Spitewood isn’t all about those crazy looking Kurnoth centaur elves, the box also comes with a Mastery Warband wrought from daemon-bound steel and made of Chaos Duardin. The Blood of the Bull are the invading, malicious counterpart to our defending, malicious Heralds of Kurnoth. Led by Zuldrakka the Hatedul, this gang loves nothing more than cheating out extra dice on attacks or saves, and pillaging the realm to acquire more power to do the same. Sow chaos, loot resources, and turn them against your foes with The Blood of the Bull. Sounds like a riot!

Thank you to Games Workshop for providing the page with an advance copy of this product for review and content creation.

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Blood of the Bull: Lore

Zuldrakka the Hateful is a former Despot of a huge Duardin army, who sought to seek Ghyran’s resources for themselves. Unfortunately for her, the scions of the Hunter God didn’t fight fair and attacked her at night. She and her crew burned tons of forest in the resistance, but most of the force was eventually slain. Zuldrakka and a few of her homies escaped, of course, and instead of being broken by the experuience she’s even more committed to ruining this land and taking everything of worth it has. She had heard that burning a specific place – Syr Edris – would wither the whole forest. So that’s exactly what she’s set out to do with this small warband while she awaits reinforcements for a larger force.

Her crew, while victims of the same experience, aren’t just there because they want revenge. Zuldrakka has them beholden to her and has called in every favor and debt she can. Now she uses each person to their own best application in her quest to ruin the Spitewood with… well, her spite, and kill every Kurnothi wretch she finds in her way.

Here’s a little short story in the Spitewood book that’s just everything you could ask for. These guys are real charmers!

Blood of the Bull: Warscroll

Inspire

The dwarves will inspire when they use a Daemonforge die on either attack or defense, regardless of the result. We will get to what that means in the next section. Grisk, meanwhile, doesn’t get to use these dice, and instead can only inspire if he’s adjacent to the target of somebody else’s attack.

It’s nice that you can effectively choose which duardin to inspire at will, at least as long as you have the dice. The tricky part will be getting enough dice, and not just wasting them to inspire if they don’t also help you in other ways.

Empowered by Spite

Here’s where we generate those dice for inspiration, and also what effect they have otherwise. Your fighters are Empowered by Spite, which is pretty chill

You open the game with 1 of these daemonforge dice. That means you could use one right away to inspire whoever is making a roll if that feel like the right call. If you want more, you’ll need to dig some up by delving treasure with a fighter who has no stagger tokens. It has to be treasure side up, and they can’t already have a stagger, so you won’t be able to just spin the same token a dozen times to generate dice, at last in the same round.

Also worth noting that all daemonforge dice are lost at the end of the round! Use it or lose it. You will NOT start rounds 2 or 3 with any dice, so if you ant them, you’ll need to leave some things treasure side up and ready to delve the subsequent round.

OK, on to using them. Once you have a dice, what does it do? You spend a dice, and you add it to your next roll. It has to be a dwarf who does it (so no Grisk, sorry bud), but when you’re about to make an attack roll or save roll, you can get +1 dice with no maximum. That’s pretty solid – you’re more likely to hit, less likely to get hit, and will inspire for your efforts.

Infernal Conflagration

Tokkor gets grievous on ranged weapons, which makes him the only fighter in the game with this ability. It only gets this on adjacent targets, so you can pretend it’s kind of like a range 1 melee using his ranged attack’s profile and adding a damage. That’s far less impressive. He does have a melee weapon but it’s worse, so you’ll rarely use it unless you get a bunch of cards that only modify melee attacks. Regardless, nice to see he can do 2 damage with a solid accuracy profile.

Also, the fire is sentient? Crazy cool.

Hobgrot Cunning

Here’s something dandy – attacks made by chorfs while the hobgrot is adjacent get to count both swords and hammers as successes. In the majority of cases (save for when the opponent has the Brawler upgrade or you’re playing into the Spitewood matchup against Heralds of Kurnoth in their own territory) this will also mean you have the target flanked. And it works on all attacks, not just melee!

