WarCry

[me_in_japan]

Well, I finally managed to get in a game of WarCry yesterday. Three, in fact, and given the amount of booze being consumed, that's pretty solid evidence that WarCry's system is actually pretty damn fast (and simple, in fact.) I went to chez Spevna (Spev says hi, y'all), and I put down my Witch Elves against his Big...Orcy Things. I dunno what the technical name is. Big orcy buggers with armour and choppas and whatnot. Anyway, my thoughts on the system are...

The good:

• Fast. Really fast. A sober player who was actually paying attention and was at least passingly familiar with the rules could easily get a game done in 30-45 mins.

• Lots of variation in scenario and set up. The card system works very well.

• Interesting mechanics. The initiative dice roll especially is great. Essentially the way this works is: At the start of the turn, you roll 6 dice. Whoever has more single dice (ie unduplicated) gets the initiative for the turn. BUT doubles, triples etc are very useful later in the turn to activate special actions. Thus, a single dice roll has multiple pros/cons, and uses. Very clever. There's also a bit of tactical stuff with a Wild Dice each turn, that you can choose to add to any of the dice you rolled to turn a single into a double, etc. But that's just gravy on a clever basic concept.

• Alternate activation. Amen.

• Critical hit rolls. This really adds spice to every attack. A basic hit tends to do 1 damage (some orcs were doing 2), but a crit can mess you up real bad, especially the witch elf archer snake ladies, who had a nasty special action that could see them plugging some poor orc for 20+ damage in a single shot. Sure, the odds are stacked against it, but when it lands? Beautiful.

• Easy to transport - it's a skirmish game, so...

The bad:

• Maybe a little too fast? There were a couple of moments where I might've liked to go another turn, but the game said nae.

• I can imagine that occasionally a scenario would just flat out screw a player from the get go. For example, one scenario had me choose a model at the start of turn 2, and Spev had to kill her by the end of turn 4 to win. Buuuut, his guys are move 3. My guys are move 5, 7, or 12, depending. Regardless, if a witch elf dont wanna be caught, no orc is gonna catch her. (it wasnt as though he had overwhelming numbers - we both had 8 in our warbands.)

• Some units seem quite powerful compared to others. The archer snake ladies in particular were bloody lethal, and I only had 2. I can imagine a warband of 5 or 6 of them would be a nightmare to deal with for any warband that wasnt extremely fast or had equally good ranged weapons of their own. (The trouble with the snake ladies was: they had lots of health, reasonable toughness, and could shoot someone to death with a single volley from right across the board, if they got a lucky shot (needing 6s), which mine did. Repeatedly. To be fair, when an orc hit them, they stayed damn well hit.) But, I was deliberately not playing evasively, as that would've been very frustrating for Spev. It may just have been a bad matchup. *shrug*

Overall, though, a big vote of yay for WarCry from both myself and Spev. Will definitely play again. Also, here are some pics...


aforementioned poor bugger about to get pegged in the eyeball...


my leader and his leader having a barney


the bottle caps were objectives...


spev's terrain was, as always, very nice. The table was actually modular, with 8 swapable sections.


a game...


Hmmn. Raging Heroes. Not afraid of a twiddly bit or two...


izzat a bow she's got up there? Naaah, can't be...

*whishthunk*

Nazgob? Oi, Nazgob, stop muckin' abaht and gerrup!
*
*
*
oh bugger...




mmmmmn. Cheese....
and crackers (two kinds!), and fried chicken, and ham, and salami, and crisps and beer. For once we were not muckin' about with the snacks...


All in all, a great day of gaming. Many thanks to Spev for hosting

[Primarch]

Nice looking spread on that table. The game looked pretty too.
Some more line of sight blocking terrain would probably help limit your snake-girls a little. The fact that you could pick off a guy from clear across the table seems like a good advantage.
The 'nominate a model to survive' missions are very disadvantageous to the attacker if the defender gets to choose them and has no motivation to move them out of cover. Perhaps a Malifaux-esque tweak where the attacker secretly chooses one model before deployment and the defender has objectives that encourage them to move forward would work?

Is there any kind of experience system in Warcry? Can you expand your warband at all?

[Jye Nicolson]

Glad you had fun!

You can get screwed very easily by the card draw for scenario, especially since you don't have that information when you form your team (unlike Kill Team where most factions have answers to most situations and you draw from your roster to suit). There's a couple of approaches to this:

1. Rub some dirt in it and play again
2. Use the matched play subset of cards/scenarios, which are intended not to do this.

That being said I'd be a little worried trying to play keep away from Orruks; they're slow as a wet week but a good Triple for Waaagh! and they can start rocketing around the board, particularly if they have a double too for Charge on a key unit.

Ranged attacks are super good, and the AoS factions that can take them can spam them in a way the Warcry factions can't easily match (without kitbashing at the very least). Last week's FAQ did limit them a little by making the basic +1 attack Double only work on attacks with range 3" or less, which helped rein in the Stormcast a bit.

[Jye Nicolson]

Is there any kind of experience system in Warcry? Can you expand your warband at all?

The campaign system gives magic items, commander traits and rerolls for your troops, and lets you increase your point limit as you go. The latter resets when you finish your campaign quest and start a new one.

The interesting bit is the campaign is an individual one - you could theoretically play the same campaign warband at a gaming club, FLGS and home games, as long as your opponents were on campaigns of their own. I haven't actually started a campaign though, most people are still just starting the game and learning the ropes.

[The Other Dave]

Wish I could have made it - if I'd known there'd be cheese and salami I might have dared two days in a row of gaming!

I wouldn't be particularly surprised either if the AoS factions had less playtesting than the "core" factions either - speedy, ranged-attacking snake elves versus slow, non-ranged-attacking orcs seems a particular edge-casey sort of setup.

