GMG Reviews - WARCRY The Core Book by Games Workshop

The Heart of Ghur, the new 2 Player Starter Set for Warcry comes with a revamped rulebook that includes a re-tooled Narrative Play section and reworked Core Rules that include many of the Updates from the last four years. Let's check it out!
Big thanks to Games Workshop for the complimentary advance copy of the box to review.
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[@JamesMKeegan]

God I hope my warband gets that blood beetle potion, just so my fighters can say, "I ate a bug and now I have its powers"

[@12neef]

Love me some man reads book. Keep up the great content. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾🤩👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

[@elijenkins2181]

Thanks as always for the great in depth review! Warcry is my favourite GW game currently and I can never find any opponents... I am a little divided on this set for that reason as it is a terrific box and amazing minis but I will struggle to find an opponent. :(

[@johnmiddleton4291]

Everyone seems to collect it but no one actually plays it, despite what forums and youtube videos profess.

[@odeegrotsniffer4166]

I got three people into the game with persistence lol. I had to have two painted warbands, painted terrain, and the book, then I literally ran demos for some people at the lgs and over time we now have a group of 4, most of whom were 40k players.

[@wishmeheaven]

I'm not a WH player and I don't understand if you can't find an opponent who purchased the exact same army/boxes as yours, or just another player as a partner to the table to play with in your own copy pvp..?

[@odeegrotsniffer4166]

Thank you! I'm picking the box up now in part because of your review! (I also found a deal)

[@jeffwiese4037]

I look at warcry like it's secretly a warband bash game set in Hyborea but GW didn't want to pay the Howard estate so it's just AoS now, nevermind you can literally build Conan with the Dark Oath warband. Looking forward to getting this set.

[@theredknight1757]

GW had no idea what to do with Warcry. They wanted to sell more models, so they set it in the Eightpoints and sold the new Chaos warbands for it, like the gangs for Necromunda. Warcry sat in a weird place in-between Kill Team and Necromunda. More so with the release of faction cards that now let you make warbands from most of the AoS factions. They later slapped on a hardcore campaign mode with injures and such as per Necromunda/Mordheim. Things got kinda messy. I'm glad to see the actual rules remain mostly intact and polished up a bit. I'm also glad to see the Narrative/Campaign get completely cleaned up and revamped. It still hovers in a place between Kill Team and Necromunda/Mordheim, but it refined and redesigned to sit in that place with rules that don't seem sloppy and slapped together like in 1.0.

[@schooner2000]

Looks like they just cleaned up and tweaked the core rules a bit, not a full rework like KT, with the main change being the reactions.

[@breakupgoogle4584]

I was afraid they were going to go radical changes like with KT2 as well. This core system was great, it didn't need to much change, the addition of reactions feels like a no brainer. Cant wait to see the bespoke reaction for the original warbands.

[@devonaikins9065]

Hell yeah. This is what I've been waiting for. I've been collecting warbands, both Warcry bespoke and otherwise, but the game never quite had enough meat to get the guys invested. But now I think if I supply the warbands for a taste, I'll get them jazzed enough to jump in and start their own.

[@breakupgoogle4584]

I am so happy that this is the type of edition change that adds instead of reduces.

[@timothyyoung2962]

Honestly I can do without most of the Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar miniatures. Sure, they are nice miniatures, but I think Warcry and Necromunda have some of the best miniatures that just have a lot of character and unique design aesthetics. Hell, I buy Necromunda miniatures just to use them in other games because they look so cool. Some of the new Kill Team minis are pretty nice as well. But to me Warcry and Necromunda are hard to beat.

[@ant6227]

GW: "Warcry is not just chaos anymore" Also GW: "Here's the new release with 2 new chaos warbands, and a tease for the next warband....also chaos" I think at this point there is legitimately 1 warband GW has released that was not chaos (the shadowstalkers). I'd love to get in on a Fantasy skirmish game but I am not the slightest bit interested in chaos and just like Kill Team the warbands created for purpose are stronger than the generic "compendium" style releases. I'm keeping an eye on it but I'm not seeing anything so far drawing me in.

[@TehSEOULMAN]

I don’t know how it’s gonna be in the new edition, but in first edition the grand alliance teams STOMPED the bespoke teams. Especially teams like Freeguild and Seraphon that had cheap access to ranged units. The old chaos teams didn’t stand a chance.

