Warhammer Underworlds is a game that has a ton of things to think about and a lot of work to do despite only having 12 activations per player each game. When you’re playing a single game with a pal on a Wednesday night, however long it takes you to get through it is just fine. However, if you’re planning to play in a competitive event, you’ll likely have a time limit to your matches, and it behooves you to get your games done in as quick of a manner as you can while still playing to the best of your ability. If you don’t play quickly, you risk frustrating your opponent, or even finding you don’t have time to complete your set and having to take a draw or even a loss because you weren’t able to finish out the games and get to that final end step. Even if you never play competitively, faster games mean more opportunity to play another before the shop closes or you have to go home to put the kids to bed. today I’ll walk through a few strategies for improving your pace of play.

I also want to add a disclaimer that I don’t think many players in this day and age are intentionally “Slow Playing” to stall out the clock and win. If that’s something you are doing, please stop and consider why that feels right to you, and try to do better. Realistically though, I think it comes down to either complacency or lack of practice/experience in playing quickly for some players, and there are a few things you can do both in your regular games and in your event prep to help speed you up.

Why Play Fast

• Tournaments often have 2 hour rounds for a best of 3, and unless you’re winning 2-0, you may end up taking a draw 1-1 since it’s hard to get through all three in two hours. This can hamper your ability to make the top cut, hit the podium, or win an event.
• Your opponents deserve to have a fun time, and it can be very frustrating to play against somebody who you think is ‘taking too long’
• If the T.O. decides to implement a chess clock after your matches are slow, that adds stress and increases your odds of making mistakes and losing winnable games down the road
• If you’re able to quickly and efficiently perform your half of the game, you put time pressure on your opponent to ‘keep up’ and might even get a competitive advantage as they have less time to contemplate their own moves between actions and have to react to new board states more quickly
• You can avoid looking like ‘That Guy’ who is slow-playing for advantage, and instead get the reputation of being a player who has their act together and is professional and ‘good’ since you look like you know what you’re doing
• If your event has scheduled breaks, you get to actually make use of the break and get lunch, go potty, etc instead of having to play a marathon of back to back matches as you spill into the time padding repeatedly
• It’s just the gentlemanly thing to do. Overanalyzing and spending too long in each power step is actually bad for the health of the game overall as it can reduce people’s desire to come out to another event, and can throw off the whole tournament while you’re dragging out the proceedings for other players

Pre-Game Setup

Ideally, you know when you come into an event which boards you like and what orientations you want. You’ll have a good idea of where you want to deploy your fighters. You’ll have a solid plan for what cards you’re looking to draw in the first draw and when you do and don’t want to mulligan. If you win the opening roll-off, you’ll know whether you want to go first or second. The more practice you do honing your own setup information, the faster you can get to actually rolling dice. The game itself might only take 45 minutes, but if you’re spending a ton of time just getting things started, you’re eating in to a lot of your actual playtime.

Know your deck so you know what you’re looking for and what might come down the pipe. The more familiar you are with the deck you brought, the better informed your decisions can be and the less guessing you have to do when considering your own actions and can focus on what your opponent is up to. Cutting the guesswork in half can really speed up your power steps and discard choices in an end phase.

Storage, Transport, and Token Management

Ideally, you have a well-established way of organizing your supplies. There are a bunch of things you need to play the game – two decks of cards, your warband, your dice, a dozen damage markers, glory tokens, move and guard tokens, etc. If these are all loose in a bag or box, you’ll spend more time digging around to find the one you need midgame, spend more time getting things set up as the game gets started, and spend more time cleaning up in between games if you’re playing in a best of three format. You’ll also spend more time packing up between games when you advance to the next round and have to move tables.

You can absolutely benefit from a 3D printed token storage box, but even lacking that, you’ll really benefit from some structured way of storing and transporting the bits and bobs you use to play the game. A big messy pile is not only unprofessional looking but also slower for you to play with and move around, plus increases the odds you lose something.

Get your stuff organized, get familiar with where things are, and grabbing a charge token will become a fast and seamless thing that will not eat into your games. If you put your glory in the same spot all the time, you’ll get into a routine that will speed you up rather than taking several seconds every time you need one or spend one, and that will add up across an event.

Practice Fast Play at Home

If you play casually at home with a laid back pace and have fun with that, I totally support you. You and your friends should enjoy your playtime in whatever way makes you all the happiest. I know I sometimes take a while to get through things especially if we’re eating pizza and having conversations in between actions and all that. You’ll have to be aware though that in prep for an event, it might be quite difficult to transition out of chill mode and into All Gas No Brakes tempo if you haven’t been doing it ahead of time.

I’m not saying you need to time yourself in every game at home and be ruthless with each other, but especially as you close in on an event and are repping your tourney deck with more familiarity, you should try and consciously increase your speed. Practice makes perfect, and practicing fast can make you better at playing fast and you’ll play better while playing fast because of the experience rather than trying to do all of your methodical, just-so precision but at double speed.

As a counterpoint, a boxing coach I had once told me not to rush into trying to go fast and hoping my technique would catch up. Instead I should work on being smooth and doing it right. ‘Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast’ he told me. That speaks to the many games of preparation you might need to feel ready for go time at your event, but theroetically your first few ‘learning games’ with a pairing should take longer and you should accelerate as you go along. Doing so intentionally helps make sure it happens.

