Learn the rules like a pro,
So you can break them like an artist

~ Pablo Picasso

by Peter Atkinson

Which Gargant gets the least love? Beast-smasher must be in the conversation, and a lot of people actively hate Mancrushers (mainly for the dated minis), but I reckon the one who saw the least table time in the last edition would have to be the Kraken-eater. He was just too pillow-fisted for the kicking gimmick (with its extreme variability) to rescue him.

We’ll be covering the new Sons of Behemat Faction Pack in detail later this week, but before we do, I just wanted to take a moment to run through the Kraken-eater in some detail and specifically, whether he’s actually worth considering in 4th Ed. The headline is that I reckon he might be – there are a few reasons to be optimistic, which we’ll go into, but the main one is that he can bend quite a few missions to breaking point and beyond.

Now, Rob is an absolute trojan and he’s smashing out the content right now. So while you’re waiting for our SOB review, if you want the full details on the army right now (including pictures of the warscrolls), here’s your 38-minute slice of heaven:

Ready? Let’s go.

Starting point: Generic support for the army

Just to set the baseline, here’s the warscroll (snipped from Rob’s stream, linked above). We’ll take a quick look at how his kicking ability supports the army in a general way, before we launch into the real fun around specific interactions with individual Battleplans in the new GHB. TLDR: he helps you stand around in a couple of spots.

The Kraken-eater has all the factory standard Mega-gargant settings, 35 wounds on a 4+ save and so on. Still the softest-hitting option in the army, too. His USP is kicking the objective around, and for context, that’s rarely been enough for him to see competitive play. You can roll crap and only move it 2″; the fact that you now have to roll a 2+ before you even get to try seems a bit mean-spirited for an ability that was already dicey as hell.

So here’s how kicking primaries around helps Sons in broad terms:

• Gargants like to cluster. If you’re strung out across the board, you’re just waiting to be chopped down one by one. Isolate and annihilate is the way to conquer Megas, and clustering up makes life way harder for your opponent. If the Kraken can launch the objectives over towards your Gargant Union, they can castle up without compromise.
• They love 3-objective missions. If Megas can score One-Two-More by bunching up on a couple of points and just completely ignoring the third, they’re living their best Standing on Circles life. Scenarios with more Primaries flip this around, so it’s your opponent who can hold more without having to engage. Kraken-eaters can effectively help turn the latter into the former, by pushing objectives into the same place as each other.
• Breaker Tribe triples down on their chief win condition. They like being tough to kill, they like standing in unison, and Unbreakable Tribe makes them tougher to kill by standing in unison. Sounds good to me! Clustering up the objectives helps you achieve this and really brings Breaker Tribe online.

So that’s your context: Get Orf Me Land is a fun and unique mechanic that supports your army’s playstyle, but on its own that’s probably not enough to put Fish Breath ahead of other Megas with way more output and special rules of their own. With that established, let’s look at the GHB missions in turn and see whether the Kraken has a bit of specific play into each, because that’s what could get us over the line.

Assessing the Missions

Border War

BAM! Let’s start with an absolute classic, and one with immense potential for Kraken fuckery. The big question, and one which may need an FAQ, is that third bulletpoint: what happens if there is more than one objective wholly within enemy territory?

The wording states “the”, which assumes that there’s only going to be one such objective, but there’s no definitive indication of what happens if there’s more than one. This is not as game-breaking as it sounds (noting that scoring on the primaries is capped at 6 per turn), so it’s not like you can end up with all four in there and score 20 VPs in one turn (and thank Gork for that!). It would just give you an extra option to hit those 5 VPs if your opponent has the other one zoned out with a tough unit. This one specifically is one for the TOs right now I think, although I do believe it’s more likely than not that you’re meeting the criteria. At the end of the day, it is in enemy territory.

Similarly, we have the question of what happens if there’s more than one objective wholly within friendly territory (since the first bullet point again refers to “the”). You’re probably not going to kick any backwards into your own territory, but you could certainly put your opponent in that position. The idea here would be to run up a points lead and then kick them all across the line into your opponent’s turf, at which point they’re worth max 1 VP each to your opponent, and they’ll struggle to catch back up. This one also refers “the” objective in friendly territory being worth 1 VP, but I can’t see any good faith way you can argue it’s worth more than 1 VP to them. You’re certainly not meeting the criteria for the second or third bullet points (there’s no way you can argue that it’s on the border for example), so it’s a massive stretch to say it would still score 2 VPs in that case. This I do think this is a slam dunk for the SOB player.

