Wyrd unveils Malifaux Fourth Edition campaign and cooperative modes for summer book

Wyrd Games has pushed Malifaux Fourth Edition past a straight rules refresh. Its next book, Index of the Untold, is set for summer 2026 and will bring both campaign rules and a cooperative mode, a sign that Fourth Edition is expanding into story-driven play instead of staying locked to competitive tech.

The campaign system is the part hobbyists will be measuring against their backlog. Wyrd said players begin by choosing two keywords to combine, regardless of faction, with examples like Urami plus Fae and Red Library plus Chimera. From there, a player builds a master by selecting an archetype and pulling actions and abilities from those keywords, then grows the crew card over time as the campaign progresses.

That progression is where the hobby payoff starts. The aftermath phase adds equipment, injuries, an Aftermath Hand, and a Back-Alley Doctor, along with gear that ranges from standard weapons to stranger tools such as a Strange Portal. In practical terms, Wyrd is building a system that rewards crews that feel like a cast, not a shelf of interchangeable stat cards. That is good news for painters who like themed schemes, weathering, and basing that tell the same story from game one to game six.

The company’s own examples point to the kind of builds this mode is meant to encourage. A haunted-forest pairing or a more chaotic, monkey-heavy combination fits the direction Wyrd is taking, where faction walls matter less than the identity of the crew on the table. For anyone deciding whether to start a new faction, the message is clear: the safest purchases now are models that can carry strong narrative presence and flexible paint jobs, because the new rules are leaning hard into custom crews and personalized progression.

Cooperative mode is the other half of the announcement, letting players work together against the game and its non-player models in a puzzle-oriented format. Wyrd also said the campaign content is only half of Index of the Untold, which makes the book feel less like a side expansion and more like the next step in how Malifaux gets played.

That broader direction fits the rest of the Fourth Edition rollout. Wyrd launched the edition with an official announcement on April 14, 2025, and has since supported it with a free core rules guide, a searchable rules database, FAQ support, card downloads, and organized-play resources. Its AdeptiCon 2026 presence, including Malifaux Fourth Edition Learn to Play and Tyrant Tournament events, showed that the game is already being pushed as an active ecosystem. For collectors planning the next six months, the signal is not to pause, but to build around crews that can live in more than one mode.