encounter cards is well designed. Overall in terms of the supporting books, Shadows over Hammerhal edges it with its larger Cinderfall city theme with its varied districts opens up an expansive world. However in Blackstone Fortress there is a much deeper storyline unfolding over many expansions and as such it had the best support overall.
The Miniatures
Balancing off against the production artwork and background books are the high quality plastic miniatures. It is here that Silver Tower is my favourite, with 6 excellent hero models and a host of varied enemies including grotlings, acolytes, tzangors, skaven deathrunners and the amazing ogroid beast. Hammerhal has a leaner selection of 4 nice heroes and a gryph hound, with enemies comprising khorne bloodreavers, acolytes and the putrid blightkings, but overall it just cannot compete with what Silver Tower offers, being too humanoid focused, although the acolytes in this game are improved miniatures on the Silver Tower ones. Once both sets are painted up, i feel a greater sense of pride when looking at the Silver Tower set with its more unique model builds, but the good news is that models can be used and interchanged between the two games. Blackstone Fortress stands alone for model and setting, and comes with 8 individual heroes and real variety of enemy groups including guardsmen, chaos enemies, mechanical drones and ur-ghul creatures and is a very comprehensive one box package of great models. Overall though the miniatures and setting of Silver Tower edged out Blackstone Fortress for me.
Tiles, Cards & Components
Tiles are very individual to each game and all are really nice in theme and style. Silver Tower are bright and colourful with interactive items located on the tiles, while Hammerhal is darker and more dungeon like in appearance with chaos symbols, skulls and fiery locations. Blackstone Fortress is metallic spaceship related with hex based spaces, and generally dark rooms are interspersed with neat lighting effects. In terms of other components, Silver Tower provided sets of different coloured action dice for players to use and identify with, something that Hammerhal and Blackstone left out to their detriment, but Blackstone counters well with different dice types for combat strength which enhances the play variation, and has additional card decks for encounters and discoveries, and seal-able baggies for saving games. Overall Blackstone Fortress goes that little bit further as a whole package, but Silver Tower has the most interesting tile designs and artwork, and Hammerhal apart from it’s really excellent background book, feels slightly lacking in component quality content compared to the others. However, the most important factor may simply come down to the location theme and art style you prefer.
Gameplay, Campaign & Rules
All three games use the same dice slot allocation mechanic for actions, feature extra destiny dice and renown and are built with the same core gameplay feel. However, there are some key differences which may split opinions. Silver Tower and Blackstone run a fully co-operative approach, with cards and dice generating the adventure, and enemies using artificial intelligence, while Hammerhal offers up a gamesmaster experience, controlling the enemies, revealing hidden secrets, and providing or embellishing the general storyline. I prefer the co-operative approach, but managed to play a Hammerhal campaign as both gamesmaster and hero at the same time keeping some secrets to myself until it was needed. Silver Tower is unique in that each adventure can be scaled for different hero numbers, while Hammerhal and Blackstone largely expect four heroes to participate each game. In campaign terms, Hammerhal has a city to visit between adventures, experiencing encounters, adding to the overall theme, and Blackstone has a space station with docked ships. Hammerhal features a long pre-written multi level dungeon campaign which is well designed but has more limited replay value, while the others randomise room order and encounters to vary repeated adventures. Silver Tower scenarios offer a little more quest variety and storyline and certainly feels better for engaging one off adventures. Each new game released has slightly improved the rule set, Hammerhal benefited with the removal of respite, and added an ability for players to search rooms for hidden items, and Blackstone has the best turn order mechanic, plus much better combat dice and is a slicker design with more challenge. Monster AI is handled by simple table rolling that i feel works better in the two fantasy games as Blackstone requires individual rolling and table examination for every model, which can become tiresome. While Blackstone Fortress is a slightly more polished game overall, Silver Tower is the winner for it’s storyline theme and different player count design.
Expansions
Expansion content is always key to the enjoyment of games like this. White Dwarf magazine made a way to join up the Silver Tower with Hammerhal editions which was a nice touch, and Silver Tower and Hammerhal added card packs so you can expand heroes and monsters yourself. However sadly new campaign storylines and dungeons were never added, and Hammerhal in particular needed new content to keep it fresh. Blackstone Fortress received a lot more design support, the addition of the Dreaded Ambull monster hunt was excellent, plus they expanded into small box enemies such as traitor guard leaders and a nurgle enemy box, and then two larger box expansions with new campaign material. Ultimately Blackstone Fortress has much more official content, should you wish to pay for it, and far exceeds what came with the two fantasy boxes. Silver Tower is a great individual product, and the ability to play with less heroes is very desirable for many groups. Hammerhal could have been amazing, if it had been expanded with a new campaign book or two, but is hampered by a poor decision to drop the line early to enable the release of Blackstone Fortress.
Conclusion
All three games are great to own, being relatively simple designs to learn and play, capturing a dungeon feel with a story and light campaign, albeit not as strategically deep as some other crawlers, they are quick to teach and great fun. They are also some of the most enjoyable modelling game sets around, providing a great hobby experience. Overall Silver Tower and Blackstone Fortress are the better value sets for their model and component content, while Hammerhal has a great background theme it is more of a controlled dungeon master experience, but needs future effort to create your own adventures in the future. Blackstone Fortress has become the fullest set for additional content, with new expansions, a properly expanded storyline, new enemies, magazine content and even an annual, and so has the deepest long term prospects, with its new combat dice, and more range fighting with cover and corridors. However, it is let down by rather repetitive enemy dice rolling, and if you do not want to be sucked into buying costly expansion sets, then Silver Tower shines as it is largely self contained, has storyline events, great models and is scale-able to player numbers. Personally for me i like the fantasy theme and combination of Silver Tower & Hammerhal but theme really is the choice here.
Alternative Options
The original Warhammer Quest (1995) is still the most traditional dungeon crawl featuring creatures such as bats and spiders, enemies such as goblins and orcs, and a roleplaying sandbox approach, with levelling up of characters that has not been beaten since. This older classic has really expensive out of print prices, but it remains a good option to consider, especially as the prices for the newer versions are also increasing as they also now out of print. Whilst the gameplay in this box is more simplistic compared to more modern dungeon crawl games, it remains for many players the definitive random dungeon experience, with a superb role playing book and bestiary, making it still the greatest and most flexible of games with the Warhammer Quest titles. It has a huge amount of official and fan content available and is the most customisable of the series. Games Workshop could re-print this game and just upscale the model quality and it would be a huge best seller.
The newest version of this series was called Cursed City, released in April 2021 and it is a really great box set. It comes with an undead and vampire theme, something that remains so appealing, and it does seem that Games Workshop are expanding the series with new separate themes keeping each set focused around one location setting. Cursed City continues to blend and build on some of the better ideas from the previous ones, using the newer combat dice from Blackstone Fortress, but returns to the group enemy intelligence rolls from the fantasy ones. It has for me the best theme and artwork yet, and the models are amazing, outstripping any of the other sets for its content and variety. Also the game has more mission type options with different types of dungeon crawls, plus encounters that help to change up the game and add storyline as you play. Despite what appeared to great plans, production issues meant it was never as well supported as was planned, with two official expansions called Nightwars and Nemesis concluding the story, and models that need to be purchased separately. That said, there has been some great community support at boardgamegeek, and it terms of its game style, theme, the overall appear of its built and painted set, this became my favourite of the series. A fuller review is available > Cursed City
With Cursed City now a completed product line we wait to see if the quest series is continued in the future, and i would be surprised if it does not continue.