Whatever kinds of games you favor, you’re probably aware of Age of Sigmar, Games Workshop’s flagship fantasy battle game, thanks to its stores' up and down global high streets. You may be less aware of its kissing cousin, Spearhead which uses a stripped-down version of the rules and fixed army lists to allow faster, more furious fights that are also more newbie-friendly. It’s proved extremely popular.
Now there’s a new starter set for the format, Spearhead: City of Ash, with pretty much everything you need to play in one single box.
What’s in the Box
Like most Games Workshop products, the initial lid-lift reveals a disappointing sea of grey plastic sprues. Also like most Games Workshop products, once you’ve spent considerable time with sprue cutters, hobby knife and plastic glue, your disappointment will vanish as you stare at battalions of extraordinarily detailed and dynamically posed miniatures, bringing a fantasy battlefield to life as few other publishers can.
To add even more spice to the mix, almost all of these models are brand-new. So if you like either of the two represented factions - the stalwart human warriors of the Cities of Sigmar, or the devious rat-man assassins of the Skaven’s Clan Eshin - you might want to pick up Spearhead: City of Ash just to add to your collection. In addition there’s some really lovely ruined building scenery that will look great in any fantasy battle game you care to add it to.
If you’re interested in this as a starting point for the Games Workshop hobby though, a note of warning: some of the figures are quite difficult to assemble, particularly some of the Skaven. They’re flexibly posed and fragile and it’s worryingly easy to damage bits while you’re cutting them off the sprue and trimming the flash, and frustratingly difficult in some cases to understand how the bits fit together, or to access the necessary surfaces.
Beneath the sprues there’s the nuts and bolts of the game: two rules handbooks, some decks of cards and a double-sided base board to fight your battles on. The books are great, glossy and filled with inspirational photos of fully-painted armies, although for some inexplicable reason the build guide for the miniatures is inside one rather than printed as a separate pamphlet, and it won’t lie flat for easy consultation as you trim and glue. The cards are functional but ordinary and while the board looks great it’s unmounted, so requires a judicious amount of back-bending to lie flat.
Rules and How it Plays
If you’ve ever played one of Games Workshop’s core games before, you’ll be familiar with the basics. Players take turns in an I-go, you-go structure running through the phases of each turn like movement, shooting, charge and melee. Each model has a range of stats: a movement distance in inches, a number of attacks, and target values to hit, wound and armor save. In combat you roll dice equal to the total number of attacks for all models of the same type fighting, trying to equal or exceed the hit value. Those that succeed to roll again, trying to equal or exceed the wound value. Then the target unit gets to try and equal or exceed its armor save value to nullify some of the hits. Anything that gets through this process inflicts a wound which is normally enough to kill a standard trooper model, although elite units and heroes can take greater punishment.
Obviously, this process uses a lot of dice and is highly random. And we haven’t even mentioned the importance of charging where you get a two-dice bonus to your move in an attempt to reach an enemy unit, but stand uselessly still if you roll badly or misjudge the distance. Throwing buckets of dice around is tremendously satisfying and often very exciting, generating lots of critical moments during the battle, but it can also be frustratingly swingy. Instead, Spearhead wants you to engage your head in different ways.
For starters, you don’t win simply by slaughtering all the opposition. Each side of the game board, which is a quarter of the size of a full Age of Sigmar battlefield, has a number of objectives printed on it. Models that touch the objective can contest it by adding up their “control” value: if you have higher control on an objective than your enemy, you control it. The more objectives you control, the more points you’ll get in each of the game’s four rounds, after which they’re totalled up to find a winner.
Although the board is relatively small, and there’s a temptation just to pile in toward every objective from the off, this system encourages planning and forethought. Both generals, for example, have special abilities that allow other units to make surprise moves, allowing for some surprising additions to contesting an objective. Like other Games Workshop games there’s also a strong element of rock-paper-scissors in terms of what units are good against facing off others and this calculus is particularly important when deciding what objectives are worth contesting with what units at different points during the battle.
Spearhead thrives at throwing these kinds of curveballs at the player, altering the parameters of play and the strategies you need. Relics litter the battlefield, lending surprising abilities to nearby units, like a barricade that protects from shooting, or caltrops that are very risky to maneuver near. Like objectives, these can very much be worth fighting over. Each turn also sees a new “twist” card revealed from a small deck, with examples including increasing the value of particular objectives, or allowing units to have the tremendously powerful ability to both move and charge but only if they stick to the roads.
Card play more broadly forms another plank of what makes Spearhead work. Players start with a hand of three cards, each of which has two effects: a “tactics” option to score a substantial amount of extra points, and a “command” text that offers a one-off special effect. The former might involve a foray deep into enemy territory, or slaying the enemy general. Examples of the latter include minor stat buffs or the ability to explode a relic, causing damage to models in the vicinity. You re-draw at the start of each turn, so there’s real use-it or lose-it motivation to engineer situations where you can benefit, further influencing your thinking.
Between dice, cards and maneuver, cramped in by that ever-looming four-turn time limit, Spearhead: City of Ash has a cinematic knife-fight quality that’s highly engaging. The unexpected is always around the corner, forcing you to adapt your plans on the fly and spot possible openings for your cards and special powers to really make a difference. And of course, the twists and turns of fate and strategy also make for an excellent storytelling medium, with lots of memorable highlights, accentuated by the fantastic physicality and detail of the miniatures and terrain.
However, all that narrative drama comes at a price. The cost of so many possible things that can happen in a battle is that you need rules for them. While this is certainly more accessible than the full Age of Sigmar experience, and although the rulebook gives you a very helpful step by step set of tutorials to learn the ropes, there’s a lot of complexity to master. In particular you’ll need to grapple with all the rules for the enemy units as well as things like relics and cards if you want to play well. Don’t mistake this for something you can just pick up and play on occasions you feel like it. Between building fiddly figures and mastering all the special rules, Spearhead requires you to dedicate time to it.
The One Flaw
For enthusiasts, or even those who are new to the Games Workshop hobby, Spearhead: City of Ash has one particular unfortunate flaw. In Spearhead you don’t pick units for your army, but choose one of a number of different pre-selected forces to fight with. In theory all the options are supposed to be roughly balanced, but in practice there’s a fair amount of disparity. The Sentinels of Embergard included here are one of the weaker options around and their opponents, Crixxit's Kill-Pack, are among the stronger. In time, Games Workshop may well tweak the unit stats through FAQs and its online app but right now this is not a fair fight.
Where to Buy
Matt Thrower is a contributing freelance writer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.
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