You wait an entire edition for one Destruction Battletome¹, and now they’re flying at you from all angles. Ogors and Sons of Behemat are the two factions I’ve played most in this edition – the lower model count suits my declining brainpower – so I’m super keen to get my teeth into this one.

Today we’ll be parsing the first couple of reveals on Warcom, breaking down what they mean and trying to read the tea leaves a little on what might be around the corner.

Ready? Let’s go.

First thing’s first: Today’s Battle Traits reveal

We’ll start with the latest article, because that has the most meat on the bones.

In their words:

OK let me stop you right there. Shitty D3 is not “small, reliable damage”. When your main battle trait does literally nothing 1/3 of the time, there’s a lot of words that I’d use to describe that, but “reliable” is not amongst them. I’d suggest words such as “crap”, “lazy” or “please stop using this Shitty D3 stuff immediately” instead.

Anyway. Once you get past that Shitty D3, what you’re looking at is actually really interesting: a push-your-luck mechanic that aims to pivot Giants away from having one of the most reliable win conditions in the game² to a much more high-variance proposition. It’ll be interesting to see if that philosophy permeates the whole book.

How it works

So there are layers to this, which is a polite way of saying multiple failure points, which in turn is a polite way of saying “roll a dice to roll another dice”.

Firstly you have to decide how many units you’re going to try for in a given phase. If you roll below the number of units you’ve chosen, nothing happens for any of them, but if you succeed they all get to do something cool³. So the more units you pick, the more chance of complete failure – I reckon that the sweet spot as a starting point would probably be going for two Megas on a 2+. Situationally you might choose something else but it feels like you’ll often get a lot of value out of that as a starting point.

I actually really like this design. The fact that you get three cracks on every turn (across three phases) means you’ll inevitably have both players getting wins and losses along the way. You can lock in 1 unit for an auto-pass and you’ll also get stories about that one time you were up shit creek, but rolled a 6 to make six babies do some crazy movement bump and steal loads of VPs. Big fan of this, honestly.

Secondly comes the question of what actual abilities you can trigger through this. Although I’ve been taking the piss out of Shitty D3 the fact that you can get multiple bites at it every turn means it should be somewhat reliable in total, and come in handy for finishing off units.

Details are currently scant on the other options although they do mention that “each phase has one or more utility abilities that let you pile in further, scoot off the battlefield edge, or move through enemy units and terrain.” That part about the battlefield edge interests me – I wonder if you can go into Reserve if you finish a move wholly within 6″ of a board edge?

The other option is that you can bank your move and charge phase abilities to do something bigger in combat: Strike First with smaller units, or unleash a haymaker with a bigger unit.

Now before we go on – what is classed as Big in the new book, with our various new units? Mancrushers and Megas speak for themselves, and the article does mention that Boss-Stompers are Little. The fact that they are even making this distinction tells us that it can’t just be Megas that are Big – otherwise they could just use the Mega-gargant keyword – so by process of deduction it looks very likely that Ma Maegran will be Big along with them.

So how does the haymaker work?

You can save up your resources and unleash a massive whallop. Now: what do you have to give up to use this ability?

When it says “wind up for the whole turn” and then mentions the Movement and Charge phases, I’m taking that to mean that you sacrifice your battle trait abilities for those phases – there’s nothing here that says (or implies) to me that you don’t get to Fight normally and then do this. I just wanted to flag that up because it seems to be a direct replacement for the Gatebreaker’s Hillbilly Smash, which was instead of fighting, where this seems to be as well as. Now that is yet to be proven, but it’s what we can take that from what’s written here on Warcom.

A couple of things to note here:

• You have to survive to the end of turn before you get the chance to use it
• On the plus side: End of Turn is its own phase in the game, so it’s another way you can score Blazing 1
• The article is clear that you choose how many dice and roll them all at once (not roll in one at a time)⁴

I mean…that’s pretty cool, no? If you’re not excited about the idea of scooping up a fistful of dice and smashing out a million mortals, then you’ve come to the wrong place. And any seasoned Gargants player will instantly know that the power of such abilities relies in bypassing those 4+ to Hit rolls, especially when you’re facing basically any debuffs but especially Neg 1 to Hit. Rolling a tiny handful of dice hitting on 5s is depressing, so just letting the dice get to work unimpeded is a joy.

For anyone interested, I’ve also ran some numbers over on the Patreon site to give you a feel for how the odds and outcomes shift as you add in more dice:

https://www.patreon.com/PlasticCraic/posts/hillbilly-smash-168916443?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

The article also goes on to mention a set of Rampages which is presumably your second battle trait, and they show you one of them, which borks your opponent’s control score down to 1:

There’s not a lot of detail on these but they’ve consistently been excellent across all iterations of Sons, from the iconic Suplex to the mortal damage shooting on both player’s turns in King Brodd’s Stomp, with Roar (for switching off commands) in between. Hopefully there’s some cool wrestling moves among them.

Second things second: They showed us the models again

Sunday’s article didn’t really show us much other than some pretty pictures. Ma is a wizard and her monster pets are fighty, go figure.

The Boss Stompers can be assembled as a dedicated shooting unit. The use of a slingshot as a missile weapon is a nice inversion of the David and Goliath bible story:

I do like both kits and it’s neat that they’ve tied in the Boss Stompers aesthetically to the extremely dated Mancrushers, without making them look shit. It will definitely help the army look coherent and it’s a good modernisation.

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So that’s a wrap on what we know so far. I really like this push-your-luck stuff and it feels like a good fit for the army. You’ll get some stories of obscene damage but a lot more where they do nothing – risk / reward at its finest. I’m keen to see what else is coming, because this is a genuinely creative and fun dice mechanic.

I’ve also started work on an SOB wishlist article which may hit the screen on Friday, or may be rendered entirely obsolete before then if Rob Reads Book, in which case I’ll give it the arse and smash into reviewing the leaks instead.

Catch you soon,

~ Pete

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1. Yeah the Gloomspite and Orruks ones don’t count. They were just lazy rehashed Faction Packs, with a few nerfs thrown in. ↩︎
2. Let’s be honest, “Choose to stand on circles” is not a high-IQ move. It’s why I love ’em. ↩︎
3. Or, if you don’t like cool stuff, you can roll for a Shitty D3 instead. Imagine my excitement. ↩︎
4. These articles aren’t rules text themselves so keep an eye on the final rules wording, but they did go out of their way to specify, so it does feel likely that will be the case this time. ↩︎