Together with my friend Jack, I managed to play a few games of Warcry. I must say I went into it without very high expectations, but it really surprised me positively. Let’s just briefly go over the game:

First of all Warcry is a hardcore skirmish game. You would have around 5-10 figures or so – having more than that is difficult for most warbands. The game is based on the current range of Age of Sigmar miniatures, as well as some Warcry specific warbands (and you could easily use your old school models too… but more about that later). The game board is 30” x 22” which might seem small, but works really well for a fast game.

Mechanics:

The game is super simple. Each turn starts by establishing a dice pool and priority: You roll 6 dice, and put aside any doubles, triples or quadruples. The remainder (the singles if you will) is your priority roll – whoever gets more singles gets priority, which means a few things during the turn (amongst others – who will get to start).

The doubles, triples and quadruples, are used during the game turn to activate special abilities for indivual fighters. For instance if you have a Nighthaunt Guardian of Souls (ghost type necromancer) you can raise back a dead model by using a triple. Sometimes the ‘value’ of the double/triple etc. is used (for damage and so on). So if for instance your double was two 6s – the value of the double is 6. Brilliant!

The game turn is alternating activation – first you activate one, then your opponent. Each model gets two actions when activated. Both of the aforementioned statements are subject to change pending the use of abilities by the way… An action can be a move, a retreat, a fight or shoot.

Each fighters has one or more attack profiles that details the range, the number of attacks and the strength and the regular/critical damage of the attack. It is very straight forward: If you are within range, and have any actions left, you can make an attack. To do so, roll your attack dice, and compare strength to toughness of the opponent. The roll to hit is then S>T: 3+, S=T: 4+, S<T:5+. Each hit deals one times regular damage. If you roll a 6 to hit, you have scored a critical hit and you deal one times critical damage for each such hit.

This is more or less the whole core mechanics explained in a page…

In addition to this there is a great scenario/campaign generator built in, that employs 4 decks of cards for setting up terrain, choosing deployment and adding a twist of lemon. I won’t go into detail with these, but simply state that I find it to work very well, for a meet up and play kind of thing.

Buying in

There are A LOT of official models for Warcry. And equally there’s a lot of terrain too… simply put you won’t run out. But each and every Age of Sigmar army is also viable to play in Warcry, and also the Underworlds warbands brought out as splash released, all have profiles in Warcry. I have made a warband from my Underworlds starter set and a Khorgorath I once painted:

The Nighthaunt that I painted last Christmas are another warband also.

But of course, Games Workshop wants to make money and they really should. Because this is an absolute gem. Therefore, the rules and stats are kept in various books you need to buy to play the game. It is difficult, because people tend to work against such schemes. I really like the cardboard stats cards and all the tokens that GW make, but I realise not everyone agrees. I am not going to imply that someone has compiled all the rules into a printer friendly version and put it out there. But…

The warbands are actually super flexible and there is absolutely no reason you couldn’t use your oldschool miniatures collection for Warcry. Unless you’re going to a tournament, in which case I don’t know why you’d be reading this page anyway. Haha!

Here are some examples (used without consent, but in total awe) of warbands with older/alternative figures that could absolutely work in Warcry:

This works just perfectly! Splendid painting is all it takes… you could go for the large bases like Thomas above, but you actually don’t have to. It is as much an advantage as a disadvantage in the rules I think.

Conclusion

I must say that this game seems just perfect to me. No fuss. Quick. Tactical. I love it.