How to Play Nighthaunt in Warhammer Age of Sigmar (4th Edition)

Nighthaunt's army rules lean into being hard to pin down and hard to fully kill, rather than hard-hitting.

• Ethereal: friendly Nighthaunt units ignore negative modifiers to their save rolls (Nagash excepted). Rend simply stops working against you. Combined with a widespread ward save, this makes cheap units surprisingly sticky, though base saves themselves are poor.
• Wards and 2-wound infantry: much of the roster carries an innate ward and, for many infantry, two wounds. You survive by soaking damage over many bodies, not by armour.
• Ethereal Translocation: a command that lets a unit not in combat vanish and redeploy far from the enemy (reported as more than 9" away). This is your core repositioning and objective-grabbing trick.
• Mounting Dread: while enemies are in combat with your Nighthaunt, they suffer a penalty to their control scores tied to the battle round, helping you contest and steal objectives as the game goes on.
• Nexus of Grief: the faction terrain piece supports the army with area effects (reported to hamper nearby enemy command use and to aid your own spirits). Position it to anchor a key objective.

Exact wording and values are paraphrased from current reviews; check the printed rules for specifics.

The 2025 Battletome gives Nighthaunt four battle formations; you pick one when building your list. Each grants an army-wide rule that shapes your gameplan.

• Quicksilver Gheists: the standout mobility formation. Each movement phase pick a unit, roll a dice and add it to that unit's Move, letting it pass through enemies and even end in combat. Widely regarded as the strongest, general-purpose choice (and priced accordingly).
• Shrieker Host: a control pick that stops enemy units in combat with your Nighthaunt hero from retreating, locking a target in place.
• Death Stalkers: hit-and-run specialists. A chosen unit can retreat and still charge and/or shoot, and ignores damage from retreating, so you can disengage and re-strike.
• Royal Procession: grants Anti-charge (extra Rend when receiving a charge) to a couple of units, turning them into a punishing counter-charge anvil.

If you are new, Quicksilver Gheists is the most forgiving and flexible; the others reward specific list themes.

Rosters and points shift each season; confirm current warscrolls before building. Typical staples:

• Chainrasps: the cheap, two-wound anvil. Screen, hold objectives, and soak with wards. Your baseline body count.
• Grimghast Reapers: elite horde infantry that generate extra hits/mortals against big enemy units; your main volume damage.
• Bladegheist Revenants: fast, aggressive strikers that want to charge; good with formations enabling repeat charges.
• Spirit Hosts: durable, high-wound-density chaff for their points, excellent for holding ground.
• Hexwraiths / Dreadblade Harrows: fast cavalry and lone-hero movers for objective grabs and flanking.
• Black Coach: the army's centrepiece monster/war engine, growing more dangerous over the game; a strong hammer.
• Heroes: Lady Olynder (Mortarch of Grief) as a leader/caster, Kurdoss Valentian for command disruption, Knight of Shrouds for buffs and speed, plus support casters/priests (e.g. Guardian of Souls, Spirit Torment, Reikenor). Nagash is a huge allied Death option but sits outside the Ethereal buff.

Build around a resilient objective-holding core plus one or two mobile hammers.

Nighthaunt play as an attrition-and-movement army, not an alpha-strike one.

• Screen and spread: use cheap two-wound spirits to blanket objectives and force the enemy to grind through wards while you score.
• Weaponise repositioning: Ethereal Translocation plus a mobility formation (especially Quicksilver Gheists) let you appear where the opponent isn't, grab objectives, and pick favourable fights.
• Ignore rend, embrace numbers: your defence is Ethereal plus wards plus bodies. Trade cheap units into expensive ones and win on the scoreboard over rounds.
• Time your hammer: hold the Black Coach and hard-hitting units until you can charge on your terms, ideally where Mounting Dread and formation rules give you an edge.
• Contest late: because Mounting Dread scales with the battle round, your ability to contest and flip objectives improves as the game goes on. Don't overcommit early.

• Fighting fair: Nighthaunt lose most stat-on-stat brawls. If you charge into a prepared elite unit without support or a formation trick, you evaporate.
• Forgetting wards and Ethereal: newer players roll saves without applying Ethereal (ignoring rend) or their ward, badly under-valuing the army's durability. Track both every time.
• Wasting mobility: the faction's teleports and extra movement are the whole point. Playing them like a static gunline throws away your main advantage.
• Over-investing in one unit: this is a horde army. Star-unit strategies fail when the opponent focuses it down.
• Where they struggle: armies with heavy mortal-wound output bypass your saves entirely, and elite high-damage lists can out-trade your bodies if you feed units piecemeal. Anti-horde and board-clearing tools also blunt your screens.