The newest Warhammer Quest set from 2021 was Cursed City, the fourth in the new series of branded core games each with a different theme. The setting is an undead city where Radukar the Wolf, initially the saviour of the citadel, has now succumbed to the evil and surrounded himself with undead fiends and creatures. Local residents have been turned into vampires or zombies and the city now needs savings by your band of heroes.
This new quest game is built off the same core mechanics as the previous ones, largely taking the better ideas within these other sets. While the dice allocation system and destiny dice remains at the core of the system, over time there have been minor improvements including a turn order activation track which you can manipulate, and a new set of combat dice which appeared in Blackstone Fortress. Heroes and enemy cards are double sided with an upgraded version accessed by becoming inspired or for enemies as night sets in, and enemy groups also come with the addition of leaders or champions. The tactical game elements are light, so this is not going to be a really deep thinking experience, as this game aims more at the fun and easy to play side of things, but this does have a number of different mission types for additional variety.
The artwork style of the game is impressive all round, and the models rank as my favourite set they have done, with many excellent unique hero characters and different undead style enemies. The tiles are a mixture of outside city flagstones and indoor castle style rooms, which adds to the mission variety, and are nicely detailed. The gameplay mixes up three different mission types, with scavenge, hunt and chase scenarios, sometimes using pre-set maps and others with more random exploration, which is great news for variety. Each mission you complete affects the cities peril and fear status which you need to keep in balance.
Heroes will have some levelling up over time, which is an advantage over Silver Tower and Shadows over Hammerhal, and with each new level a skill is gained and a decapitation pre-set mission is unlocked to take down one of the main city bosses. It is worth noting that this core box has a proper expedition deck to represent the tiles, meaning that you could create a random dungeon crawl and even use elements of the original 1995 edition to cross over rulesets between the games.
In terms of a Blackstone Fortress comparison, Cursed City has improvements. Firstly it returns to group enemy activation rather than individual models, and its tables are found on the front of the enemy card, thus removing one of the biggest downside of the excessive dice rolling and table look ups. Then there are crises encounters that occur during your main campaign, rather than being added between combat adventures, which makes the whole integration much smoother, and brings some storyline and surprises to the quest you are on. Thirdly whilst there is a grind element to both games, Cursed City has character levelling up to unlock new boss fights, and the game enemy spawns scale up accordingly. Blackstone Fortress offers up another unique theme and a more skirmish style map with ranged combat and terrain cover.
Whilst this game, like Blackstone Fortress, does have too much grind in the original rules, it is not hard to skip your way through to quicker boss fights, which is where the game ultimately shines the most, and this more than suffices for the number of times i play it.
This particular edition of Warhammer Quest had many production issues and maybe never quite held up to its huge expansion potential, gaining two additonal boxes with storyline content, and some White Dwarf missions. Despite this, the witch hunter theme, models and gameplay improvements lead this to become my favourite of the series to keep expanding. My own painting journey of the core set > Cursed City Painting Journey
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Expansions
Related expansions to this game were cut rather short by Games Workshop due to production issues and there was never any real White Dwarf magazine support either which is disappointing (my additions highlighted green = own, blue = part owned, red = not purchased) :
Novel with New Character
At launch there was a Cursed City novel set within the city and it came with a unique Battlemage Hero card, not available elsewhere.
Nightwars
An official Games Workshop expansion is a vampire campaign which focuses on Lady Annika, Kritza the Rat Prince and the Vampire Lord. There will also be support for Radukar the Beast, fell bats and grave guardians. A decision was made to release this box with no miniatures, and whilst this means collecting everything is going to be pretty expensive, it does mean adding this story content is initially cheaper, and of course there are many ways to proxy models.
Nemesis
A second official Games Workshop expansion brings a confrontation with some original characters plus a wight king, necromancer, grave guardians, dire wolves and vargheists. This box again does not contain any miniatures, which are available as separate purchases, and brings a quick end to the official content which sadly never really fullfilled its full potential. However more storyline content remains welcome, and the new enemy units make it one of the most important additions.
White Dwarf
A number of new articles in the magazine have added scenarios, hero rules and expanded the game to include flesh eater courts which i really liked.
Community Content
Fan based content for this game is exceptionally well produced in quality and content, and can provide a lot of additional gameplay to your set > Variants & Expansions