As you’ve been able to tell from my feed lately, that I’ve been really pumped for the next hot skirmish game by GW: War Cry.

Earlier today, some leaks surfaced of the inside of the core rules. I won’t post the link myself, but cruise around the facebook group or subreddit and you’ll find it soon enough. I didn’t read it all (skimmed the campaign rules) but read enough to get a general feel and form an opinion.

VERDICT: Its what I needed

Not disappointed, and certainly pleasantly surprised to find that the rules are built in a way that takes a few of my favorite features from Necromunda and cuts out a ton of the busy-work. I didn’t think I wanted something that was super streamlined and less customizable, but the more I think about it, the more I think its what I needed.

As much as I enjoy considering the loadout options for a model in games like Necromunda, I frequently find that it causes me grief. Is this weapon the right choice? Am I spamming this? Should I go with the stronger weapon or the cooler looking one? Lots of decisions, and lots of equipment options that come in a kit that I just ignore (looking at you stub guns). It occurred to me that even though Necromunda has a huge post-game trading post, that I’m not willing to buy most of those options for a gang, because I’d have to build a model for the new weapon, which I’d only be able to use mid-campaign in future campaigns (unless I magnetize). For other players in my group, this is often too much to keep track of, to much paperwork, and too many decisions to make in a timely manner.

There appear to be a couple of loadouts for some of the miniatures, sometimes making it a different fighter, but apart from that all of the campaign customization is “invisible” (meaning doesn’t need any kind of changes in WYSIWYG). That means if you build your band roughly the way you want it (or magnitize the two loadouts when it applies), you can’t really go wrong. Not having a huge table of weapons and gear to attach to the model moves the decision: instead of deciding what equipment I want to give a character, I’m deciding what character (and all of their equipment) I want to use.

The game also clearly plays much faster than Kill Team, which was advertized as a quicker tabletop game to begin with. Where Kill Team ran into an issue, because the Movement phase was very much an “orders” phase, people paused to strategize, and again when it came to activating individual fighters. War Cry cuts right to the chase (more like Necromunda) of activating individual models with a simple 2 actions. Executing moves and attacks is even faster than in Kill Team, as there is no longer the tedium invovled in seperately rolling to hit, wound, and save (and sometimes another save in the form of feel-no-pain abilities). and rolling AGAIN to see if its just a flesh wound. In War Cry, an attack is one big roll, and then you just put damage on their model (which has a bigger health pool instead of like 1-2 wounds). This is ACTUALLY faster.

Lets talk about cards while we are at it. There is a nifty sorta-modular deck of cards for determining deployment zones, terrain, objectives, and twists. The optional 40k decks that did this sorta thing I loved, so of course I’ll appreciate it in War Cry.

The real surprise for me though is the fact that the starts for your warbands are also on cards, and NOT in the core rulebook. While some might consider this a negative (what, I have to buy cards to use my exising models now? AND a rulebook?) it means we don’t have to reference the rulebook for our own team’s rules, and can instead keep pages open for actual rules sections. I always hated flipping back and fourth between my team, their team, a rule, back to my team to reference an ability etc. We have to use 3rd party apps and list managers to produce reference material that doesn’t require us to flip to a page every time we need clarification, but not for War Cry, because our rules are on those cards. This is a massive assist.

Sure I was impressed with how the models and terrain all looked, but the big selling point in this game to me is that there are huge quality of life improvements here over their other games. Its not dumbed-down, the mechanics that are simpler either cuts away at minutia that didn’t need to be there at the start, or removes “options” that you would never want to take. Its a breath of fresh air, and from the standpoint of someone who orchestrates and runs our local events and campaigns, its a huge load off of my shoulders to know that the game itself will be fast and simple.

TLDR very pleased!