Warcry: Red Harvest - a self motivational project blog

31st October 2022

To cap off this project, my wife and I managed to get in a game of Warcry using the box set contents over the weekend ?

After a quick re-read of the rules section, we ran through the pre battle set up process.

As a whole we quite like this random set up process – it looks as though it will give good replay value to the game.

We did have a bit of an issue with the terrain card though. We tried to set it up exactly as shown on the card, but the images shown for the Varanite ‘conveyors’ don’t actually match the physical components – so we just made it as close as possible.

My wife chose the Tarantulos Brood (1000 pts), so that left me with the Darkoath Savagers (985 pts).

I set up my God Speaker (witch) on top of one of the platforms, hoping to make some good use of her ranged attack. The rest of our warbands were set up in roughly similar sized groups, with one group set up in reserve.

A few blows were exchanged in the first round, including my wife using her triples (6) ability to fling a poison spear at one of my glory seekers, the value of 6 meaning it inflicted quite a nasty hit on my closest Glory seeker – culminating with my leader taking out one of the Broodkin and boosting his attack number thanks to his doubles ability ‘A Vow Fulfilled’.

The right side of the battlefield saw no conflict, but the Tarantulos Brood moved up on the slower Darkoath that were trying to move across to the other side of the battle.

This gave me the ‘Reaper’ count for the round, putting me 1-0 up on VP.

Round 2 started with the reserve groups coming onto the battlefield in the middle of the long edges.

The new Tarantulos group putting even more pressure onto the small (3 model) isolated Darkoath unit.

Attacks swung back on forth, the badly injured Glory Seeker in the north west using an ability to heal 4 wounds before laying into the heavily wounded Doomweaver, taking it out.

The retaliation from the nearby Broodkin left the Glory seeker on just 1 wound – that healing really made a difference here!

A spider swarm inflicted some damage on the Darkoath boss with a free attack from a Tarantulos doubles ability, then another wound from its normal attack. Sadly, over two rounds of combat my adjacent glory seeker only managed to inflict 5 wounds (out of the required 6) on it – meaning that the Darkoath leader had to use his attack to finish it off – overkill, but it allowed the boss to use his second action to move out towards the approaching Tarantulos leader.

In the south east, the Tarantulos inflicted some minor damage on the Darkoath, but then the Wrathborn used its two actions to attack the adjacent Broodkin.

With a damage rating of 1/5 I was somewhat please to see some crits come up – and down went two Broodkin; really swinging the balance back to somewhat more even in this part of the battlefield.

Reaper count went to the Darkoath again, now 2-0 on the VP.

The third round saw very similar combats, and we called it at round three (out of the maximum 4 rounds). With the Darkoath up 3-0 there was no way back for the Tarantulos (and we had to get on with tea ? ).

Post battle thoughts….

My wife is keen to try it again, this time with her using the Darkoath Savagers.

At the moment I prefer co-op games, but we both had some fun with this and found the variable set up and the special abilities that can be used (from the initiative dice roll doubles, triples and quads) add an interesting amount of tactical thought and options.

Although, sometimes it really just does come down to the dice rolls.

It will be good to see how balanced these two warbands feel (we are using the most recent profiles and points values for them), but having looked at some of the other warbands I don’t think I would like to face some of them (*cough* Legionnaires with high S, high A and T5 *cough*).

There is also the option of adding in some monsters to the warbands (up to the 1000 pt level still).