One major advantage of moving back to Leeds was putting me back in range of my university friends, many of whom have appeared on this blog as what I have jokingly called the Regular Opponents. We have the Creative (the man of big gaming rooms, too much Napoleonics and my 3d printing sensei), we have the Corporate (who also transferred to the same office so I see 3 days a week mostly and got very into playing BPRE against), the Former Housemate (whose love for Necromunda knows no bounds and whose intro Warcry we covered last week) and of course the Dastardly (whose house has probably run more of my games than my own).
I thoroughly enjoy playing games with these guys (hence why they are regular opponents) so when any new wargame systems turn up, I get to have a series of sessions to teach them. Let’s talk about two sessions – one against the Dastardly Regular Opponent on a Saturday evening and the other against the Corporate Regular Opponent during our lunch break.
The Dastardly Regular Opponent and I are both pretty busy people (him more so than me, most of my busy-ness is self-imposed) but we have been trying this year to actually get back to our goal of at least one game a month. It usually means we need to try and fit our gamings in on an evening (especially as any trip over is bookended by a drive between Leeds and York which means when it comes to picking our games, it needs to be either something that we know mostly already (Chain of Command usually fits in this slot) or something relatively simple to get on the board once I turn up with the figures/rules.
Good news! Warcry fits directly into the second slot. Thanks to Warcrier I was able to pass over the army list builder the night before, meaning when I arrived on a stormy Saturday evening there was a literal horde of goblins sat across the table from me. It took roughly three to five minutes to give the basic instructions and we got to playing.
While the Dastardly Regular Opponent went with a horde of Goblins (14 of the little scrappy bastards in fact), I went for a different Chaos force from my first game. Rather than the heavily armoured Chaos Warrior-focused setup, I instead shifted to using the other half of my painted fantasy guys, using the Godsworn Hunt as its core… and then added an Ogroid Myrmidon for the big stompy boy with 30 wounds. Surely such a monster like that would be able to demolish all those goblins right?
Game 1 saw the Goblins attempting to ambush a group of Chaos Warriors carrying treasure through the area with the conundrum that the figure carrying the treasure wasn’t revealed until later. Naturally being a sensible man I assigned the treasure to my Ogroid and proceeded to laugh my way to victory.
With the deployment we rolled, forces arrived piecemeal, with the last group only arriving on the final turn. This meant that the goblins weren’t able to mass their forces quite as effectively as they may have wished, meaning I could effectively deal with them piece by piece. It also helped that the Ogroid is a monster, literally nailing the boss goblin in the first combat between the two.
However, it wasn’t all my way. The goblins have a few little tricks that give them additional attacks when in a group, while their archery was surprisingly effective against the medium-toughness barbarians (such as my lone archer). This guy didn’t even get to activate as the gobbos literally appeared next to him and proceeded to murder. Warcry is a bloody game, and even with low-damage weapons at weak strength you’re still able to cause havoc with 1/3 of the potential results of each dice rolled.
It wasn’t any help – in the end, the Marauders managed to fight back the goblins, the waves breaking on the Oginoid.
For Game 2, I shifted my force around – dropping the mage and dog, I instead managed to fit in two of my favourite models from this faction, the Darkoath War-Queen and Chieftain. This gave me a hard-hitting core of heroes (alongside the Mymirdon) who I immediately formed into a single group for deployment.
And I was going to need them all – having managed to fight through the piecemeal goblin attack, the reformed Chaos band found itself under attack from goblins with a more innovative tactic of “what if we all attacked in one go”. With the objective Hold Our Gains, I setup my three groups planning to defend the treasure token.
This game was an absolute bloodbath. With one goblin group spawning dangerously close to the token, I decided to use the Ogroid to effectively lock one group in place against the edge of the board, with the Darkoath Chieftan moving in to assist and finish off any stragglers. My opponent and I both laughed at the visual of two heroes being sent against one group of goblins.
And then the goblins gained the initiative and we all stopped laughing when the gobbos started swinging.
And then the goblins won. Turns out with the bonuses generated by various abilities, goblins can put out an impressive number of low strength/low toughness, all which stack up. Two full turns of combat from 4 goblins absolutely did the work, even with the leader goblin getting destroyed in a single round of combat.
In the end though, I managed to succeed by picking up the treasure token and moving into cover as far away from the goblin bows as possible. A little cheesy, but seeing as the goblins had wiped out my force minus the two heroes and the treasure bearer, I was happy to play to win on the victory points alone
Playing at work against the Corporate Regular Opponent has a similar issue. With up to 90 minutes at lunch (thanks flexible work time), we can usually get something but it needs to be quick. Luckily Warcry feels like it was designed to support this – we managed to get setup, learn the game and finish the objective all within the time limit. I’m expecting we’ll be able to play even faster once we learn a little more.
Sadly due to my work’s social media policies, I’m unable to take photos in the office so you’ll just have to deal with my words instead. Seeing as I was providing both of the armies we had Chaos Warriors vs Chaos Marauders in an all-out brawl, with both sides having a big hitter ready for action (the Chaos Lord vs the Ogroid Mymirdon). We rolled up the mission and ended up with the same objective as my first game against the Dastardly Opponent, except this time I was attacking with the Marauders. That mission is only three rounds and it really came down to the wire, with my warband having to run across the map to deal with a heavily defended area that the Warriors had dug in on.
Some key high points began with the Twist – we ended up with an extra initiative dice each turn. This meant we had one more dice in the roll that could either help win the initiative or go towards more cool abilities. We ended up using a lot of special moves, from the constant javelin throwing of the mauarders to the Ravager’s mage pinging characters around the map to give them some mobility. I even got to use the Myrmiidon to swing the game at the last minute, taking a wound off a Warqueen (who had already cannoned across the map to damage the treasure carrier) but in return letting her fight an additional round that took out the mage.
However, the final result was a win for the Chaos Warriors. Even though I managed to absolutely destroy the mage initially holding the token, another of the warriors was able to move in, scoop it up and maintain control of it when the battle round ended. Victory to the Corpo Opponent!
Overall, it’s safe to say that both players had a good time with the game. Warcry was ridiculously quick to get onto the table and teach new people, meaning we were able to get full games in (the Dastardly Regular Opponent even got two games in an evening). The only downside was perhaps learning the pile of abilities and how best to use them, not especially helped by the runemark system which I don’t find especially clear (hence Warcrier’s character sheets with your characters listed on is a must).
In both cases, the Regular Opponents were on board to playing some more, both because it was a fun time but also as a chance to learn which force they would actually prefer to play. The Creative Regular Opponent was grumbling about getting his adventuring Dwarfs out while the Corpo Regular Opponent was look more towards the undead…
Standby for more Warcry soon!