More generally to the thread, I'm pretty excited about the game. I've only played a couple matches, but was pleased that my night goblins did so well, and really liked the quick play nature of it. It's definitely a lot "smoother" of a game than, say, Necromunda or Kill Team, and while I do enjoy the occasional extra-crunchy gaming experience with lots of complex moving parts, I've also come to appreciate a simple ruleset that allows you to get gaming quick without referring to the rulebook a lot. Personally I'm not too upset by the occasional difficult-to-win scenario the random missions might throw up, as asymmetrical scenarios have always appealed to me. (But then I did play night goblins in WHFB, so. )

[Primarch]

I'm running hot and cold on Warcry, the models are gorgeous, even the ones I don't like (Cypher Lords) look well designed. The terrain is likewise awesome and I'd be tempted to pick some up if it were available* and reasonably priced. Smooth game-play with alternating activations sounds like my cup of tea too. But at the same time, it seems like there isn't a great deal of crunch to the game, not much under the hood so to speak. While there were parts of Mordheim's combat system that were too grindy (I knock you down, you stand up, knock me down, rinse, repeat), and we aren't really a good group for campaign style play, I do appreciate a bit of granularity in my games. This is especially true in smaller model count games imho.
Of course, me being me, I'm sure this opinion is rather too curmudgeonly for the majority, so feel free to ignore my grumblings.

*I haven't looked yet to be honest.

[The Other Dave]

A couple previews.

The first of the Spire Tyrants, the elite ex-gladiator faction, and it looks... well, not so good IMO:

That could be in the dictionary under "uninspired," I tell you what.

But they're also releasing a new recruitable monster guy:

Whose name I forget, some kind of Proper Noun Crusher, but I love him and may need to get the monster supplement after all. Very Lord of the Rings, in a good way.

@Primarch - a late reply, but! One of the nice things about WarCry is that a demo will only cost you about 30 minutes of your life, but WarCry is a good deal lighter rules-wise than Kill Team, which ISTR you didn't like because it wasn't crunchy enough for your skirmishing tastes. So...

[me_in_japan]

Something I’ve noticed with GW’s recent non-main games is that they seem to be moving away from “one long game” to “as many short games as possible”. Maybe it’s juts the Magic player in me, but I kind of feel that this is a positive change, as it allows for inconsistencies in luck to level out a bit. So, rather than viewing one single game of Warcry as the Warcry experience, consider it more of a best-of-three match? (Or whatever). This allows players to adapt more to their opponent and suchlike. What I mean is, the gameplay is a bit more meta than the older, cruncher games.

[The Other Dave]

Yeah, I kind of feel like the way the missions work, since you're not guaranteed a matchup that perfectly (or even particularly) gives the same odds of winning to both sides, there may be a lot of "doing the best with what you have" on an individual per-game basis, which (IMO) can really ask you to flex your tactics muscles more than in a "both sides have perfectly balanced 1500-point armies and mirrored objectives" game. So you may occasionally have a game where it's going to be very hard to succeed at your objectives, but you try anyway, and it'll be done in a half hour at any rate. (That said, I'm coming from a place of loving asymmetric forces and objectives in wargames, and thinking "balance" is sort of a pie-in-the-sky ideal anyway, so.)

I also think the simplicity of the campaign system is tailored for groups like ours, since there's no particular need for all participants to be at the same stage of their campaign story (plus the narrative campaign stories are quite fun). Part of that, in some sense unfortunately, is because there's next to no "leveling up" - you'll get an occasional one-use magic item, once-per-game reroll, or extra ability (which gives more options, but competes with resources with the base abilities of your faction), but there's no XP tracking or stat improvements - and part of it is because the 10 or 20% extra points you might have to spend on your force over your opponent is going to be mitigated by staggered deployment and mission objectives (but cf. my comments above about asymmetry and balance).

[Primarch]

The following comes with the caveat that I haven't played Warcry yet and as such is just a general set of opinions rather than a specific commentary on the merits of Warcry itself.

Something I’ve noticed with GW’s recent non-main games is that they seem to be moving away from “one long game” to “as many short games as possible”. Maybe it’s juts the Magic player in me, but I kind of feel that this is a positive change, as it allows for inconsistencies in luck to level out a bit. So, rather than viewing one single game of Warcry as the Warcry experience, consider it more of a best-of-three match? (Or whatever).

Hmm, I have never played MtG Best of 3, just Best of 1. But then I don't play MtG all that seriously and prefer casual decks that I have slung together over the built to win, tier 1 power decks.

Back on the topic of wargaming, or in this case, skirmish-gaming. I'm not an adherent to the less-is-more theory of games rules, at least at this scale. Sure, if I have 300 plus figures on the table, I don't want to go into too much detail about what each of them had for breakfast before the battle or what they plan to do on their next holiday. If there are only a half dozen guys per side though, I like a bit of depth to the rules.
As far as gaming goes, I am time-poor in that I can't get to gaming events as often as I would like. If I do make it to a game, I can usually spend the day playing. So, I either have 0 hours or I have 6 hours for gaming. So maybe I could get 6 games or more in of something fast and simple, but my preference would be to play 2 games with a bit more complexity to them. I guess that if you're trying to get a game in over your lunchbreak, or in a busy FLGS after work in the evening, a 30 minute game is ideal. Your mileage may vary of course, and everyone has different opinions about these things.

As for the new minis, neither of them does much for me tbh. The crow guys and the snake guys were all kinds of awesome, but the guy in the Borat mankini is (while nicely sculpted), an awful model and the big fellow isn't doing much for me either.

Tl;dr