For those of you who exist in healthy and active Warhammer Underworlds communities, life can be pretty good. Maybe you worked hard to build your own from the ground up, or revived one that was on the ropes, or potentially lucked into one that was already going strong. Regardless of how you got here, try not to rest on your laurels – that precious community is yours to maintain! Today we are going to cover a few ideas for how to keep your Underworlds community kicking for years to come. Below is a collection of ideas, some of which will work for your community, and some which won’t. I don’t do each and every one of these things, but if they are a fit for your group, give them a try!

Keep Drawing in New Players

Gatekeeping is for losers – be as open and welcoming as possible to help bring more people into the fold. Advertise your game nights in local online spaces. Invite your personal friends to come out and play a teaching game. Encourage your other players to bring a friend along. Host a learn to play event at various stores around the area to reach more people you might otherwise have missed. Add your community to the online directory to help other people find you. New players invite variety to your group which keeps things from getting stale, and keeps your momentum in an upward spiral. Life happens, and people in your group may move away, have to sell off their stuff, have to take a step back due to family or work, they foolishly decide to focus their energy on some other game, etc. It’s much easier to weather those losses if you have a bigger group. Success begets success, as they say, and the bigger your community is, the bigger your community can get. If you don’t keep reaching out for new players, it might begin to dwindle and you’ll have a much harder time getting it back on its feet.

Document and Photograph

You and your group play games every so often, but there are probably some players who show up most times and some who come pretty rarely. You’ll have fence-sitters and cautiously interested people who want to make sure they’re not getting into a dead game. Or maybe they’re busy people who won’t think about Underworlds very often unless prompted. The easiest way to alleviate all of these issues is to post after-action reports from your games and be sure to include at least one photo. It acts as a bit of a beacon to those less-invested to say “yes, people really do play this game, look at the fun we had” and it will keep you more top-of-mind for others. The people who did come along may appreciate you calling out a great combo they made or showing off their painted minis, which can encourage them to keep coming back. You’ll want to post these photos and maybe a few short sentences on your local Facebook, discord etc. Seeds need sunlight to grow, and your little community needs exposure and morale boosts to do the same. People won’t join what they can’t see!

Host Release Parties

One idea that some groups have found useful is to host a ‘release party’ for new seasons or warbands. If your players are the type to pre-order new products, try and have them order from the same shop. (And try not to order from an online retailer – you want to support the physical locations you play in!) You can all meet up on release day and build the new toys together, chat about the faction cards, deckbuild a bit if that’s your jam, and maybe get in a few matches together with the newest thing on the block. It’s a good social hour, encourages people to get together, helps newer players figure out how best to use a new warband/Rivals Deck, and supports your friendly local game store. What’s not to love?

Hold the Occasional Paint Jam

This may come as a surprise to some, but you’re allowed to do things other than play games at your group meetups! Hosting a paint and chill night can be a great way to get the conversation flowing and get to know one another better. I find that a lot of time in my games we are so focused on card interactions or dice results that I spend an hour with somebody and never hear about their day, how work is going, what their kids are doing for Halloween, etc. Friendships take proximity and frequency but also emotional interaction, and painting gives you a space to do that a little more easily. It has the added advantage of helping your team’s warbands look good – which ups the group photos’ appeal as well. Some people may have little to no painting experience, not own any paints, etc, so bring your own gear to let people use. Who knows, you might teach each other a thing or two!

Run Events and Tournaments

Host events and tournaments that draw your community in to get people in one place, and do em often. I have some tips at my How to Run a Tournament article, but no matter what style of tournament you run, it will help to maintain your community and solidify it in the minds of your players. It may help to vary the type of event to be inclusive – some players may only feel comfortable coming to Rivals event, while others won’t be interested unless it’s Championship. Some people may prefer a two-day best-of-three hyper-competitive deal, while others with more obligations/less free time might appreciate a quick best-of-one three rounder over a few hours on Saturday. Running one kind this month, then a different one next month or next quarter can help everybody get a chance to join in the action. It also helps to make your tournaments scheduled on a somewhat consistent basis to help people go, and where possible schedule them a month or more in advance to make planning attendance easier.

Maintain Your Meetup Time

Establish a consistent weekly location/time. It’s probably how you built a community in the first place, but without routine, regular, scheduled meetups you’re liable to have your community dissolve. Advertise this online, and get it on the store calendar/promo mailer or whatever works for your local advertising needs. People will show up more often if the event is consistently held at the same day/time/place, and that builds momentum. It also makes drawing in new players easier since you can sell them on the community with ‘we meet here every Wednesday at 6’. This makes it feel more dependable and worth committing to, and can help some more cautious people feel comfortable with dipping their toes in.

Try New Stuff/Keep it Fresh

While Underworlds is a constantly evolving game with new releases every few months, it can still be worth your time to explore new ways to keep things engaging and change the theme every so often. If you play Nemesis every time at your meetups, see if your community is willing to try giving Championship a go next month. If everybody plays ‘strong’ warbands pretty consistently, try a scheduled “Tickle Fight” night, where people bring ‘bad’ warbands and see if they can’t make them work anyway. I wrote about some ways to mix it up in the multiplayer game night article, but there are dozens of ways to occasionally spice up your routine and keep things from feeling same-y to some players.

A great example of this came recently from Nick Bayton and his UK group (who also calls themselves Thunderworlds… which means we’re going to have to have a fight someday). Nick ran a great community shakeup event he called the Pandaemonium. Effectively, everybody brings a Rivals warband, and each round you draw from a hat to see what you’re playing with. So you as an individual play with three different warbands, and not necessarily the one you brought! There’s also warband scoring (as played by three different players once each). Worth noting that at this particular date, Khagra’s Ravagers won the event, and Sons of Velmorn took second while going undefeated! Great way to have some variety and fun, as well as introduce some warbands you don’t usually see at events. What the Hex did a more complicated version of this same idea they called the Trashfire Tournament, which was great fun for all involved.

Organize a League

Once your weekly/biweekly/whatever game nights draw a consistent enough crowd (maybe 4+ people for 3-4 sessions), you might be able to keep them coming back by organizing some form of League play. There are dozens of ways to do this, and I’ll put together a future article on league formats and their pros and cons, but these can be great for varying things for your players and keeping them engaged and coming back for more. You can encourage variety of opponents by altering scoring parameters or by assigning opponents. You can vary play by changing which warbands are allowed, or give points for more unique warband use/diversity of choices brought across the league duration. You can reward painting, you can reward teaching games, you can do a ton to encourage new people to join. You can do a cash prize or not, depending on how your group would be best motivated. You can even try out some of the White Dwarf league ideas like Hazard Cards to mix things up and create a unique environment for your league. Playing games is great, but playing a game where it feels like it ‘means something’ can be the spark that gets a casual player more invested in your community, especially if they see themselves climbing the leaderboard or taking home the league’s season winner award. Our most recent Rain City Thunderworlds league didn’t even award points for winning and we didn’t keep game scores, we simply recorded how many games you played in the span, how many unique opponents, how many unique warbands, and whether you played them at scheduled meetups or not. Other leagues have a ranked match system and are very competitive – pick what fits your community’s needs!

Wrap

As I have covered before, and as others have noted in their efforts, building an Underworlds community can be hard. Once you’ve taken steps and had some initial success, it’s important to keep working on maintaining that community, or you might find yourself having to start over again as I and many others did after the pandemic, for example. I hope that some of the above tips are useful to you in keeping your current players engaged, and perhaps even in bringing in new players to keep the growth up. Thanks for reading, and I hope that you and your new friends enjoy spending your glory!