Let’s address the elephant in the room first: my experience of playing Direchasm has been hugely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. I like how my colour scheme worked out, and they’re the warband I had the most fun painting. They’re very reminiscent of classic Chaos Warriors, but with more dynamic poses and added character. Khagra’s Ravagers: I love, love, love these Chaos Warrior models. It was hard work, and these are probably the warband I spent the longest on, but I think they’ve ended up being my best painted warband of the season.ġ. The Dread Pageant: I normally like to pick my own colour scheme for a warband, but I was a bit intimidated by the Slaanesh models so I followed a tutorial by Mengel Miniatures. I went for a dark green colour scheme rather than the more traditional red, and am very happy with them.Ģ. The Crimson Court: the vampire models are all amazing, and were very enjoyable to paint. I ended up using a lot of Contrast paints and glazing to get different shades of green, and I’m really pleased with how they came out.ģ. Myari’s Purifiers: I went into the Lumineth warband without much of a plan, but wanting to try out something different from my comfort zone of ‘base coat, shade, highlight’. I already have an Age of Sigmar Ossiarch Bonereaper army, so this was an easy painting project for me as I had a well-tested colour scheme already lined up.Ĥ. Kainan’s Reapers: I absolutely love the sculpts for this warband, the models all have a ton of character, and I think the happy skeleton with a sword and shield might be my single favourite Direchasm model. It worked ok, but some of the models ended up much better painted than others as I was learning as I went along.ĥ. I ended up using them as a test run for using Contrast paints over undershading, which I wanted to test before using it for another project. The crab and the fish were great fun to paint, the aelves less so – there was a lot of detail and I found them quite fiddly.
Elathain’s Soulraid: this warband was a real mixed bag for me. Hedkrakka’s Mad Mob: the Savage Orruks are probably my least favourite of the sculpts for the season (though they’re still lovely models), I struggled to think of anything interesting to do with them, so while I’m happy with my paint job they don’t stand out to me.Ħ. Probably the warband I’d most like to have another go at painting one day.ħ. The Starblood Stalkers: the Seraphon models are fantastic but my blue colour scheme didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. I’m going to rank the eight Direchasm warbands in order of how much I’ve enjoyed painting them:Ĩ. However, in the end, they both turned out to be interesting and enjoyable painting challenges that stretched my painting skills. Initially I wasn’t hugely excited about the Direchasm starter set, because neither of the two warbands included, Lumineth Realm Lords and Slaanesh, are factions I’m drawn to in the Age of Sigmar universe. One of my favourite things about Underworlds is that it gives you an opportunity to get a flavour of what painting the different Age of Sigmar factions is like without having to make a big investment in them. The quality of the sculpts released for the eight Direchasm warbands has been one of the highlights of the season for me, I enjoyed painting all of them, and I don’t think there has been a single duff warband in terms of the model releases. Underworlds is one of the few Games Workshop games where players are not required to have painted model to participate in events, but painting is a big part of the hobby for me, and I’ve painted all thirty-five Underworlds warband I own (at the time of writing I don’t yet own the Storm of Celestus warband from the latest starter set). My experience of Direchasm, however, has been quite different: I’ve been playing remotely via webcam, and for the most part playing only casual games, with the exception of one webcam tournament. Prior to the pandemic I’d have described myself as a moderately competitive Underworlds player: I’ve played in a number of local store tournaments, and a few Grand Clashes (larger tournaments). I’ve been playing Underworlds since it was first released in 2017. A game takes about half an hour to forty-five minutes to play. Each player picks a warband from the thirty-six that are available, and adds a deck of objective and power cards built from the large card pool. Warhammer Underworlds: Direchasm, the fourth season of Games Workshop’s Warhammer Underworlds game, has been fully released for a month or so now (aside from an Arena Mortis expansion which was announced just after I’d written the first draft of this article), so I want to talk about how I’ve found the season as a whole.įor anyone who is not familiar with Warhammer Underworlds, it’s a hex based, competitive, two player strategy game.