Games Workshop - Necromunda: Ash Wastes Vehicle Dice Set

Product Information

If one of your fighters is taken down close to any of your other fighters, those have to roll a dice to see if they become Broken, demoralized by seeing a comrade fall. If they do, they have to run for cover and can’t be activated in that round. In the End phase, you also have to roll to see if any fighters flee. Hive Scum are cheap fighters that you can use to fill out your roster. You can equip them with simple weapons, their statistics aren’t great, and they don’t gain experience like the rest of your gang: You only hire them for a battle at a time. On top of this, gangs can capture fighters of other gangs, try to free captives, buy new equipment at the trading post and assault strongholds. Necromunda also has many more rules detailing special ammunition, interactions with terrain, specific injuries, and even has hirable neutral characters like hive scum and bounty hunters. Necromunda is also geared towards campaign play, where gangs grow in size and strength (or die ignominiously) throughout the arc of the campaign, leading to epic match-ups and bitter competition between players. The detailed lore of the game and the level of customization available to your gang is part of what makes Necromunda stand out from the crowd of skirmish games: A lot of the time, it almost feels like playing a tabletop roleplaying game as much as a tactical skirmish game.

Dice, ruler and templates – perhaps the most important thing of all, Hive War contains all the special templates and custom dice you need to play the game. Necromunda is a wargame that really concerns itself with the minutia of shooting people with sci-fi weaponry, and this is strongly reflected in the array and volume of wargear that comes in the box.In the run-up to the release of Necromunda: Ash Wastes, we thought we’d show off some of the myriad locations in this incredible setting. Below is a small portion of the vast map we put together while we developed the setting. We’ll zoom in and describe some of these places in the future, but for now, here’s a look at the Palatine Cluster – the centre of which is, of course, Hive Primus. The Necromunda: Hive War box has a nice heft to it that really serves to hammer home the value contained within. Given the absence of such special weapon templates from Games Workshop mainstay games Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar for several years now, it may initially come as a surprise to many fans a bit longer in the tooth to see such tools again. After all, weren’t they removed with the aim of streamlining and speeding up play? This toxic, rad-scoured landscape is too expansive to fit into a single book. In fact, the wastes are so vast we’re introducing them with a massive new boxed set, which will be followed soon after by a whole series of books exploring the factions that battle across the wastes. Weaknesses: Generally fewer models and reliance on individuals could seriously stunt a Venator gang in a campaign. Related Articles

Hive War is a slightly older starter set, but it has everything you need if you just want to play a self-contained game with two players in the Underhive. It contains: This figure is based off of 50% of the RRP on the set since only 1 sprue is included in Necromunda: Hive War Weaknesses: Difficulty dealing significant damage to more than two enemies in a round. Close combat abilities are a joke, and there are several hard counters to their shenanigans. Related Articles

Escher

Muscled-up steroid freaks that have turned industrial machinery into brutal weapons. Most of them have mohawks, and all of them have bad attitudes. It’s difficult to fully envision how vehicles will play out in the game. Not only have we not had the opportunity to play many games, we don’t even know the profiles for most vehicles! On the face of it, the vehicle damage rules remind me of 3rd-5th edition 40k. Vehicles were less predictable in their resilience than other models. You could spend the whole game taking hits and be no more than ‘shaken’. Or you could take a hit from a missile launcher in turn 1, that needed to roll a 6 to even glancing hit you, and blow up immediately (RIP my brother’s land raider, d. 2002 on our living room floor – I regret nothing and you will not be missed). These Houses have a presence in all the hives across the planet, and each of them has a unique history and culture, as well as fighting styles and weaponry.

Be open-minded and patient in approaching the rules for the game. There is a steeper learning curve to Necromunda than other Games Workshop games so it may take you a bit more adjustment to get to a place where you can confidently play the game without constantly referring to the rulebook. You’re in the deep end of the wargaming pool with this one so don’t worry if you feel a bit lost at times. They’ve added in scenarios that include the weather of the Ash Wastes to complicate otherwise straight forward missions. The fuel cache scenario that was played on Warhammer+ is a great example of this – slightly updated versions of missions you know and love. Manwolfs Sentinel. Credit: Fowler Ash Waste Campaign The rules for running and customizing Skirmish games can be found in the Necromunda Rulebook. Campaign Games in Necromunda

Slave Ogryns

Yes, the miniatures have lots of small, fiddly parts, but one of the best parts of Necromunda is the ridiculously detailed loadouts your fighters can have and having their miniatures represent that exactly. The rules have a complex, old school feel, but they were written with the idea of streamlining a 90s wargame without changing it too much. A Hive War Rulebook – it’s not as updated as the most current rulebook, which is the 2023 Core Rulebook one described below, but it has all the most neccessary basics.

Shooting is done by rolling a dice and trying to roll equal to or higher than your Ballistics skill. You have to shoot the closest visible target, and all sorts of rules for cover and line of sight apply. Weaknesses: …but you can also roll poorly on its stats and have it be a total dud. The Psychic powers don’t really do anything, and your fighters will rarely be anything more than middle-of-the-road. Related Articles The next section of the review would typically feature a chronicle of my attempt to understand and execute the rules of the game. However, with the way the chips have fallen for this review, I was unable to get the game played and get the review out in time. I will hopefully be able to update the article later with an account of how learning the game went for me, or I may even do it as a separate article.The rules writers, bless their crazy hearts, have doubled down on the oft-ignored ‘no swapping weapons’ rule. They have expanded it to wargear, which now may also only be discarded if replaced by a ‘similar function’ wargear. This is obviously something that requires Arbitrator input, but the intent seems to be that Jimmy the ganger won’t give up his frag grenades unless you give him some other explosives first. For anything more complex than grenades or armour, this rule gets a little fuzzy. Strengths: Cheap bodies to outnumber their opponents, blunderbusses and flamethrowers and incendiary charges to set you on fire. Unique weapon options and cheap troops really set this gang apart.