I think most wargamers, even historical ones who claim they want nothing to do with things outside of history books, find themselves having to decide if they prefer fantasy or sci-fi. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, it’s easy enough to enjoy the two side by side, but deep down, everyone has a preference for the sword or the blaster. Except Star Wars fans who cheat by combining the two.
For me, I’m very much a fantasy man. The infinite worlds and galaxies are fun, but they don’t compare to some good low-level fantasy, the struggle of the ordinary human versus things monstrous and fantastical amongst the mud. Warhammer Fantasy may have lighted the spark, but things like the Witcher (games and books, ignoring the show as much as I can after season 2) and the game Battle Brothers allowed me to play around with it.
You might expect me, after an intro like that, to go into discussing the return of the Old World that comes out this weekend. But as much as I love the setting, big-ranked battles have never grabbed me as much as controlling a small set of stone-cold killers in a skirmish game (and saves me having to paint 10,000 figures). This can in fact be tied back to lying in bed sometime around the millennium, reading about the (at the time) upcoming game Mordheim, and becoming entranced in the artwork and depictions of warbands fighting through the ruined streets. I would never actually play the game (it would be some time before I was allowed to spend that much money on a single box) but the concept of it would lodge itself in my brain.
GW stopped supporting Mordheim in the early 2000’s (they instead gave us more editions of this little indie title Warhammer 40k) but they do offer an alternative for small-scale fantasy games – Warcry. Beloved by friend of the blog Moments of Inertia, as well as a big chunk of my wargaming colleagues at work AND on the internet in general, Warcry is a skirmish game using all the factions of the Age of Sigmar setting but in a very different set of core mechanics. There is a focus on smaller battlefields with lots of terrain to fight in and overall pulled together by card-based system to decide the exact details of what you’re about to play.
It also so happens that in 2020-2021 I collected a lot of Warcry stuff, starting with the Catacombs box before expanding it with a pile of extra pieces such as various terrain packs and Age of Sigmar figures. We’ll talk about that collection later but the core thing here is that I have everything I need to play the game. So, why not get it on the table?
For my first game, I challenged my former housemate and Necromunda enthusiast to a game. This worked especially well as a few Christmas ago I bought him a set of the bird men (Corvus Cabal) mostly because he thought they looked rad as hell. Little did he know he’d soon get to use them on the table (rather than as some conversion parts for Necromunda). I took my Chaos Warriors (the few GW Fantasy figures I’ve actually painted up) meaning I had six figures on the board (Khagra Ravagers with a few friends), while he had 8 squishy bird things and a Darkoath Chieftan to keep us in a similar points value. Then we realised we had different versions of the army lists so the points were closer than we originally thought but it’s fine!
We laid out the terrain and I’ll be honest, we needed a lot more platforms – Corvus Cabal’s whole thing is leaping from high places and gaining bonuses so being stuck on the ground did cripple them slightly. After that we rolled out the cards to determine the deployment, objectives and twist. Warbands in Warcry split into three parts (Dagger, Shield and Hammer) with icons determining where the three groups deploy. This actually played into the objective draw quite well – I rolled off to be the defender, meaning the birdies would need to take out my Hammers within 4 turns. The problem was the Hammers didn’t arrive until turn 2 while the big hitters for Corvus wouldn’t arrive until 3, giving the A hard ask for the Cabal. The twist ended up being something we only tried once (spend an action to potentially receive a bonus wild dice to the initiative phase) but there is some monstrous stuff hiding in there.
I won’t do a blow-by-blow but instead, we’ll talk over some high points. The first thing that struck us was the Initiative Phase. Rolling six dice to decide what you can do may sound familiar to fans of Chain of Command but this game uses it slightly differently. The dice rolled either help you to gain the initiative (by rolling large numbers of singles) or gives you the resources needed to use your characters’ special abilities (doubles, triples and quads). This is then enhanced by the wild dice – you gain an additional one every turn, letting you adjust the dice you’ve rolled (adding it to your singles for a chance to grab the initiative or tweaking your ability dice) or to save for a mad splash on turn 4. This is the sort of stuff I love, forcing you to think on the fly rather than simply working out the most optimum play beforehand and running through the motions.
Players take turns activating figures, with every activation giving you two actions. The action list is giant and all-encompassing and… well it’s 4 entries. Movement is simple (using your movement value), attack we’ll cover below, Disengage lets you leave a combat if you’re within 1″ of an opponent and Wait lets you spend an action now to spend an action later. Waiting also lets you use reactions, a new feature of the second version of Warcry – this allows you to use unactivated or waiting characters to perform special things, such as countering enemies or putting in one final hit on someone trying to disengage.
When you first read the unit cards for Warcry, the number of wounds may seem rather than high, making you think this is a game of slugging back and forth. Well good news, combat is fast and deadly. Rather than rolling to hit, to save and armour save, combat is a single roll. Get the number of dice equal to your attack value, compare strength vs toughness to determine target value (1 and 2 always miss, 6 is always critical), roll them to see if you get regular attacks or a critical. Regular damage is usually around 1 or 2 per hit, but criticals can slam home with massive amounts of damage, made worse if you start to stack crits. OH, and you can attack twice in a single turn if you’re already locked in combat. In our game, a light Corvus Cabal fighter charged a Chaos Lord, did a little damage and then got ANNIHILATED when the Chaos Lord activated and spent two attack actions to unleash 8 strength 5 hits on some poor toughness 3 bird boy.
Remember those doubles, triples and quads we rolled at the start? Well, they are used for abilities. Abilities are used in addition to your regular actions and give you some real bonuses. Some provide additional actions, some let you run away quickly or clear off wounds and some let you deal damage directly. Many of them utilise the ability score (the number on the dice used to make the combination) to make their effects more variable and give you more to think about when you use them. I was a big fan of using the shield bash one of my warriors had to get in close and smack people around before attacking while the bird boys utilised part of the terrain to gain additional damage thanks to Death From Above giving bonus move AND attack actions.
In the end, the birds tried their best and get VERY close. I lost half of the figures that had to be taken out by the sneaky little rules about not ending a turn within 4″ of the board edge (nice work to reduce hiding in a corner) which meant what had seemed difficulty was now potentially possible. Taking advantage of the high movement of his forces, a few brave fighters pushed hard and almost managed to take down the final warrior, delivering 10 damage against his 16 wounds. With a few luckier dice rolls, victory may JUST have been claimed. The good thing was we managed to play it and reach the end in far less time than our usual games (even with all our faffing around to learn) so potentially in the future we might be able to fit more into an evening’s gameplay.
Once the game was over, how did I feel about it? My actions in the days after probably tells you all you need to know – my opponent and I spent the next day bouncing strategies and listen ideas back and forth to each other, my Sister and I decided to use the Warcry combat for our upcoming campaign (with a few homebrew elements to tie the games together), my usual lunchtime rival and I are planning a game at work and I’m actually going to be playing a game tonight (literally getting in the car to go to it just after this posts) against the Dastardly Regular Opponent and his horde of goblins. Translated, it’s a hit.
There is something about the way that the core mechanics just give you basic information and then get out of the way of the more interesting elements. Combat is fast-paced (without any of the usual back-and-forth hit-wound-save GW games have) and the initiative phase forces you to think on your feet, unable to plan your actions exactly each turn while also forcing you to decide between gaining the initiative or having lots of ability dice around to pull off your most powerful moves.
Now if only I had some kind of device to let me print the type of terrain to use for a Mordheim/Warcry hybrid, letting me send fantasy forces into the ruined streets…
Oh yeah. Let’s talk about that tomorrow…