Grimrock

People in my area also tend to play one game at a time. When a LotR league started up over the summer it was an absolute nightmare trying to find an AoS game. People showed up on game nights, played their games for the league, and went home. When warcry dropped there was a bunch of interest, but AoS won out and nobody plays warcry anymore. My group has about 20 or so active players. If it counts for anything, I also stick to one due to the monetary and time investments trying to get armies up and running. Plus I get one game in every few weeks typically, so it's not like I get really bored and need to switch things up. I don't know if Fantasy would win out over AoS here, but we do have a bunch of old school fans. I'm sure it'd be enough to make a dent initially, but after that who knows if they'd come back or not. Edit: Maybe it's a north american thing? I know in Canada we pay a decent markup for miniatures so that might have some impact. I've been gaming for almost 20 years now and I can't think of a single person I've met that actively played more than one game for any length of time. I've seen some people try, but they always seemed to settle on one or the other.

They could always take inspiration from d&d with different castes of giants. Current one being a hill giant, the smallest and crudest of the bunch, and then move up from there with fire giants, frost giants, stone giants, cloud giants, and storm giants. Even if you only use a few types you have lots of room for variety and different roles. Use different weapons/amounts of armor to differentiate between heroes and battleline within the same kit and you're off to the races.

Well, got my first game against the OBR tonight. After after a full 5 round game playing as slaanesh I managed to kill two whole models. A few more fell over of course, but arkhan picked them back up so not permanent damage. I did win by a single victory point on the last combat phase in the last turn, but if he had been a touch more aggressive in the first two turns I don't think I would've stood a chance. Catapult did great, putting 10 wounds on a keeper one round, thinning out daemonettes in others. Didn't even need to use its special shots to make a huge impact on the game. I will say that the layering of buffs caught me off guard. At one point the mortek was rerolling saves, 5+ death shrug, 4+ harvester resurrect, rend -2, exploding attacks on 5+, hitting on 2+, rerolling 1s to hit. They were an utterly unkillable unit that was also an unstoppable blender that killed everything it touched, with 20 of them taking out almost 1000 points of models. I avoided it as much as possible but there's only so much you can do when it's walking straight at the objectives and taking up the whole center of the board. So maybe not grossly overpowered, but it felt like the only thing I could do all game was avoid combat all together and sit on objectives. It worked, barely, and only because he was being cautious, but not exactly a fun game for anyone.

I'm talking about the rumor engine pic. It could be another new warcry monster coming out early next year.

Why is no one guessing a new beast for warcry? Seems loosely consistent with the cat llama, and the rumors were we might see a few more of them as we get closer to the release.

Archaon will be tricky unless they remove his ability to play in god marked armies. For example he's already really strong in a khorne army, so a big power boost would make him insane there. I'm not expecting him to get a lot of warscroll changes or a huge point drop. I assume most of his improvements will come through allegiance abilities, spell lores or the endless spells. For example, there could be a spell that makes the caster fight first and an endless spell that gives plus 1 attack to all models within a range. Or maybe they move the varanguard fight twice ability over to a 'clan' command ability so Archaon can benefit from it too. Lots of possibilities.

Really the cost ratio of OBR is a big selling feature for me. They're remarkably cheap to get into, primarily because of the Mortek and the big characters, and I hope that affordability is something that GW carries on to future elite armies like slaves.

I've wanted an excuse to pick up a unit of varanguard for ages, but they've never justified the massive cost and hobby investment. I'm really hopeful this book gives me a reason to buy them! It's tricky for GW though. Varanguard need to be elite enough to justify a big points cost, thereby justifying the big monetary cost, but when things are that expensive it's super easy to be too strong or too weak. Same goes for Archaon, but the way Nagash is sitting gives me some hope.

From the armies I own, (khorne, nurgle, tzeentch and slaanesh) I think khorne is the best written. I love how there are ways to layer on buffs, sub factions, and battalions so that any unit you really want to use can be made at least viable. Definitely not perfect, there are far too many throwaway heroes, bloodthirsters are a little ahead of the curve, and a few other daemon units lag behind, but overall it's pretty great.

Well specifically for this case they're said to be push fit, which usually does exclude multiple loadouts. I guess I should have been clearer.

Well, one possible negative is loadout. For example, the blood warriors in the old 2 player starter could only be built with axe and gore fist with no banner or blood glaive. Workable for 5 models but heavily incentivized to only get one set and move to the main kit after so you have the free options. So in this case if GW switches things up for chaos warriors and makes, let's say, halberds the blatantly better option and includes those weapons in the multi part kit that comes later, then the SC warriors will likely be of no value to most players other than as a painting project.

Yeah hints for pricing suggest it's in the low end of price for SC boxes, so that's good. As long as they release non push fit units later then I'll be perfectly happy but if they try to pull a chainrasp again I'll be really disappointed. Edit: Actually, thinking about it push fit makes a lot of sense for this SC. Given the typical pricing for heavy infantry, cavalry and a mounted lord model, this would have been a massive savings. The push fit is likely GW trying to give value while also discouraging people from just buying 3 or 4 of them at once.