What’s also unambiguous is that if you kick it onto the Border between the two territories, then it’s worth 2 VPs to each player, and you can max-cap at 6 primary VPs by holding those three without even worrying about the one deep in their turf.

I think there’s a strong case to be made for all of the above working in the Gargant player’s favour, although again (to reiterate) the Primary scoring is capped at 6 per turn so it’s not going to completely blow off the hinges when you pull it off. I’d just run it past your TO first for good form.

Focal Points

Less exciting for us than it might look at first glance: unlike Border War, the objectives are defined by their starting positions and not their current location at any point in time. The “Home Objective” label, for example, will follow it around wherever it goes. Worth noting that the devs could have labelled the Border Wars objectives in the same way, but chose not to, so that’s another minor indication that any potential FAQ (if one is even needed) might go the Gargants’ way.

You can at least kick the Central Objective over towards one of the others you’re controlling, and thereby score the 1 VP for controlling “more” each turn while only committing to having your army in two places (classic bunching up). But no direct mission-warping power here.

Starstrike

Nothing particularly helpful here I’m afraid, although I don’t think Megas will mind playing on this one too much. You should have a good chance of securing Primary scoring supremacy for as long as you have duders alive.

Note that while controlling the impact site counts as control of an objective for the purposes of scoring victory points, it does not actually become an objective, and as such you (sadly) cannot kick terrain around the board.

Shifting Objectives

Nothing to see here, although again it’s just a mission that’s pretty good for Megas in general.

Feral Foray

An objective you control in “Enemy Territory”? BAM! Now you’re talking!

There’s no actual bonus VPs on offer here – just the power to control which objectives can be scored. So the play pattern would be some variation on tap and go, where you switch off an objective and walk back to the safety of the mob (perhaps after countercharging onto it in the first place, and denying objective control to your opponent, really upending the status quo for the turn). You’ll also probably take two turns to kick it over to the other side, but that’s ok.

Kick the objectives from your side of the board over to theirs, burn and profit. You will be burning and profiting like nobody has ever burned and profited before, except for maybe the guys who control the illicit tobacco trade in Melbourne by repeatedly setting fire to their rivals’ businesses. They probably do burn and profit more. But Kraken-eaters on Feral Foray might just come second.

Jaws of Gallet

Krakens are of very limited help here, other than crunching some of the 5 objectives closer together. The trouble Giants have here is that the Underdog bonus (remove one objective) is massively impactful, and as an army whose scoring rhythm is generally about running up an early lead and holding on as you get slowly tabled, you could be in a bit of strife here. Getting punished so heavily for leading early on isn’t great news.

Battle for the Pass

Basically the same situation again as Border War. Potentially needs an FAQ (or TO ruling) on whether you can score 5 VPs on more than one objective in enemy territory – although again that’s less dramatic than you might think, because Primary scoring is capped at 6 VPs per turn.

So regardless of that one question, I’d be pretty confident Gargants are in good shape to fuck with this this mission. You can certainly kick your “Home” objective onto the border halfway line and make it worth 2 VPs to you, while switching off the option for your opponent to score 5 VPs on your home objective. Look at that 3rd bullet point: Do they control the objective wholly within enemy territory? No? Well there’s your answer.

Relative to Border War, the grey DMZs actually add a little bit of nuance here. If you kick any objectives into those grey areas, they are worth 0 VPs (to both players). Read through the bullet points and you’ll see what I mean – objectives in those dead zones satisfy none of the criteria. So if you’re holding onto a lead but running out of Giants, it might be worth punting the objectives into the dead zone and limiting the total points available for the rest of the game. I reckon that edges this one over into being the best mission for Kraken-eater bullshit.

Scorched Earth

Another goodie. 1 objective wholly within enemy territory per battle round (from the second onwards) means that you can start punting them forwards early with a view to zapping them later. You’ll need to move them 12″ forward to get them wholly into enemy territory so it’s probably going to take two turns each anyway. You don’t actually score any VPs for doing that, but it does put you in complete control of what gets burnt and when.

The Better Part of Valour

Nah nothing here, other than it being a 6-objective mission and the whole bunching up thing.

The Vice

This is surprisingly good for the Kraken-eater. The “new” positions are pre-defined so the objectives will snap back to where they “should” be regardless of whether you kick them in the interim. But the thing to note is that the additional scoring condition for the lone objective in Rounds 4 and 5 is not controlling the objective, but rather having no enemy units within 6″ of it:

This is cataclysmically bad for your army. You’d still score for controlling “One” and “More”, but Control Score does not matter at all for the other 2x 2 VPs on offer, and that’s your army’s whole thing. That famous Control 20 is a big old waste of space for those VPs, and Gargants generally struggle to table their opponents, so you’re probably not keeping them out of 6″ by simply massacring them all.

