Warcry review

I really like Warcry. I haven’t had a chance to play it for… five days? Now? And I literally can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve instantly found a faction in the Untamed Beasts: the synergies and strategies were immediately clear to me when I began to play with them, and that’s not something that happens often. The game is fun; actually sitting down to play never takes more than an hour, there is a fluidity to the game that is never overly simplistic, and the models and scenery just look great on the table. I’ve yet to get into the actual campaign portion of the game but it is fleshed out in a way that I didn’t expect. There’s a lot of character to it, and thats neat.

The character, really is the key here. See, the immediate comparison one can make to Warcry is Kill Team, its Warhammer 40,000 cousin. Both are skirmish games, both take place on a small field, both are designed around a modification of the core rules of the larger tabletop war-game they draw from. Now, anyone who’s followed me on twitter or knows me IRL knows that I’m not a fan of Kill Team. It’s very imbalanced, still feels incomplete after three expansions and comes across as very unfocused and messy. I think that’s because Kill Team is trying to be all things to all players. It isn’t set anywhere in particular, doesn’t focus on any one conflict or area. The possibilities for Kill Team are endless, but that’s more of a drawback than you’d think. By not being set anywhere in particular, it’s difficult to grasp what kind of engagement Kill Team is trying to portray. Elite teams facing off against each other? Desperate soldiers cut off from the rest of their army? A chance encounter between two patrols? It’s not clear. As a result, the rules are open ended, a slight modification of the existing 40k ruleset. A change to moving and charging to encourage dynamism, cover rules making shooting less effective, flesh wounds… for some reason. Because attrition is fun for someone, I suppose. It all feels very vague, and with all the available units being essentially direct translations of their main 40k counterparts, there are some factions that simply are more effective than others, have more options and can mitigate the negative modifiers the game throws at you much more easily.

Warcry, on the other hand, is less broad in its remit. In a way, it has to be. Even though Age of Sigmar has been a thing for a few of years now, the world is still only partially fleshed out. We only know so much about it, and therefore, a small part of it can be stuffed with new and exciting things to explore and create. Setting the game in the Eight Points is smart, it can be representative of the entirety of the Mortal Realms without actually being set in the Mortal Realms as a whole. It defines the narrative core of the game, too. These war bands are here for glory. They wish to make a name for themselves, and thats the purpose of the engagements here. For the other non chaos factions, their purpose is laid out too, from hunting down lost Stormvaults to looking for a challenging fight to… well… listen, good glassware is hard to come by, all right?

As well as having a focus on the place, it has a focus on the people. Each faction in Warcry feels like it has been designed explicitly for Warcry. Admittedly, some of the non-chaos factions feel a little bloated (Daughter’s of Khaine, I’m looking at you), but thats mainly because of the way the game handles weapon options. The designers have asked ‘how do we want this faction to play, within this ruleset, and how does that manifest on the field’. Designing factions specifically for the game, surprise surprise, gets around the weird disparity of Kill Team, where one faction can have dozens of options, and one faction very few, simply based on the options available in the requisite retail boxes. The factions in Warcry speak to specific style of play, first and foremost, and that’s communicated visually on the models. It helps that, regardless of faction, the models themselves are stunning.

So, Warcry has focus. That focus gives it character, and that character is clearly established in the rules. If Kill Team wants to try and be everything, Warcry wants to be one very specific thing and it nails it. Warcry wants to have the players acting out this exciting, dynamic action scene, with heroes leaping off walls and knocking each other off ledges and kicking seven bells out of each other. Warcry wants your fighters to do more than the core rules would normally let them, the central system of special abilities activated by dice multiples lets fighters go beyond their normal two actions per activation. The designers recognise that in a good action scene, when the camera focuses on a given character, like, really focuses on them, they need to do something special. The dice multiple mechanic is that camera focus. It’s designed to make standout actions happen, so the players say, ‘oh, do you remember that bit when…’. They players are staging an action scene in real time in front of them. It’s impressive.

Warcry is able to do this because the rules aren’t just slightly modified Age of Sigmar rules, either. Any fat has been stripped away to create a very simple ruleset that, actually, is what lets players do cool things. Very simple rules for climbing and leaping and falling set up great cinematic moments that you can be sure will happen because there are no rolls needed. You just know whats going to happen, a smile creeping on your face as your leader hurls himself off a platform and into hammer range of some poor sod camping an objective. In Warcry, something will always happen, and it’ll be cool. Whether it’ll be effective is another matter, not every hammer swing hits, and, sometimes, your leader rolls his ankle making that leap, takes some damage and gets eviscerated by the enemy he was trying to have a go at. But, the point is, he made it into combat so cool things could happen, either way.

Warcry could’ve been a hard sell, to be honest. It is a game that primarily focuses on one faction in the universe (chaos). It has a very simple ruleset that could’ve easily been simplistic, but is still exciting to play. Honestly, the models themselves are, in a lot of ways, a tonal shift from a lot of the other Age of Sigmar range, and that could’ve put people off. But it all works. It all comes together in a way that is truly greater than the sum of its parts. I would *love* for Kill Team to go in this direction, with focus and more unique rule and models. Like Necromunda, for example, but less crunchy. We had a good old conversation about setting a 40k Warcry-style game in the arenas of Comorragh. I’m still not sure of where Warcry goes from here, how they expand on these factions and such, but I’m positive there’s good stuff in the works. I can’t have been the only person to notice the ‘gargantuan’ runemark in the rulebook…