Perhaps I misread the rules, but the rulebook keeps referencing that Khorne gains a Dial Advancement for every region he 2 kills or more in. Yet, on the actual card, he is suppose to gain 1 Dial Advancement for each region he kills 1 or more figure. Which is it? After playing a 3 player, I am inclined to think that the card is right and not the rulebook's anecdotes.

Yeah, this was in a thread on BGG too. The consensus there seemed to be that the cards were the most up-to-date, so Khorne's dial advancement (and Slaanesh's too I think) are both supposed to be the *easier* version shown on the cards rather than the one shown in the rules.

I was taught the game froma player that got the demo from the FF group at GenCon, and we have been playing with the rules on the cards. in the book, they attribute Nurgle's condition to Slanesh.

Well, we had 3 games until now and i have to say it was truely impossible to keep Khorne away from winning: There´s just no way against his Thread Dial domination. He can build two Warriors and the great Bloodthister every round in 3 different areas, and together with the units which survived the round before he easily gets 4 or more Thread Dial markers! He just puts 1 Warrior/his great Demon into every area with enemy units reachable - usually he/she can reach every area he wants by building " "roads" with cultists first. It doesnt really matter of his own units survive, as long as he gets one or more 4+ per model, he gets a Thread Dial marker...

Did i miss something?

What you missed is the other players' abilities to slow him down.

1. Don't put figures in his path so he can easily battle in region after region.
2. Use your warriors and daemons to slow down his followers so he has to spend points to bring them back or reestablish links
3. Use your Chaos cards to greater effect. The game is balaned - but in different ways. The other powers have things that boost their defense, prevent their figures from getting killed, moving hero tokens, or wiping out enemy figures.
4. Getting a lot of dial advancment tokens isn't a big deal since you are only guaranteed the one advancement. What you should do is play to prevent him from gaining the most tokens so that he doesn't get that 2nd advancement which could separate him fromj the pack. So work your dial advancment trigger better than him.

Slaanesh in particular has good chances of being more succesful than Khorne as soon as it gets its first upgrade and there are a few nobles or heroes on the map - get the cultist upgrade so Khorne needs to concentrate his forces for a definite kill and place one or two cultists near every single noble or hero (yeah, he may get killed - so what?) on the map.

My group has played 4 games so far, and the Slaanesh player has won all four. Old world cards placing extra nobles/heroes has helped to a large degree, but the Slaanesh dial advancement strategy seems very powerful. I still believe that it is equally possible for any of the gods to win any game, but Old world cards do play a large part in game outcome. The balance is definitely there though, if subtle at times.

I have played 2 games thus far and lost them both; each time as Tzeetch. 1st Game: Slaanesh won by Victory. 2nd Game: Khorne won by Dial Advancement. I will say that throwing troops to Khorne is a bad idea. He wants to kill something, make him work for it.

I have played twice so far. Slanesh has won both.

Tzeentch won our game jumping away with the teleport from the fighting masses corrupting far from the others.

I've only played once and my initial thoughts were that it was far too easy for Khorne to win. The game we played last night Khorne won at a canter. When we sat down and thought about it, myself playing Slannesh and the other player, playing Nurgle worked what we'd done wrong and could see the tactics we needed to win, or at least be more competitive.

Slannesh just needs to concentrate heavily on the two regions that start with Nobles in them, and hope that they're close to make life even easier, and load up with cultists and cards that allow you to control other playing peices. Once you get the third or fourth dial reward of adding two extra noble counters to the board then life gets easier, but does offer more targets to Khorne.

Nurgle should load up on one or two regions and corrupt the hell out of them, again offering less targets to Khorne.

I noted that some players also thought Slannesh could win easily. played well I'm sure he (they?) can, but if you get someone playing Khorne who has the sense to play the card that stops you laying corruption tokens, then your game can stall very, very badly!!

I think this game is pretty well balanced and would like to play some more (well a lot more as I totally loved it) and really work out the finner tactics. I suspect with 4 playing that you could eventually end up bogging each other down badly and letting the Old World win!!

I think Khorne and Slaanesh are clearly balanced against each other. Playing a 3 player game yesterday (Nurgle, Slaanesh and Tzeentch) Slaanesh had a runaway victory that the other two couldn't hope to match. I think if I were to play 3 player again, I would make it Khorne, Nurgle and Tzeentch (since Khorne has less enemies, he is naturally more scaled in a 3 player game than Slaanesh)

First and Second Game Tonight.

First Game:
Khorne - Slaanesh - Nurgle = Slaanesh wins by dial ("noble tactic")

Second Game:
Khorne - Nurgel - Tzeentch = Khorne wins by dial & nearly unstopable

We agreed to test a houserule next time ("Khorne needs to kill two or more enemy figures per region in order to score for a dial up"). Otherwise, we deem Khorne to be unstopable.

Sure, there are these "upgrade defense" and "no battle at all" card (Nurgle/Slaanesh)... but you have to HAVE this cards. "Do not get in his way" isn´t that got a tactic. He can seek you out...and you have to defend some area in order to score yourself.

We hope that our houserule isn´t unbalancing anything else, but "Errate as written" we do not see any chance to stop Khorne.


By the way: has any one of you ever RUINED a region?

We ruin a lot of regions. Usualy Nurgle wins through ruining regions and comes back from last place to end up winning. Khorne hasn't won et, but that's because everyone gangs up on Khorne. If you can keep him from getting two clicks for 2 or 3 turns, he can't win.

