Since the original Starter Set for Warcry is no longer in production, new Warcry players are faced with a confusing amount of options for choosing their first battlefield terrain.
Luckily, I am here to help. This article takes you through the pros and cons of each available Warcry Terrain box, as well as a few other methods for building battlefields for your Warcry games.
What is Warcry Terrain, and how does it work?
Terrain is very important in games of Warcry: some fighters benefit from attacking from a higher position than their target, and terrain provides cover from ranged attacks as well as blocking line of sight. It also gives you a way to move vertically, making the battlefield larger than the small area it is played on.
The rules for the game state that you create battlefield by randomly drawing terrain cards from at terrain card set, and then subsequently drawing battleplan cards that tell you what to do in each battle, so terrain interacts with the game’s rules and objectives in a myriad of ways.
You can just use whatever terrain you can find if you don’t mind bending the game rules a little, but if you want to get the full experience of the games rules, here’s a guide for the different terrain options available at the moment.
Find the right terrain for you:
1. Find a starter set / box set
The original starter set for Warcry is no longer in production, but every quarter a new box set is released (and you can still find some of the old ones), that contains:
- Full terrain for Warcry battles, there are different styles available. The new season in Ghur has daemonic trees and rope bridges that provided vertical space essential for some warbands manoeuvres.
- A two-sided battle map.
- All the cards you need to generate battlefields and missions for the game.
- Dice, ruler and tokens for the game.
- The Warcry Core Rulebook (only in some starter sets).
- Two opposed warbands.
That’s really all you need to play Warcry for many hours! You can find my review of the warcry game and the starter original starter set here.
Every quarter a new box set is released, and even if the core book is not included, you find all the above and is enough to start a Warcry campaign with a friend.
2. Buy one of the Ravaged Lands boxes
If you already have the starter set, or you want terrain with a different style, the next product to get is one of the Ravaged Lands sets. Some come with terrain cards and tokens, some don’t. They are all out for a limited amount of time, so be quick to grab one if they interest you.
The terrain from the previous box set is also put in a Ravaged Land box for a limited time (usually from the release of the next box set to the one after, roughly three months). Usually this is just a subset of the original terrain set, so the best deal is always to buy the starter set, and if you are not interested in the warbands in it, sell them. This way you can have more terrain at a cheaper price.
3. Use the optional terrain rules from the core rules
In the new rule set, it is now included a section on randomly setting any type of terrain before drawing the battle plan. The only requirement is to try to be as symmetric as possible in matched play, but otherwise players have much freedom. The little segment describing it is available at page 61 of the core rules or on page 5 of the free core rules available on Warhammer Community website.
If you are looking to get some terrain made for you, you can check out our review of the terrain we had commissioned from Go to Ground Wargaming.