Oh boy, Warcrow is coming in hard into the scene. The rulebook was released this week. Of Course I wrote this blog before the release, so once again, I could be wrong on certain places. That’s also the fun of writing speculations and such I guess.
So, the story so far, we looked at the background, the factions and the unit cards for the most part. Now it’s time to actually dive in the game a bit more. Are you ready?
How does a Warcrow game turn go?
When it’s someone’s turn, that person can activate a unit that hasn’t been activated this round. You may also activate a unit that HAS activated, but that gains a stress token en is one step closer to running away. First learn about stress tokens.
Stress Tokens
A unit gets Stress tokens through being activated twice, to activate more aggressive attacks or defend harder on some units, losing combat or via the effect of certain skills or abilities. Example: The Northern Tribes Evoker has a spell called Spirit of Thermapleurus which gives the target or friendly unit the intimidation keyword as a condition. This, reading through the spell, can cause enemies to gain stress tokens.
Why do they matter? On your unit profiles you will find a moral value. When you have more stress than this value, there is a chance your unit will become demoralized and decides to run away. Even if it doesn’t run, the stress token need to leave if you want to take action somehow this turn.
If you fail this test, your unit won’t do anything. Not even if the unit is under attack. You don’t want to see the model running away at the end if you still need it.
Managing stress is therefore important. But what can you do about it? Well, at the start of every round, you will remove one stress token from every unit as standard. You may then remove some more with abilities or from other units. The War Surgeon has the First Aid skill, which removes a stress automatically and can remove another one if you hit a good dice roll.
Back to the turn.
When you activate a unit, you may choose to complete up to two short or one single long skill. If you have played Mantics Walking Dead, you should be familiar with it.
You can do a couple of things with these options, like move and attack, move and a skill or a move and a move. You can’t double attack because move has to be in there somewhere.
When it comes to long skills, the one I found was “charge”. That’s the movement value in the bracket on the unit profile, followed by an attack. We also know that there is a rest skill, which I believe to be a long skill. It seems to remove some negative effects from units.
This skill includes both ranges and close combat attacks. Spellcasting would be there too as a short skill… My guess still, since they are still very dark about spells.
Movement in a turn
Warcrow uses the stride system. 15 mm per stride. Warcrow uses distance templates. Each unit has two movement values on their profile, which you can use to move the unit in a single movement. The template of the first value is placed against the base of the unit and moves it to the other end. Then the second value template is placed en the unit is moved to that other end. This means you can’t just measure strides in 1.5 cm en then measure it with a ruler, you need to add in the base sizes too.
You’ll also not that this means the units aren’t moving around corners. You can turn in the space between the widgets exchange. Straight lines it is.
With charge, that is the same too. If you want to attack a unit with a charge, you need to be able to get into base contact with one of the models in that unit. Going through terrain is no option and not allowed. When the pain train leaves station, there is no stopping or turning.
Moving units in Warcrow
A unit movement is always measured fromoff the leader. Models that are in the units can be placed 2 strides (3 cm) from the leader. This makes unit movement quick and no need to measure individual models.
When a unit is under attack, you do have to measure distances for ranged attacks, spells and charges separately. This makes positioning the units more important than ever, especially as they then can function as meat shields for leaders and characters.
Combat in Warcrow
Close combat is relatively straight forward. In the most basic form, the attacker rolls their attack dice, the defender rolls the defense. You then subtract the total of successful defenses from the total of successful attacks. This is the amount of wounds the model takes. All damage is blocked if there are no successful attacks left.
Ranged attacks work quite the same, but the loser does not seem to fall back when wound are caused.
We can speculate a lot about magic, but since it hasn’t been discussed a lot, there is not a lot to go on. I think you need to roll attacks against the willpower of the spellcaster. This model also gets some tinge, what could be stress for all that I know. High valued spellcasters take more risk than cannon fodder.
No-one-left-behind
This is where you move any units that haven’t been activated this round. Like we spoke about the Warsurgeon last time, she has benefits of walking around in this phase. A unit cannot use this phase to retreat or pull out of combat.
Winning a game of Warcrow
The moment we have all been fighting for in a game. Who takes home the prize and who licks their wounds, only to laugh it off over a good glass of something. I’m not responsible for not telling you, you might be bombarded by comical, game related insults during the next week. Yeah, I’m like that and will never stop, because I know the opponent does the same to me.
Each scenario has a narrative element, which we expect to define the victory conditions. What we know is that these conditions are varied, with the ability to with through combat, tactical and perhaps other objectives. It lets you build lists based around how you plat the game, rather than preparing for a game wide fistfight till the death.
The end…
…not for the Road to Lindwurm series, but this blog. I’ve said enough and want to get some food after entertaining you with my chat about Warcrow. As always, if you are interested, be sure to get to our shop to take the pre-order notification here or on top of the page via the link. Stay tuned for next week’s blog about the upcoming (hopefully) masterpiece called Warcrow.
Oodles of Poodle Noodles and Toodles… (long live word suggestions in spelling checkers)