Well the benefit is that they don't have to run to get that bonus movement, and they can still do things like charge or shoot while moving quickly. They also have access to run and charge through the stalliarch lords if they want to focus on a fast army rather than a purely resilient one. Like I said, I don't know if they're going to be top tier or not, but they definitely have the tools to be a strong army and a number of tricks that can make them a real threat. I'm really curious to see how this all turns out.

I'm not sure if the army is going to be top tier or not, but people thinking it's slow need to consider that any unit can get +3 movement from a 'command' point. It isn't totally free but considering they can get a half dozen or more per turn it lets them speed up any unit that needs it. With their slowest models at speed 7 they're actually one of the fastest armies in the game when it counts. Honestly I think the army looks very skill based rather than the obvious straight-forward strength of armies like Slaanesh of FeC. If a player can keep track of all the potential command abilities, buffs and spells, and use them efficiently, then I think the army is going to be very strong. If a player starts to forget or lose track of things then they're going to struggle. In addition list building is going to be more crucial with this army than a lot of others and there are a ton of combos you can make to really amp up the power. I think it's actually pretty cool that GW has released an army that should reward skill and careful play rather than just another mallet to bludgeon people with.

It's actually been a weird mix for me. The last round of price hikes definitely killed a couple projects, like picking up a an insensate rage bloodthirster, but another killer has been the regular balance changes. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that GW is balancing the game more regularly, but it's making buying any new models a real gamble. Now if I'm looking at buying something I regularly find myself thinking it might be too strong and will just get nerfed into something completely unrecognizable in 6 months. Take Slaanesh for example. I was planning on picking up Slaanesh for years to finish off my 4 armies of chaos, so when they came out I was super excited and bought a basic army. Now I just feel dirty every time I play them, and I'm frozen on purchases because I have no idea what's going to get the nerf hammer in January and what isn't. I'm finding myself in a holding position where I don't really want to buy anything anymore.

@HMB Depends on how crazy you want to get. I've played it in a dozen or so games with 30 pinks and no blues starting on the board, and I think I can get away with 40 blues 85% of the time. Typically blues will die around the same speed they're created, so you shouldn't usually need double your number of pinks. I've ended up with extra blue or brimstone points in the end game but usually when I do I've already won or lost, so the extra summon wouldn't make a difference.

I would expect something you don't see played a ton, but still newish stuff. From the new chamber they could include a couple dracoline cavalry boxes, aventis firestrike for the centerpiece, castigarors, and then some sequitors to add draw and round it out.

So are knight questors becoming the primaris lieutenants of AoS? I mean the model looks cool but even the stormcast have heroes from the lore that would be cooler than another generic hero, not to mention the nearly limitless number of excellent heroes from other armies that could use a resculpt or even a first plastic model.

@Overread it's interesting because I feel pretty much the complete opposite of you. To me the warcry warbands fit into AoS incredibly awkwardly. Having big unique models like the rocktusk prowler with mostly the same stats as the plains runners doesn't feel seamless, it feels shoehorned in to keep things simple. Something that lets them say there are AoS warscrolls without putting in a bunch of effort. The idea that they will form the core of an eventual chaos release is just truly bizarre to me because they just don't seem to be designed to take 20-30 at a time. Too many mono pose models with tons of detail and character. My impression was that Warcry was originally meant to be like necromunda. A stand alone, chaos only, game with all new models. Sure the models could be used in AoS, but it'd be more like the rogue trader release for killteam. Then when the details got out and people started complaining about it being chaos only they quickly jumped in and put the other factions in the book. There's such a significant difference in overall feel and flexibility between the base chaos warbands and the non chaos stuff... it seems like the non chaos stuff couldn't have been intentional from the start. Plus we had that bizarre dead zone for like 6 months between the initial info and the actual release that could've given them time to scramble and make the extra campaigns before sending the book to print. Who knows, maybe that's why we saw the monsters and mercenaries book so quickly. That stuff could've been intended for the core book but got shuffled out to fit the extra warband campaigns. Of course that doesn't mean that we won't see AoS factions rolled in now. That Pandora's box has been opened for better or for worse, and Iknow I'd love to see daemons.

Well a keeper-less slaanesh box would be pretty handy for fleshing out models to summon. Maybe three chariot kits, 20 daemonettes, 5 seekers, 3 fiends? Actually, nah. That'd be too good of a deal. Forchaos I'd lean towards beasts of chaos since they've been out for a while and would be pretty easy to put together.

But the aspiring deathbringer affects all friendlies within 8, potentially way more devastating than a single model's attacks.

I'm a little confused on something, so just to be sure. You aren't limited on taking mercenaries from within your warband, just based off the grid in the book right? So an ironjawz warband could take a member of the gobbapalooza or the FeC could take a lone necromancer?

I think so... Didn't watch the whole video but there are some strong models in there. For example the khorne aspiring deathbringer will crank up the damage for nearby friendlies like crazy.

GMG review is up covering the whole book. Seems like the balance concern with heroes was covered by just making them much weaker than expected. Still powerful, but definitely not a direct port from AoS. Pretty cool overall, I'll be picking it up if I can get some consistent narrative gaming in.

Decent looking list, some surprises for sure. Definitely hoping for cards now considering it looks like they're adding new chaos beasts with the warhounds.