Additionally, you need to be realistic with the constraints your pairing presents you. If you’re playing a warband that’s very time-intensive and involved, especially hordes with multi-moves, resurrection, push mechanics, etc. you may find that you’re simply taking too long because you have too much to do. If you can’t win a game at home in 45-60 minutes, you can’t win in an event at that time either. Winning every practice match in prep for an event but spilling over time each game means you aren’t winning when you play the tournament – you’re getting draws, losses due to time, etc. Zarbag’s Gitz, Knives of the Crone, and Exiled Dead players need to be extra, extra fast since their warbands have more models and/or more ‘things to do’ per action step. I’m sorry if that’s hard news to hear, but some warbands aren’t going to give you success no matter how strong they are if you as a player can’t keep them efficient. In that event, you might need to switch to a different, more streamlined warband. Likewise, if you’re having trouble keeping up to speed in practice with a deck that has lots of extra ‘accounting’ and the like such as Realmstone Raiders, you may not be able to do that efficiently in a live event.

Show Up Early

Get yourself in the right headspace prior to the event, be at the venue before the first round with all of your things ready to play. Go to the bathroom and eat well beforehand. The last thing you want to do is be scrambling during your first game – if you’ve been up early and had time to settle in before things get going, Having all your ducks in a row before the event begins and being ready to play right away once your first pairing is live is not only respectful to your opponents and your T.O. but it will also improve your performance in your first game and get you on the path to winning more games to come.

Play with a Clock in Competition

I don’t mean this as ‘ask the TO for a chess clock immediately after registration’ unless you’d like to set a really bad first impression for everybody you play with. What I mean is try to have some way to keep track of your match time as you go along. Whether that’s having a timer running on your phone, a digital clock display, or just sitting in view of a wall clock, it may benefit you to have some way of telling the time and referring to how much is left mid-match, and possibly even periodic reminders/alarms if your TO won’t be going around making announcements to that effect.

This serves a few purposes. Firstly, it keeps yourself accountable and is a tangible reminder that you can’t take too long. Second, it can actually reduce your stress because you can look over and see ‘oh we actually have plenty of time left’, as well as save you stress down the line when you get to game 3 and say ‘oh my gosh we only have 20 minutes left’. Third, it works for both players; it helps make you both aware of how fast round 1 or game 1 went, and you can collaboratively agree to both pick up the pace if needed. This also doesn’t have the separate players tracked so you aren’t necessarily blaming them for playing slow but also helps them play faster in the event they’re also a slower player.

Be Willing to Concede

This one can be a tough pill to swallow but also demonstrates a lot of maturity from the players who do so. It also actually does come with some competitive benefits which we will get to in a second.

If you’re losing a game by a whole lot and there’s plenty of activations left, consider a scoop if you can’t come back to win so you can take all the time you need to win game 2, and then get to game 3 faster (and win that too). Unless your tournament has tiebreakers that really emphasize total glory or glory differential (and I hate that), it doesn’t hurt your opponent when you concede. They were going to win anyway, and now you don’t have to burn another 10-30 minutes as they continue to piledrive you into the dirt. Concede the game, give them a win, and then you can try to win the next two while also giving yourself more time to play that. I’ve seen it first-hand where a losing player keeps trying to claw back an unwinnable game, loses anyway, wins game 2, and then doesn’t have time to win game 3 in a match that they had a shot in. Same goes if you win game 1 but have an unwinnable game 2, just dump it and move on to game 3.

Now to the competitive advantage part: when you concede, you’re not obligated to reveal any of your unplayed cards. Your opponent gets a win, but they don’t know all of your objectives and haven’t seen a fair number of your power cards, so you may have an information advantage that could help you win subsequent games. Occasionally a player who wins by concession is allowed to ‘score out their deck’ and get to ‘whatever glory they would have earned’, in which case they actually reveal to you what they took in their list, while yours remains partially secret.

Finally, if you’re 1-1 and looking at game 3 with only 10 minutes left, just don’t play it. Take the draw, nobody wants to win by just lucking into more opening surges or having a nice first end phase and then the game ends when there isn’t a ‘real’ winner yet. You’ll maybe harm your overall tournament standing, but you won’t drag your opponent into a feels-bad situation nor will you delay the rest of the tournament as everybody has to wait for your partial game to end so they can get the next round’s pairings sorted and all that. Plus, there’s a chance you actually ‘lose’ that match because you chose to play it and just get bad dice in round 1 or what have you. Your overall standing in the event may actually be higher if you’re willing to accept a draw.

Conceding is fine, and it’s something adults do. Don’t be scared, and don’t be immature making everyone else wait on you/put your opponent into a lose-lose situation playing a sprint game 3 unless you’re both totally game for it.

Wrap

There you have it: all the reasons to play fast in a longer reading time than a fast game might take. I want to repeat myself from the beginning of the article and say that it’s totally fine to play at whatever pace you prefer when you’re at home with your friends having a good time. I absolutely encourage that and think everyone should get to engage with Underworlds in whatever way makes them happiest! If you’re entering a competition however, you will benefit from playing quickly, and so will everyone else at your event.

However quickly you blast through your power steps, I hope you enjoy spending glory in the Underworlds. Until next time!