Khorne does seem to be unstoppable if he gathers momentum. Mind you, we were playing 3 players without Slaanesh so that may have had something to do with it, also the Warpstone Discovery card meant that Tzeentch's tactical advantages all went away (because everyone else was drawing ridiculous numbers of cards and all Tzeentch could do was draw from the old world card, then maybe 1 at the start of turn)

I suspect this game is only really balanced with four players

The 2+ "mistaken" requirement for Khorne is too tough for him. But the 1+ seems too lenient. However, I think with more experience, the other 3 players will be able to stop him and frustrate his plans. If Slaanesh is not in the game to shut down his battles, the other two still have weapons to slow down.

Tzeentcvh has Warp Shield and Teleport which make goood defensive weapons. Changer of Ways can cancel some of Khorne's cards and Tzeentch can reduce Khorne's Power Points to limit what is getting summoned on the board.

Nurgle can focus on his upgrades to battle Khorne. The Plague bearer upgrade makes it expensive for Khrone to keep battling because he will lose his warriors and need to resummon them. The Leper upgrade will allow him to stall and see where Khorne is at and not go there.

But the more important thing is that if Khonre is going after a threat dial win, then the other two need to beat him in their own ways instead of beat him to the punch. If they let him advance his dial 2 ticks a round, the game is over in 5 rounds. That means you need to score more than 10 points a round to stay ahead of him and win "through the backdoor." The best way to average those points is to Ruin regions (which can be done - and it is possible to get all 5 ruined - usually not to end the game but in conjunction with oen of the other game-ending conditions).

So change up your strategy. Focus all you Cultist in one region. You can corrupt the snot out of it and you limit the opportunity for Khorne to collect multiple dial advancement tokens. He won't have enough cultists to stay competitive with the corruption. And if Tzeentch and Nurgle work together, they can shut him out of all ruination points.

Now that we have the correct rulings, we can all focus on coming up with the best strategies no matter who we play and who might be missing from a 3-player game.

I don't find Khorne unbalanced due to the errata. One thing you have to think about is all the other gods don't really have a "random" factor in their dial condition. While Khorne has to roll dice, and for some of us that is a big handicap in inselt. Sometimes those dice will smile upon you and you'll slaughter everything in a space. Sometimes you'll roll those four dice for your Bloodthirster and end up with all misses. It's not a guaranteed kill.

All the other gods tend to have a little bit safer condition as long as you have 2 cultist hang on through the battle phase . . . you KNOW you'll be getting corruption to meet your condition.

We played one last night and Khorne won the game though dial advancement, but it was mostly due to the Tzeentch player just handing Khorne the cultist kill in a region so the could get ahead of the Slaanesh and Nurgle player on the dial and win the second advancement for victory. All the Tzeentch player had to do was move his cultist. It's easy in this game for one oversight to bite everyone in the rear.

empryme said:

There is thread with the FAQ in it which sates that Slaanesh needs 2+ orruption tokens in a region with a Noble or Hero, and Khorne needs 1+ kill per region.

To me, Khorne Dial Advancement is unbalanced.

Yeah, sure. It is "dice" and dice do not work sometimes.

But given that Khorne has "the combat monsters" he is fairly able to able to win by simply using them. The last game we plaid, our Khornite "got the trick" and restrained form placing cultists altogether. He even did not care for victory points. Everything he was after where enemies ("skulls for the throne").

By spending all of his points per round on "spilling blood", he was fairly able to score advances early. After his bloodletters gained "first strike" (to use "Magic" parlance) he had even more points for his plants since his daemons tended to survive the game.

And yes, his dice failed him sometimes. So did ours. In the end, he simply trashed us with ease and glee.

We agreed to try the houserule that Khorne would need to "figure kills" in one region to score a dial advance.

Gregorius21778 said:

according to the FAQ, this is exactly how you should play it. only figures, not peasants.

Johncraven said:

I think he meant it in a different manner . . . let me try to translate.

"We agreed to try the "houserule" that Khorne would need TWO "figure kills" in one region to score a dial advance.

I think you just need to tell the other three players to man up.

The game seems to break down and give Khorne the win if everyone tries to ignore the game and race on their own to victory. Khorne's victory condition ensures that players must be responsibe for their part of the game and try and not only win themseves, but keep everyone else from winning at the same time. Khorne realy is the balance to the game.

SideshowLucifer said:

I agree with this. I tried playing Khorne last night, because people seem to think Khorne is either too strong or not strong enough. Which kind of leads me to believe it's balanced. We were playing with all the current errat/faqs.

The group consisted of myself and another player that had played before, and two new players. Both of the new players, slaanesh and nurgle both quickly got the hang of the game, and are experienced with boardgames/strategy.

Khorne came in dead last in victory points, and was still two ticks away from victory dial at the end. I think this was mainly due to Bretonian knights and witchhunters being our first two old world cards. I would kill and then haemorage minions at the end phase because of all the heros floating around. It made keeping khorne a threat very difficult.

Nurgle won with exactly 50 points, with slaanesh nearly hitting his victory tick if not for khorne doling out some damage. Four nations were ruined by turn five. People were very worried about tzeentch, with meteor shower being our third OW card, there was a lot of warp stone of the map, and everyone kind of ganged up at that point.

All in all, good game, all players are eager to try again.

SideshowLucifer said:

If everyone plays thier own game without regard to what else is going on the board, then yes this will happen.

However, if you interact appropriately with the other gods/regions/cards- the game become much more fluid depending on dice rolls, card, draws, and of course how you implement your strategy.

Castling, ingnoring, or doing your own thing only ensures that you finish near the back while one of the other gods get an 'easy' win.