I played Warcry and lived to tell about it

Its quite cool and very tactical game. Scenarios are constructed in a way that you have to play scenario and some bands could be handicapped.

I played Untamed beasts and had to decide which of my models carries a treasure chest. 

My opponent had to kill him and take the treasure. But I had to nominate a model at the start of 2 nd turn when reinforcements arrived and the scenario had only 3 turns.

So to catch potential campy treasure keeper my opponents would have to plan accordingly and wait. He decided to smash my starting guys and had very small chance to get the treasure guy. Anyway again he went for carnage and killed my leader unnecessarily and I won easily.

Its hard to not want to kill everybody with bunch of bloodthirsty chaos cultists :P

 

First turn brawl in the centre 

I've killed his leader and 3 lesser guys and grunt and i lost my beast herder leader and some grunts.

Most definitely MVP was big wildcat thingy with 8 of movement and ability to be forced by beastmaster for and extra attack and survived the game.

Kitty attack

If I understand it correctly there is one building miniatures decision in the starter box. You can built Iron golem standard bearer with an iron gong or Preceptor (?) with huge hammer.

Gong or hammer - tough choice to made...

I cant say anything about the terrain as we used pre painted Garden of Morr shop had on hand.

Golem leader fall

The cards for creating the missions can have big impact or almost non existent. We had a card that asked for drafting another pair of cards and using both from which one was +1 to movement for everyone (meh) but the second one gave the both bands extra die for activation rolls (we rolled 7 dice each turn - and this was huge - my opponent managed to use pair of quadruple results in one turn- that would let him win the scenario most probably but he went for max carnage of Ogre model.)

They were bragging about 30 millions of combinations of cards during creation of battlefields but lets be honest - those options are quite cosmetic sometimes.

Most important thing is that you have to split your forces between 3 detachments Dagger, shield and hammer (each one need at least 1 model and no more than 1/3 or 50% and biggest one (shield?) need minimum 33%)

But you dont know how they will deploy and If they will deploy turn one or turn 2+ from reserves - this is dictated by card drawn after splinting.

You can see hammer, dagger and shield icons and deployment zones. They are symmetrical on all cards I saw. Here - Dagger and Hammer deploy in second turn.
This is major factor creating friction and fog of war on the battlefield and its the tool for making games different.

Abilities card example
Second factor is roll for initiative/abilities - they can change course of the game allowing extra attacks, more devastating attacks, extra movement and even one heals - but its hardly useful IMHO in such low turn games. Those again are quite few and will be repetitive but combination of dice rolls should make game unpredictable.

Overall great game. I loved it. And preordered a copy.

Just don't expect to play deep campaign with it.

It will be perfect for pick up games though (and probably tournaments and such which interest me less). Its less time consuming and tough decision game as Underworlds but its much easier to get into and don’t need great investment in cards ( you only need your model cards and your faction and shared activated abilities so one box of a miniatures and you are playing the game.

It won't be for everyone but I will have great time with it.