Skaven Ambush Rabbit Hole: Subterranean Tricks, Assassins, and Too Many Ideas at Midnight
We love how often a normal post-game chat turns into a full-on army-building spiral.
It started innocently enough: everyone reporting travel times after the meetup, with the usual tiny victory lap over who got home fastest. Michał made it in 16 minutes, Staś in 14, and naturally there was immediate discussion about fairness because, well, some of us simply live further away.
Then the conversation took the most predictable hobby turn possible and swerved hard into rules tech.
Staś dropped a link for Ender, pointing out that Subterranean Ambush might be a very fun rule for his Army of Infamy idea. That was enough to kick open the door for a proper Skaven theorycrafting session.
Michał immediately jumped in with the thing he had apparently already been talking about earlier that day: Eshin units popping out from inside Skaven units like fanatics or skulker-style surprises. And honestly, this is exactly the kind of sentence that makes us want to build lists instead of going to sleep.
There was one important reality check, of course: the trick costs 120 points. So this is not one of those “free value, why not” add-ons. It is very much in the category of expensive, weird, and therefore extremely tempting.
What really got us excited was the follow-up idea. Michał pointed out that this setup can work like a kind of delivery system for Night Runners. If Night Runners or Gutter Runners are arriving from ambush, they do not necessarily have to appear at the table edge in the usual obvious way. Instead, they can emerge via a Master Assassin who himself appears from inside a unit.
That is such a gloriously Skaven chain of nonsense that we instantly loved it.
A hidden assassin inside a unit, acting like a launch platform for more hidden rats, feels completely on-brand for Clan Eshin. It is sneaky, overcomplicated, and just dangerous enough to make us start imagining all the ways it could either win a game brilliantly or collapse into total chaos.
Michał summed it up perfectly with the comparison that this mechanic feels like it was designed by Xzibit: we heard you like ambushes, so we put an ambush inside your ambush so your sneaky rats can deploy from your sneaky rat.
That is probably the real charm of this whole idea. It is not just about efficiency. It is about building an army that does something memorable. The kind of list where your opponent has to stop for a second and ask, “wait, they come out of where?”
For us, that is peak army-building energy in Warhammer: The Old World. Not just chasing raw power, but finding those interactions that are flavorful, funny, and just a little bit evil.
Will it be worth the 120 points every time? Probably not. Will we keep thinking about it anyway? Absolutely yes.
Sometimes all it takes is one rules link, one half-serious comment, and one midnight Skaven brainstorm to create three new list ideas we now want to test on the table.