[@ant6227]

@@TehSEOULMAN That's actually still the same as Kill team. You have a couple teams that aren't balanced because they use mechanics the developers didn't balance for the "real" game. In this case ranged units which you'll notice none of the Warcry specific warbands can be build entirely out of. I think Skaven were another example that got FAQd because you could just spam rats and the 20+ bodies couldn't be beaten. But for regular grunt warbands they just don't have the variety of units and cool abilities that seperate them from the custom made ones. Your Corvus Cabals are always going to beat your Kohrne reivers or dark oath. It's two issues rooted in the same thing. The real game was always supposed to be the ~10 chaos warbands and GW doesn't put in the effort to balance anything else. If you want a balanced game you should only be playing with those warbands. I just want some purpose made warbands for the other AoS factions.

[@TehSEOULMAN]

@@ant6227 there are bespoke warbands for some of the other factions, they’re just hard to find these days. Kharadron Overlords and Stormcast Vanguard had boxed teams before the grand alliances came out. I see what you mean though, it feels like the Chaos warbands and Grand Alliance warbands are balanced against themselves, but not each other. Hopefully that will change with this edition. The Grand Alliance warbands they’ve released for free so far seem way better balanced than before, ranged attacks got nerfed hard, and the Chaos bands come out tomorrow so we’ll be able to see how they stack up.

[@Hundmathr]

One of the main disappointments with WarCry is it wasn't Mordheim. While it's never going to have the depth of Mordheim, I agree that they have given the game a story and a reason to keep playing now.

[@dmeep]

Its wierd that all aspiring chaos cultists were such a big deal for people. Its the necromunda model with gangs competing for power and glory. It was one of the selling points for me. But then again i play chaos among other factions in other games aswell. All factions are terrible in different ways in GW games so a protagonist faction is just ignoring that factions particular horror because you like the models imo.

[@johnmiddleton4291]

I agree. AoS is the story of Chaos to begin with and the other factions mostly exist just to shift models. Very few of them are actually good guys either an have done horrible things just to stay alive. Look at the Sylvaneth lore and what the wood elves were mostly forced into by their queen, for ex.

[@johnmiddleton4291]

@@actualwafflesenjoyer You talk as if GW doesn't always design new models and then come up with rules, fluff, and a reason for them to exist. It's how they design everything. There is no deep lore or connection for most of their stuff when it's designed, and many armies hardly get much more than their release book too. That said how much deep lore does a Chaos warband fighting to join the Everchosen actually need?

[@SomeGuyNamedRoy]

You are 100% right. When I was deciding to buy my next Sigmar army I looked at warcry but all I saw was Chaos and completely missed out.

[@kaibe5241]

See I'm the complete opposite. I was loving Warcry, then the minute they opened it up to everything, I was out. I loved that it was hyper-focused on the chaos subfactions.

[@SomeGuyNamedRoy]

@kaibe5241 you know 9 months ago I was against it, now I really enjoy it! I love the conan, classic Era sword and sorcery look.

[@acs8827]

First of all, on-topic, this is all good stuff. Few core changes, a handful of improvements, an expanded campaign system -- exactly what was needed. The character-card pdfs since released have had a mixture of sweet and sour notes sprinkled in (some of the reactions are great while some are lackluster; I'd hope the across-the-board wound reduction is not intended to mimic KT's frankly silly mortality rate). For all those discussing the propriety of a Chaos-centric vs. all-comers setting . . . I understand both viewpoints. _Mordheim_ in its original release played mostly true to Warhammer's standard that nobody at the faction level is Good-with-a-capital-G. There actually was one Good, albeit slightly batty, group (Sisters), and the rest of the options were various strains of bastard -- exactly the sorts of characters one would expect to descend upon the scene of a catastrophic disaster with an eye toward profit like so many high fantasy Harry Limes to post-war Vienna. It was a setting tightly defined, not only in information but in mood. It frankly wouldn't make sense for members of a "big-picture" faction like High-Elves to be dicking around in a bombed-out city trying to scrounge up brain-melting space rock to trade for booze money. It had to be desperate characters. But _Warcry_ isn't _Mordheim_ . _Warcry_ is in part intended, lest we forget, as an entry-point to encourage people to enter into the broader hobby and AoS proper (whether or not everyone pursues this path is immaterial to its nature), while _Mordheim_ harkened back to the RPG-like adventure game battles that had been, before WHFB (and 40k) grew into the large-scale wargames they became. Still, somebody at GW clearly views the skirmish scale as more evocative of those desperate characters, clawing for glory because they have nothing left to lose, than of _Dirty Dozen_ military outfits on suicide missions. In that sense, being a game mostly about Chaos warbands fits, and saves the writers the trouble of inventing reasons why these polearm-wielding soldiers in full battle-dress are traipsing about the jungle. But the Mortal Realms are not the Old World, for good and ill, and trying to shoehorn its characters into a different setting's mood would be awkward. It doesn't have to be exclusively Chaos warbands. Let that be the heart of it, sure, but let everybody find an angle. (The Chaos warbands created for Warcry were certainly _not_ balanced; it's just that most of them were sorely sub-optimal out of the box and you had to buy multiple sets to refine a list, but several can go toe-to-toe with anyone in the game: Adding the AoS troops did not throw off the game's balance, only its perceived tone). For my own part, I'm fairly particular about faction selection -- it has to appeal to me aesthetically, thematically, and how it plays -- and thus far none of Chaos warbands has hit all the right notes. I'm still holding out that a release down the road might be in my flavor (hoping they don't intend to do the KT thing of releasing "skirmish" versions of each faction that can't play with the base faction), but in the meantime, I can get in on the fight with any of the characters I already own. It works this way, and if you prefer a "pure-Chaos" version, you can find people who want the same thing: That's sort of the point of the hobby.

