One of 2022’s impulse buys was the Warcry second edition starter box Warcy: Heart of Ghur. Way back in 2019 I bought the first edition starter, and loved playing it, even winning a local event with my Splintered Fang warband at the, now sadly closed, LGS. I can’t explain what it was but I ended buying Heart of Ghur, and then it sat in a box, unopened – still sealed in fact – until last week. My recent review of 2022 post got me thinking about unstarted/unfinshed projects. I just felt the need to start a clean slate, do something different and new.

So, I built this…

Can’t See The Wood For The Trees

Maybe one of the reasons I hadn’t broken the box’s seal was because of the ‘horror stories‘ I’d seen/heard on the internet about the set’s terrain. Of course you shouldn’t believe everything you read online – erm except on this blog, this blog’s OK, and I’m sure there are a few other blogs that are good too 🙂

The opinions I’d read online relating to the box’s terrain were along the lines of:

• Its too fiddly to put together.
• There isn’t enough terrain, especially compared to the original boxed set.
• Its not varied enough in terms of game play, mostly relating to height I believe.

Now the original 1st edition starter box did come with a massive amount of terrain, I absolutely cannot disagree there. Perhaps on the face of it the amount of terrain that comes in Heart of Ghur does look less, but those 4 centre piece trees are BIG. Here is a top down view on the 30″ x 22″ Warcry board, its pretty well covered in scenery using the full set. I have not played a game though so I have no experience as to what its like to use in battle so to speak.

And another angle…

I am looking forward to being able to play over it though, it really does look good in bare plastic grey, it should look amazing fully painted up.

The Splintered Fang camping trip to the woods…

Don’t Use Wood Glue*

The build of the Heart of Ghur terrain was alright. No real issues for me, I do admit it wasn’t totally intuitive. That is to say, generally, you can build something simple without worrying too much about the instructions. The trees did need me to look at the instructions carefully enough to understand which way round the various parts were meant to be and how they fitted together. There again that is what instructions are for, they are supposed to be read. If you’ve read any of the posts on this blog about building models then you’ll have seen me say that dry fitting parts together is a really helpful thing to do before going near the model with glue. At each step of this build I dry fitted the parts together to make sure I understood how they were supposed to fit before getting glue on the parts. At a guess I think I spent approximately 6 or 7 hours building the terrain, I didn’t really log it. Thursday night, Friday night (a good long stint as it wasn’t a work night), and finished off the accessories Saturday morning. Then I spent a short amount of time Saturday night gap filling.

I broke out the green stuff too, to fill gaps on three parts, these two identical wall sections…

Also the watch tower skull had some gaps that I wanted to fill. I think this was my most challenging part to assemble**. It seems to go together really snugly and I just couldn’t quite get it to fit as well as I thought it should. Perhaps I missed cleaning off a mould line or sprue port that just stopped the skull fitting fully together. Maybe I just didn’t quite get one of the multiple parts sat quite right early on in the build and hence the last joint didn’t fully meet up. However the gap was easy to fill, and once painted I suspect you’ll never know.

The last thing I thought I’d mention are the short rope bridge supports. I might sit these on a base of some sort, to add a bit more stability. It might just be me being clumsy when setting up the above photos but I did knock these over a couple of times and thought if they had a base they wouldn’t do that.

This would also allow for some interesting additions to the terrain. I have some bamboo from a previous failed hobby project, and these would fit the theme of the Ghur terrain with its oriental feel, both the Rotmire Creed, and the terrain itself using bamboo in their aesthetics.

Its Ghur-eat Terrain

The puns get worse! But the sentiment is true, it is great terrain, I think it is really atmospheric and can’t wait to play over it. The build was not really difficult, sure it was time consuming, but there are a lot of parts that make up those big trees. Take your time, read and understand the instructions, dry fit the pieces, job done!

In one way the instructions have improved over the original box. With the original box instructions if you followed them to the letter you’d actually have glued parts together that were use separately on the battle plan map cards.

Of course all that remains to be done now is the painting – its currently all sprayed black in the garage. There’s hope for painted terrain yet.

Warcry Heart of Ghur is no longer in production by GW, but if you have a search on Google you can still find it for sale with a number of retailers. Just not the big online hobby stores (eg Element Games [last one], The Outpost, Firestorm Games), they have sold out of it. The contents of the box are available seperately – mostly. You can’t get the tokens or the battleplan cards (but the rule book does provide them in table format for generating randomly via dice rolls), and the Ravaged Lands: Gnarlwood Watchcamp only has one accessory sprue rather than two like this set. GW seems to have this habit of generating hype and the follow on sale through making these ‘limited release’ sets. Works though doesn’t it – otherwise why did I but the box lol

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Element Games (get double element crystals using code DAV615), and The Outpost.

*use plastic glue, just in case you didn’t think my puny heading was at all funny 😦

**after all my ‘advise’ and ‘instructions’ on ‘telling you’ how to build model kits, i actually missed a part when gluing this together and had to go and squeeze it in afterwards. See don’t believe everything you read in the internet after all! 😉