That’s where Ol’ Fish Breath can you get you out of a hole: if you can’t kill the bastards, kick it out from under them and score it that way instead. Just be careful not to leave a countercharge back onto it – maybe charge and tag their units if you need to. The Kraken-eater can give you a situational “out” in a mission where you could otherwise struggle, in this case the physical movement of the objective being inherently valuable rather than breaking the mission conditions as such.

Close to the Chest

Direct synergy here, albeit hard to achieve. Note that the objective you pick does not need to be wholly within your territory (only “within”), so 4 of the 6 are in play for both players. You can go deep and start kicking one of “theirs” back towards your own army, but that’s probably a big ask; more achievable might be to simply kick one off the border backwards into your own turf, limiting your opponent to two choices. The trouble being that those two choices (the ones that are deep in their territory) will generally be the most favourable to them in any case.

So in theory, you can bust this one wide open if you manage to punt those deep objectives back your own way (potentially starving them of the opportunity to pick a Primary objective at all if there end up being none in their territory). But in practice that’s going to be a big ask.

Limited Resources

Nah nothing to see here – it’s just another 6-objective mission where bunching them together might help a little.

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Conclusion

Given that Kraken-eater was already not popular (at all), he probably needed a bump relative to the others, but GW hasn’t really delivered that on his warscroll. They have kept the piss-weak output, and actually made Get Orf Me Land worse by locking it behind a 2+ roll. 2D6 is already extremely variable so if they’re doing that, it could probably have been smoothed out to D6+4″ or similar. That’s something to consider for the eventual battletome.

Where he does get a bit back is how he interacts with this GHB’s missions. Is he more than a novelty pick? Maybe. What I would note is that a lot of the cases where the Kraken-eater is least helpful are missions that are already good for Sons of Behemat. So if you don’t know which scenarios are going into a pack, he could be good insurance. If he’s not getting the missions he wants, chances are you’re in good shape anyway.

Where I’d be most excited through are the missions where he busts it wide open. If I do know the missions in advance, and I see the likes of Battle for the Pass or Scorched Earth on Day 2, I’d be very open to slotting a Kraken-eater into the army. And when I do put one in a list, I’d be that little bit more likely to take Breaker Tribe, since he’ll facilitate keeping your models together on high objective-count scenarios.

I’m certainly not ready to say that he’s competitively optimal – but I do think he’s at least competitive, and if you like the objective-kicking minigame, he’s good enough and brings enough to take in your lists.

Sample List: Unbreakable Tribe

I’d be happy to run this one at a GT this weekend. We’re going hardcore chicken-shit DPS test here:

Allegiance: Sons of Behemat
– Battle Formation: Breaker Tribe

Regiment 1
King Brodd (520)
– General
Gatebreaker Mega-Gargant (500)

Regiment 2
Gatebreaker Mega-Gargant (500)
– Heroic Trait: Monstrously Tough
Kraken-eater Mega-Gargant (480)
– Artefact: Glowy Lantern

Battleline

Total: 2000 / 2000
Wounds: 150
Drops: 2

You’ve got two 40-wound Giga-Chads in Brodd and your General, and an army-wide 6++ ward as long as you’re bunched up. And the Kraken-eater helps to make sure that you are always bunched up.

Glowy Lantern brings the flexibility to choose a Manifestation Lore at the tabletop – we’ll come back to that later this week – and Brodd being a Priest provides a second method of binning off Manifestations beyond battering them, which is important when the stupid things are standing in your way.

If you’re getting debuffed you can just nope out of regular combat with the Gatebreaker’s Scorpion Punch – if you’ve got balls like King Kong, I dare you to prove it by running 4x Gatebreakers and refusing to roll a melee attack all weekend. Just 4x Scorpion Punches in every combat, every time. My competitive Sons lists currently are just Brodd, two Gatebreakers and take your pick for the 4th: Warstomper is a much better Mega, Kraken-eater brings the bullshit.

All in all, this is a very simple list with a very simple gameplan, and perfect for getting to grips with the new edition. The Kraken-eater puts a bit of zing in the salsa, and with the right set of missions, could make the difference between scoring a podium and missing out.

Anyway. I hope you’re all enjoying smashing into the new points and smashing out lists – have a good week, nerds.

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