[@DarrinSK]

I kind of like that it is all antagonist or neutral sort of evil factions.

[@platypuspaints]

Kudos to GW! This is how you do a new edition!

[@moredakka4275]

So you're telling me there's a crashed ship, everyone's looking for loot, your members can gain skills, you send your survivers out to gather stuff between games and there's a serious injury table including 66 servive against the odds? So this is gorkamorka but everyone lost their guns? Sign me up

[@orkusdorkusmaximus]

i WENT ahead and got the set plus i purchased another set of the terrain

[@AndreaAndy85]

I need a free people (human) warmband.... come on GW!

[@andrewbakescakes9684]

The most reasonable initial warband were the Spire Tyrants I think.

[@itsallfunandgames723]

Your opening rant makes me wonder why with all the new worlds and sci-fi stuff, they didn't think about an oppressive order world where Chaos is the good guy faction. You know, keep ripping off Moorcock, don't quit what was working.

[@bumgilligan]

Why isn't this box on the gw website anymore?

[@patrickleder8415]

Is Catacombs still playable in these rules?

[@edwindrood2816]

Great revsiew

[@billdeal]

Are there no setup cards with this one?

[@GuerrillaMiniatureGames]

There are in the box, just not printed in the core book. They’re tied to the Warband book that has a set of terrain rules in it.

[@billdeal]

@@GuerrillaMiniatureGames ohh, that makes sense. Thanks!

[@johnmiddleton4291]

The whole point of Warcry was that is was Chaos focused and the storyline revolved around that. It stumbled when it diluted that focus, allowing other AoS factions into the game with very little reason for them being involved, and transforming into another AoS skirmish game with really simple choices. AoS had skirmish and Path to Glory already and didn't need another variant. Not to even mention the variable battle sizes that the third ed rules now add in to make smaller games easily viable.

[@Sybok51288]

yeah was thinking similar, i remember an age of sigmar skirmish around "1st ed", i actually liked AoS a lot better back then esp once that first generals book came out

[@johnmiddleton4291]

@@Sybok51288 I really like using AoS first ed for any smaller games, especially under about 1000 points. It has much less bloat and far less focuse on command abilities with hero phase shenanigans. It's the same issue 40k has with all the stratagems and mission special rules. I never made the transition to 3rd because of the bloat in 2nd.

[@tomryan3768]

People were hoping for "Mordheim" but AoS. We got "obscure chaos warbands fight each other" Now with Excelsis being a ruined city we can get Mordheim in AoS.

[@dan8981]

On paper the idea of WarCry should have been my kind of thing when it first came out. But the whole Chaos focus left my friends and I cold. It really opened up for us one we could bring our armies and we realised what a great game it is. Skirmish rules for AoS didn’t really work, as much as we wanted them to. WarCry works, in spades. It’s probably the game we play at most now as none of us have time to paint a whole AoS army, but a warcry troop? Sure.

[@johnmiddleton4291]

@@dan8981 I think the Chaos focus was the best part. It's mostly all the added factions that required lots of balancing and extra rules to compensate for battleline weapons and armour in a parking lot brawl set of rules.