Play hard, you’ll forget the fear.
Peter and Will play Warcry, the new tabletop skirmish game by Games Workshop!
When Warcry, the new skirmish-level fantasy miniatures game from Games Workshop, was announced, I immediately groaned at the prospect. Would this be a fantasy reskin of the disappointing Kill Team? If it was, I wasn’t going anywhere near it, because it’s become increasingly obvious to me that GW’s ‘roll to hit, roll to wound, roll to save’ system is antiquated, boring, and just not fun.
So my ears pricked up when I heard that it was going to be a much simpler, faster, fun system. And saints be praised, it is! Stealing a bit from Blood Bowl, the combat is a simple strength vs toughness system with three different roll outcomes. Coupled with an wide selection of card decks that give you thousands of random combinations of terrain setup, deployment, victory conditions and twists, there’s some fresh approaches at work here.
The cherry on the top are the interesting warbands that finally move away from the old fantasy sterotypes and embrace a playful sense of weirdness—though I must admit I did find constructing and painting the spikey Unmade warband (available separately) a chore, and the Untamed Beasts warband in the box is a bit boring. I hope GW pushes this particular envelope even further and creates even weirder, over the top warbands for this game. Because with such a slick, simple system underpinning it, you now have room to overlay some interesting special abilities.
And that’s another great thing about the game—the special abilities aren’t just the usual endless rules you have to remember for each model, but shared abilities that are activated by spending Yahtzee-like combos of dice you roll during the initiative phase. It’s a paradigm shift that makes special abilities special again!
One last thing. Amazingly, this set is actually pretty good value, and I don’t say that very often about GW game—if ever. All that great terrain is fantastic.
Anyway, here’s Will and I playing a game of Warcry: Iron Golems (from the core box) vs Nighthaunts (I had to buy the cards for these Age of Sigmar models separately). Depsite a battle at the end that went on too long, we had a great time and both came away impressed by this new streamlined system. See GW, you can do it if you try—just break free of the past!