If you ever wondered what it would be like to live in New York City during the events of the movie, “The Warriors”. Have we got the system for you, Necromunda pits gangs of fighters in brutal battles in the Underhive. It is a Skirmish wargame that is published by Games-Workshop, and has been around forever! In 2017 they revised the new edition and have been slowly pumping out models for it, and finally we have decided to get into. There is a lot of confusion when it comes to this, so this article will be aimed at giving you a very simple breakdown of what the game is, and also where is the best place to start if you don’t want to throw a bunch of money at everything.
The best place to start out would be the Hive War Starter set if you can find one, it will come with some terrain, all the game aids that you need, the rule book, a Delaque gang and an Escher gang. This will give you a very well rounded place to start playing the game with a friend, you will be shoehorned into the gangs that come with the box, but this isn’t so bad as it will give you a good place to start learning. There are other gangs, and groups that you can play, you just need to make sure you pick up the book that is needed for the models. Go to the games-workshop webpage for now and look at all the gangs that are on there, we will work hard on getting a faction focus for all of the gangs and cults that you can play as.
There are a few websites that will help you manage your gangs, I suggest you go to these sites and work through the list building and read the different rules on the weapons. This game is very dense, so it will take a lot of time to learn all the different little rules, so don’t get daunted with analysis paralysis. I think the best way to do your first game would be just take as many different models that you can, give them all some armor and have them run around beating each other up with fisticuffs. Once you get the fundamentals down, then you can add shooting to the game, I only say this because almost every weapon has a special rule and again we want to spend more time playing the game during this part, than reading.
This is important for helping you understand the rules, just sitting down and reading the rules one or two times will help you know the rules. When you play the game and have to look up the specific interactions, and break down the problem to simplest forms this is how you start to understand the rules. Universal rules used to be a big thing in 40k and it was really daunting to try and learn them all, you will learn all the rules from playing the game. If you have to look it up for the first few matches, then just make sure you mark those pages so you can make better use of your time.
One of the joys of this game is how punishing it can be, a simple punch to the face can send one of your gangers to an early grave. I can understand how this can put some people off, just remember this game was designed to be played in a narrative format. There are ways to play matched play, but I believe that is best for learning the game, have fun throwing broken stuff at each other. Once you have a good idea of the range of punishment then you would be able to plan accordingly for your campaign. I don’t really think this game is meant to be played at a competitive level, but I feel like we could make some modifications to the system and allow for some fun narrative events.
I think that the models are some of the best that GW has to offer, so I know I will be enjoying building and painting up all the different gangs out there. That being said if you are close to Alabama and you want to try and get into Necromunda then you should join the Discord and plan for a demo match! Stay tuned for a look at all the different gangs, the rules, the lore, we will have it all here!