Review: Warhammer Invasion - Assault on Ulthuan

A few weeks back I was able to pick up the first major expansion for Warhammer Invasion. In my previous review of the base game I went over some of the mechanics and told you what we generally thought about the game. Since then we have played a few more games and even got one in with the new expansion. Read on for my take on what the expansion offers and what we think of the game after a few more plays.


There have been several other smaller expansions for Warhammer Invasion. These sets have added new cards for all the factions. The Assault on Ulthuan does more than this. It has added two new playable races to the game - High Elves and Dark Elves. The expansion comes with two starter decks for the High Elves and Dark Elves as well as some new creature, tactic, quest, and neutral cards.

The High Elves and Dark Elves play really differently from the other factions. The High Elves have a ton of powers that let them heal their units where the Dark Elves (for some strange reason) have a quite a few creatures with toughness and also focus on denial tactics. The High Elves creatures seem to either be very weak or really stout. One good example is the Swordmasters of Hoeth - they ignore all combat damage. Talk about being hard to remove.

The Dark Elves have a few really hard to deal with creatures - Morathi's Pegasus has toughness three unless you pay three resources to remove it, this makes it really hard to get rid of. Something else the Dark Elves have quite a bit of is negative Attachment cards. These cards will usually keep you from attacking or subtract a hit point from your units (very useful for picking off weak units or damaging units with toughness.)

In the last several games we have played the Orcs have come out on top. They are able to build up such a strong force so fast that they are hard to deal with. Most of the games we have played have been 2v2 as well so this might have something to do with it.

In the first game we played with the new expansion we decided to leave the Orcs in the box and then we randomly drew from the other races. We ended up with a team of Dwarves and High Elves vs. a team of Chaos and Dark Elves.

We didn't use the draft method as we started this up after a few games of 40k and it was getting late. Instead we all just used all the cards for our factions and we randomly dealt out the neutral cards.

The game got off to a much slower start without the Orcs. It was a turn or two into the game before things started getting really heated. With the superior defenses of the Dwarves my High Elves came under quite a bit of fire. The Chaos player also felt quite a bit of wrath since he just wasn't able to draw any good cards.

As the game went on the archetypes of each race really moved to the forefront. It was nigh impossible to really damage the Dwarves capital - he just kept healing it. The same turned out to be true for my High Elves units - if you didn't kill a unit outright it would be healed up at the next turn.

This combination proved to be too much for the Chaos and Dark Elves player. With no consistent way to heal their Capitals or Units we slowly wore them down over a really long game.

I think one of the more interesting things about this game would be the deck construction. We haven't done very much of that as we only play it every once in a while. I would really like to sit down and make up a few decks and see how differently the game plays when you have put some time and thought into building your deck instead of just throwing everything you have in it.