You already wanted to have Grisk flank an enemy so you could inspire them when a chaos duardin attacks, but now you REALLY want to do that. You have the potential to make it so 5/6 dice facings are successes, which is huge. Add a Daemonforge dice to the equation and you’re looking at as close to an auto-hit as this game gives you.

This ability is great for any attack, but is most potent when it is used on a profile that normally hits on swords. Morudok and Tokkor are therefore your prime targets for this flanked attack, and it boosts the stocks of any weapon upgrades on swords.

Pack some pushes in the deck, and don’t be afraid to burn them on Grisk for this ability, as it’s solid.

Blood of the Bull: Fighter Cards

Zuldrakka the Hateful

Zuldrakka is our warband’s leader, and she has a solid profile with 4 health and 1 shield, inspiring to 2 shields. With Daemonforge dice potentially increasing this to 2-3 shields, she will be hard to put down for 2 bounty, which is how you’d hope to se a Duardin leader. Her 3 move is a nice surprise given that prior dwarves have been move 2!

Her attack of 2 hammers for 2 with crit stagger isn’t that special, but she inspires to 3 hammers for 2 with crit grievous which is pretty good. I’d place her as a high priority candidate to inspire as 2 defense and potential for 3 damage is nice for any gameplan. with her weapon abilities being crit based, she loves rerolls and those extra dice from the warscroll.

Also, I figured out why she’s titled ‘The Hateful’. It’s because she hates me, and her model was super difficult to put together. I have gaps in the shoulder and multiple things kept falling of, and that’s with glue and peg trimming!

Imnidrin

Imnidrin is somebody who you’re going to enjoy having on the squad. A 2/2/2 attack profile is always a welcome thing to have, and this guy isn’t even the leader! Crit stagger inspiring to flat stagger isn’t super fancy, but seeing as we just mentioned Zuldrakka enjoys hitting staggered enemies for her crit grievous, maybe it’s not all bad.

Another awesome benefit is the extra dice on defense and attack when inspired. While you’re only 3 health on this fighter, getting to two shields (with potential for 3 with the warscroll dice) is saucy.

This fighter is a candidate for doing some of your treasure delving, since the range 2 makes them better able to participate in the combat from token positions.

Morudok

Morudok has one very special thing going for him; flanged maces. This is an underrepresented weapon type in many fantasy games and it’s always nice to see because it’s cool as heck. He even has two of them!

Back to more serious matters, he’s got the same stat profile as Imnidrin with 3 health 1 shield inspiring to 2, and move 3. However, he only gives up 1 bounty! This means you should definitely use him as you frontline option since you’re not as worried about losing him.

Morudok has a 3 swords attack profile which isn’t bad, but things get better when you remember Grisk allows adjacent targets to get swords and hammers out of chaos duardin who attack. This will more than double Morudok;s accuracy – going from 2/3 dice facings to 5/6 if flanked is part of the equation.

He inspires to 4 swords and his crit stagger becomes flat stagger. Overall a very good fighter card for 1 bounty.

Tokkor the Immolator

Tokkor the Immolator not only has the best name of the band, but he’s also the best model. You want some writhing smoke, burn scars, underbite fangs, bald head on display? Mr. Flamethrower has it all.

He clocks in at 1 bounty but has a more reasonable 1 dodge inspiring to 2 dodge profile to match. He has a melee weapon, but it will probably be used very rarely since his ranged attack does more damage (considering it gets grievous to be 2 damage with adjacent targets per the warscroll). The ranged attack is also more accurate.

As much as I want to storm up the from lines with him and start ‘burninating all the peasants’ as it were, you may benefit from using him as a back-line delver. He’ll generate daemonforge dice for your bruisers, keep his one dodge self safe behind the lines, and toss a few potshots out if needed. Plus, then his sick model will stay on the table longer and you’ll get to keep looking at it.

