The Chattering Horde: Welcome to Warcry!

Welcome to Warcry!

I heard a lot about Warcry - Games Workshop's latest skirmish level system - on release in the summer, so I decided to pick up a Starter set when I was in the UK.

The simple reason is that it ticked many boxes for me:

Low model count for each warband.
Good opportunity to try Contrast paints.
Starter set comes with lots of gorgeous terrain and nice models
Quick to play - under an hour by the looks of things!
Streamlined rules with minimized steps (compared to 40K etc.)
Interesting setting.

It was a royal pain to haul the 5Kg box half-way around the world to where I live (Japan), but seeing as the same set is double the price locally, this made commercial sense, even if it made for unwieldy hand luggage! (I was asked more than once at airport security about the box content - my honest reply got me a thumbs up at least once.)

After getting home I went to my local GW to buy some paints, glue and new brushes. The Citadel Colour app for Android actually proved very useful for doing an inventory of my existing paints prior to setting out (those that could be rescued - it wouldn't register a lot of my older paints at all) Although I didn't buy the Warcry set in Tokyo, I still wanted to support GW, which I did in style by purchasing new paints, brushes and spray primer. These alone weren't cheap, but as usual the GW staff at the Jinbocho store were incredibly helpful and full of good advice on which contrast paints to start out with etc.

Once I got down to assembly, it felt pretty good to get back into painting and assembling, although my clippers were dull from disuse and age! Overall, it took me a couple of weeks of painting in the evenings - accompanied by Season 1 of "Vikings" of Amazon Prime video - to get everything up to tabletop standard.

In the end I used contrast paints for large areas of flesh, and the "Classic" method (base coat, wash, layer, highlights) on some of the other areas. I think this turned out OK. Here are some images of the final ready-to-play warbands and monsters.

Warcry Untamed Beasts:

Warcry Iron Golems:

Monsters (Furies and Raptoryx)

Warcry Terrain

As well as the warbands in the box, there is a really nice selection of high quality terrain. However BEWARE putting this all together as suggested in the instructions. Apparently the way that you need to use the terrain for the actual game means that some of the pieces will need to be used separately, when if fact you might think you need to glue everything together.

You can find an excellent guide to this over here:

https://waywalkerstudios.com/assembling-terrain-for-warcry/

...and a video walkthrough based on that guide here:

(All credit must go to Waywalker studios for their excellent article on this, and to BlackJack Legacy for the video - which also credits waywalker.)

There are lots of guides around for painting the terrain, but I went with Gray primer and Agrax Earthshade washes, followed by a Deneb Stone drybrush.