While the majority of the 40k world is continuing to burn itself down over the Votann and there may be some Age of Sigmar players getting excited for the Tzeentch release I noticed that the new expansion for the Cursed City game was announced.
For those of you who don’t remember, one of the big “catastrophes” of 2021 was the launch of the new Warhammer Quest game and it’s immediate disappearance. For months people guessed that the game was dead. GW seemed unwilling to provide any updates and it looked like they had abandoned the project. It has since yo-yoed in and out of stock and there doesn’t seem to be a clear idea of how to stock or manage it. The game isn’t found on the GW website (even though they could list it as “Out of Stock”) and so releasing this now is a head-scratcher.
As a game itself Cursed City is: okay. It has some fun mechanics but the base game becomes a bit of a slog. Some individuals in the community have been doing yeoman’s work in coming up with ideas to smooth out the games play and add more challenge. Cursed City really needs a good set of expansions to turn it into a quality game and make it more fun. Will this expansion do that?
The expansion itself adds a few new enemies. It is set after the events of the main game which is not good. Getting to the final battle in the main game is a huge slog. The promo does announce that there are three new types of mission which might be helpful in breaking up the monotony. The expansion adds rules for:
- Radukar the Beast $55
- Fell Bats $55
- Vampire Lord $33.50
- Lady Annika $35
- Kritza the Rat Prince $35
Now some of you guessed that these characters were intended for Cursed City on release as they don’t really fit into the Soulblight book intuitively. This seems to confirm that this expansion was due out much earlier but was delayed forcing the models to be released first. It also brings up a huge issue with this release. Non of these models are included in the expansion. If you wanted to get all of the official models for the game you would have to spend $213.50 in order to afford it, on top of the price for the expansion itself – _ –
Now you can lower the cost by getting the models more slowly, kitbashing options, using tokens, or many other ideas. These prices are the GW prices and you can see that FLG has them at a more palatable price point. In one sense this is ideal as the expansion might have sold for $150 but you might be able to just get the bits you like for a lower cost. However I am not keenly watching to see what price this stripped down expansion is as they don’t have much room to ask for a high price.
Conclusion:
This all bodes ill for the future of the Cursed City game. this release strikes me as an attempt to recoup their costs while moving on. I could be completely wrong here though. It is possible that with the release of the other models they didn’t think it worth it to release the rules as a set. If you already own many of the mentioned models this could be a boon as you don’t have to buy them again. However, as someone who really likes the core set of rules for this game, and who wants to see it develop I can’t help but feel this is the beginning of the end. What do you think? Am I being morbid? Let me know in the comments!
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