Play A Love Letter To Classic Mordheim With Black Death City

If you're a fan of 90s Warhammer and old-school wargaming, you'll want to check out Sam Pearson's love letter to the likes of Mordheim, Necromunda, and games of that ilk, Black Death City, available to download for free right now.

Black Death City // Sam Pearson

Black Death City comes from Sam Pearson, who is well known for his work on Games Workshop games like Warcry and Spearhead. Two games that are widely considered some of the best that Games Workshop has put out in a while. As well as taking time to make videos about the process of game design on YouTube, Pearson has now turned their attention to bringing their game, Black Death City, to life.

Core Concepts // Black Death City

When you dive into Black Death City, you'll find a few familiar concepts. You will explore a blasted and wasted city where you will make a warband of around a dozen miniatures and skirmish with other warbands as you fight for resources and riches. This will play out over the course of a campaign (eventually) where your fighters will gain experience, suffer injuries and slowly but surely expand their control of the city, gaining influence and renown/infamy.

Scenario // Black Death City

Where Black Death City differs from older games like Mordheim is that the mechanics are in-depth but without the grind. The game shares plenty of DNA with games like Warcry and Warhammer 40,000 Kill Team but all wrapped up in that retro, 90s feel. A good example of this is that whilst many modern games would make things very "clear-cut", Black Death City makes use of templates, scatter dice, miscasts and more. All the things that help with emergent narrative on the tabletop.

Death Covens // Black Death City

The game also features easy-to-grasp rules from the off. It's a skirmish game where each miniature acts individually using alternating activations. A fighter can make one move and one action in any order. You can normally move, run, charge of disengage and then use your action to hide, melee attack, ranged attack or use arcane abilities.

The game also uses a duelling system for melee, which is similar to that of Kill Team. Both players will roll their attacks and then you spend your turns working out if you want to land an attack or use a successful hit to parry an enemy hit. Armour still plays a part but you'll have to make decisions in the moment. Do you let that attack through, hoping your armour will take the blow, just so you can land that extra hit on your enemy and hopefully take them out?

Of course, skills, the choice of weapons and the actual profiles of the fighter will come into play, which adds to the depth of Black Death City. If you'd like to know more, check out Pearson's video on the game below...

Black Death City Overview // Sam Pearson

Rules currently cover the basics of gameplay, with campaign rules to follow. You will also get rules for playing four of the eight proposed factions. You can choose between the Guild Mercenaries, Verminkin, Death Covens and The Blighted Cloister.

Black Death City is, as you might have guessed, miniature-agnostic, and there is already an excellent community growing for the game. You can find more links to all of that over on the Black Death City website. As a lover of classic Mordheim, this might be the great spiritual successor that we've been looking for!

What do you think?