Grisk Back-stabba

We’ve made it to Grisk. He is a special boy because when he’s adjacent to enemies, the dwarves get swords and hammers to be successes in their attacks (as well as probably flanked). Every time you can get him flanking for an attack, you want it. It’s even the way he inspires!

Unfortunately, inspiration does almost nothing for him. He gains 1 move and that’s all. His attack is about the weakest in the band, with only crit grievous on 3 dice to potentially bring him up to 2 damage. He can’ even benefit from the daemonforge dice since he doesn’t have the chaos duardin runemark.

What he can do, however, is generate the dice by delving. Trust in his two dodge to keep him alive in cover, and have him delving frontline tokens while ideally setting up flanked attacks for your better fighters. If he dies, he dies. Such is he life of a slave hobgrot.

In Practice

I played two test games with Blood of the Bull in nemesis, using Emberstone Sentinels and Pillage & Plunder. And, uh, these guys absolutely SHRED. Pillage is super smooth, so not only was I scoring for doing little to nothing, but I was generating Daemonforge dice at the same time. Ever gone to 3 shields on guard in cover? Feels great! Imagine doing that multiple times per game.

BotB (sorry bolt bros, these dwarves have taken your acronym and are not giving it back) won both games with relative ease. They beat the skinnerkin (who gave them more of a fight than expected) and then even managed to outlast Mollog BARF. The plus dice are an enormous advantage, and while you have to be mindful of how and when to generate them and spend them, I got to hit when I wanted, survive hits that would take down, well, a bull, and rock 20 gory both times. These guys rule.

Potential Pairings

You can reasonably play a lot of pairings with this warband, since their fighters look to be pretty strong all-arounders and other than low mobility have the tools to make many strategies work. However, it’s worth noting that they are interested in delving for their special dice, and interested on things being treasure side up with them standing on them to exit a round and enter the next. As such, you’ll probably want one or both of Emberstone Sentinels and Pillage and Plunder.

If you don’t want to play ES/PP (though it’s a great combo), other things they could potentially do quite well with are Realmstone Raiders since they have such high accuracy on top of extra dice to help. The deck also has synergy with hold and pillage, so it will combo pretty well. Countdown to Cataclysm is always a nice pick for aggro or hold flavored people. Wrack and Ruin gives you extra damage and staggers to fish for those crit abilities on your leader. Blazing Assault ups their potency and provides additional pushes to set up Grisk business or devling.

You could play them with their of the new Spitewood Decks – supposedly they’re cooked up with Deadly Synergy in mind. While you can make it work, I would caution against it since delving inherently wants you to spread out and that will break unity. Hunting Grounds is an appealing option though, especially if you can provide them the incentive to cross into your territory with either ES or PP generating passive scores for you.

Wrap

To begin this section, I have to say I’m glad to see dwarves getting some love again. This is the first new band released for a dwarf team in Underworlds in the last 7 years. Prior to this, there were only two, and one of them hasn’t even made the jump to a modern second edition warcroll. If you love dwarves, or love to slay them, this is a good thing that was a long time coming. I also adore the fact that we have a female dwarf, and she looks like one should. GW gets women wrong a lot, and could absolutely have fumbled this one, but I’d say it ended up being pretty awesome aesthetically.

In terms of mechanics, I like the idea of being able to add dice in a pinch, and it should make the experience more fun for new players to be successful more often and feel like they can influence the outcome. With the warband’s already solid stats, this might be a little too strong, so let’s hope their reduced mobility keeps the in check and they aren’t immediately running the tournament tables.

What do you think? Will you let the hate flow through you, or are you planning to intercept and destroy these daemonic interlopers with extreme prejudice? Whether you’re pro or anti dwarf, I hope you have loads of fun plundering the realm for power and dice to help spend your glory in the Spitewood.

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Thanks again to Games Workshop for providing me with this product so that I can produce this review content.