Getting started with The Drowned Earth – getting your feet wet…

• Posted on 15 February 2022
• By Simon Thurtle
• Posted in 35mm, The Drowned Earth
• 0

An introduction in The Drowned Earth miniatures game

Getting started with The Drowned Earth – getting your feet wet…

If you read our review of The Drowned Earth (TDE) from Olmec, you’ll know that it’s an awesome, new player friendly game. Featuring a low model count and accessible ruleset, it’s a great game to get involved with.

But where do you start?

What you’ll need.

With any game, there’s certain things that you can’t play without, for TDE you’ll need:

• The Rules
• At least two, different coloured ten-sided dice (D10s)
• A tape measure
• 3’ x 3’ playing space (around 91cm x 91cm)
• Terrain (or boxes) to go on your playing space
• Two armies of 5+ miniatures
• Ideally, an opponent

We’d also recommend that you consider some different colours beads or pieces of paper to make the state of your miniatures, more on that later.

The Rules:

TDE has a lovely, hardback rulebook available, but if you want to spend your money on minis, not paper, you can download the rulebook for free from Olmec here:

https://thedrownedearth.com/free-rulebook-and-card-pdf/

Note, you will need to “order” it, make an account and a link will be sent to your email to download it. But there’s no charge at all.

Dice & tape measure

The game uses two D10s to decide if you’ve succeeded or failed when you take shots, parkour across the table etc. One of the dice decides if you succeed the other decides if you achieve a bonus called a Feat. So, you’ll need two different colours to track if you pass/ fail and/or feat.

There is an official, TDE dice set available too, this has the special feat die and, if you love the look of the game, we recommend you invest!

TDE is based on inches, so you’ll need at least one tape measure which has inches marked on it.

The board

You’ll be playing on a 3’ by 3’ table for most games, which will need terrain for your models to hide behind, sneak around and jump over.

If you have terrain already from an existing game, you can use that. Note that TDE is usually played on jungle environments, so bring out your trees if you have them or head to the local pet shop to pick up some aquarium decorations.

For new players who don’t have their own terrain, here’s some ideas to get you started.

About 25% of the table should be water, so you can easily mark with out with paper or just a tack outline to keep life simple.

The rest should include some areas which are around 2”/ 5cm and others about 4”/ 10cm. TDE features a lot of dynamic movement, so it’s best to have different heights of terrain. You’ll also want to be sure that you can’t shoot from one side of the board to the other or the game will be over pretty quick!

For your first game, keep it simple and only having 2” high terrain will be fine, however. You should focus more on learning the game than your tactics.

Two armies

As with most wargames, TDE uses a point system to define the size of the game. Each model in the game has a points value and you add models into your list until you reach the agreed point value for the game you’re to play.

To get started, we recommend a 100-point game, which will give you about 5 miniatures, more than enough to learn the game!

There is a starter army, consisting of five miniatures and their cards, for each faction in TDE. These come in at around the 100-point mark. The cards in each starter army include the statistics, special rules and point values for each model, so they’re a perfect place to begin your adventures on Ulaya.

As to which you should get?

That’s up to you, but we recommend the “rule of cool”, which ever you like the look of the most!

At the moment, there are five factions:

Artefacters – These guys are all about speed and movement, outmanoeuvring your opponent to strike where they least expect!

Firm – A balanced faction, the firm shoots well, close combats well and moves fine too. Quite a forgiving place to start.

Militia – Do you like guns? Would you like guns with your guns and guys in robot suits? Meet the Militia, you’ll get on so well.

Bondsmen – Is getting up close then punching your enemy in the face your idea of fun? Do you like heavy armour? The Bondsmen are ready when you are!

Wayfarers – The mercenaries of the TDE world. Unique in their own right and also able to be employed by other factions.

An opponent

Okay, we can’t do EVERYTHING for you…

TableTopper recommends

If you can, we’d recommend that you invest in the condition tokens for TDE. As your troops will be climbing, swimming, and going prone during the game (as well as catching fire, passing out and getting blinded if things go wrong), it’s good to have a way to remember who has what.

You can do this with coloured beads or scraps of paper, but the tokens are designed for the job.

Also, the Blast Templates and Resource tokens would be a good move. The Blast Templates are in the back of the rulebook, but the acrylic set is both easier to use and prettier!

Your first game

For your first game, we’d recommend not to worry too much about winning or losing. Just focus on the core mechanics. Chapter 6 contains the scenarios, we recommend the first one, Assassinate as your first game.

It’s a fairly simple kill the enemy leader and hold the objective. So, nothing too complicated and only lasts four turns, so will be done pretty fast.

And that’s it! You’re off. We hope you enjoy your first trip to Ulaya. Head over to our Facebook page to let us know what you think and, most importantly, have fun!