Warcry: Briar and Bone Review
Last Updated on August 6, 2024 by Jordan
Hot on the heels of the Nighthaunt and the Lumineth Realm-Lords comes the next entry in the ongoing Warcry Saga. Briar and Bone pits the furious might of Nagash against Alarielle the Everqueen, as their followers do battle deep in the Gnarlwood. Read our Warcry: Briar and Bone Review for all the details on this new set.
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Warcry: Briar and Bone Review – Summary
Whilst fans of Ossiarch Bonereapers and Sylvaneth will be overjoyed to have a few more miniatures pushed into their faction’s ranges, there’s not much in the Warcry: Briar and Bone set to really grab the attention of just about anyone else.
Sure, the set is fine, but that’s about it. Largely run-of-the-mill models won’t likely inspire creativity in painters, nor will they likely seize the attention of would-be Warcriers.
Warcry: Briar and Bone Review – Introduction
In amidst all the new Skaven and Stormcast Eternal hype, seeing something non-ratty with the Age of Sigmar logo attached to it comes as something of a breath of fresh air. It’s been an intense few weeks since the launch of Age of Sigmar Fourth Edition, and I’m probably not the only one who’s all ratted out (for the time being, at least).
I’m a big Ossiarch Bonereapers fan, and have a small collection of Sylvaneth models that I’ve been tentatively adding to for the last few months, so when I saw Briar and Bone announced back at AdeptiCon in March this year, I was quietly intrigued as to just what this set might entail. The set arrived at the perfect moment, too: we’re just coming down off the initial post-release Skaventide wave and everyone’s probably looking for a distraction – a few non-Skaven or non-Stormcast models to have a play around with to avoid burnout (well, if you’re anything like me, that is!).
With that in mind, then, Briar and Bone’s release is very well-timed, potentially offering a cup of something different to wash down the feast of new edition-releases. But how does the set measure up – especially after the mild disappointment of its predecessor, Pyre and Flood?
The set examined in this review was very kindly provided by Games Workshop.
Warcry: Briar and Bone Review – Contents
Warcry: Briar and Bone contains the following:
- 1 x 64-page Warband Tome
- 60 cards, as:
- 12 fighter cards
- 3 ability cards
- 3 divider cards
- 42 battleplan cards
- 16 Citadel miniatures
- 8 x Twistweald fighters
- 8 x Teratic Cohort fighters
- 1 x Ravening Gnarloak scenery piece
Let’s look at all this in a bit more detail now…
Wargear
As with any Warcry set, this game comes with all the cards and book that you need to get started with this box. Remember, however, that these are not pick-up-and-play releases. It’s best to think of these Warcry boxes as expansions: you’ll need at the very least a copy of the Warcry Core Book in order to be able to use the contents of this set.
All the cards, however, are usable with the contents of this set, utilising all the models and the terrain piece. Cards are all as you’d expect: these are very formulaic, and have the same aesthetic as all the other Warcry cards we’ve seen this season.
They’re easy to read and look fairly good too; there’s no sense that these have been cheaped-out on. There’s not much exciting going on with these cards (this isn’t Magic: The Gathering, after all), and they’re primarily informative, so information is displayed clearly.
The book is much the same. Whilst the first part of it is given over to explaining where the Ossiarch Bonereapers and the Sylvaneth come into play in the Gnarlwood, and establishing a lore reason for them to be having a fall-out within the twisted realm of Ghur.
The book inside is also a fairly standard fare: good-quality writing, exciting artwork, and cinematic photographs of the pro-painted miniatures in this set duking it out within beautifully-created miniature landscapes.
There’s not really much I can say about this set that we haven’t said previously in other Warcry releases, such as Pyre and Flood and Hunter and Hunted. Games Workshop have found their formula for these releases, and each time we essentially see a re-skin of a previous set. There’s nothing wrong with this, after all: you’re not necessarily supposed to buy every expansion in a season – especially if you’ve found your faction of choice. The formula works, and if you’re a Warcry player and an Ossiarch Bonereaper and/or Sylvaneth fan, you’ll find a lot to enjoy in this book.
Miniatures
I’m going to kick this off with a bit of a moan, as I had a bit of a gripe across all the miniatures in this set – and it’s that a lot of the models in this box are, for want of a better word, quite bitty.
Each warband is on its own sprue – as you’d likely suspect – but each warband seems to be made up of a rather large number of quite thin and breakable bits: several of the long wing parts on my Aviarch Harpies were broken on arrival. But alongside that, some of the models – the Kavalos Centari, the Aviarch Harpies, the Cykloptians, and the Swarmsage in particular – played fast and loose with the line that runs between “this is a challenge” and “this is annoying”.
The results, however, are for the large part quite impressive, as you’ll see below.
Kavalos Centari
The Kavalos Centari is one of two impressive miniatures in this set (the other, as we’ll see later, is his direct counterpart on the Sylvaneth side of the box). A centaur-like creature, this half-equine, half-humanoid monster wields an impressive whip and hooked blade.
He is a bit of a faff to put together at points – particularly his whip-arm, which you’ll need to be careful with and take your time assembling. But once it’s together, it makes an impressive – and slightly different – Ossiarch figure. Definitely one the painters will enjoy.
Aviarch Harpies
The Aviarch Harpies are odd. They’re clearly intended to be menacing, skittery little blighters, but, to me, there’s something just a touch off with their design.
They look a little bit too much like Morghasts for me to get completely behind their design – perhaps that’s it; they look like baby giant winged horrors, and that’s a touch absurd. Once that connection had been made, I can’t really see them as anything else.
Setting that aside, they’re some of the more fiddly miniatures in the set. Not only did mine arrive with damage to the wingbones, they are quite fiddly to clip off their sprues, so will take a reasonable amount of clean-up as well.
Mortek Cykloptians
The Cykloptians are, again, erring towards the fiddly side of the spectrum – but they do look quite impressive once they’re together. Much larger than regular Mortek Guard miniatures, these 32mm base-mounted monstrosities will loom over many of their comrades.
But they are a touch too similar to the Mortek Guard for me. Their design isn’t quite as exciting as it could be – and whilst they are cyclopean horrors, this is one very small detail on these miniatures. In the pictures above, the boning around the cyclopean eye-socket even looks a little like to eyes as oppose to one.
It feels like a B+. There’s a missed opportunity here; these could have been some real monsters, perhaps more akin to the Ogor Mawpack we saw in Hunter and Hunted. These guys are perhaps just a little too like the Mortek Guard to score high points for uniqueness.
Teratic Prowlers
After the erring mediocrity of the Aviarch Harpies and the Mortek Cykloptians, the whacky Teratic Prowlers help this half of the box end on something of a high. These intersting little dog-like monsters are something entirely new for the Ossiarch Bonereapers range – and are a grisly parallel of the hunting dogs we saw in Hunter and Hunted.
They’re also easy to assemble, which is nice given how some of the miniatures in this box are.
Swarmsage
Skipping over to the Sylvaneth half of the box now, much like the Ossiarch Bonereapers, the Twistweald come out fighting with a simply spectacular model.
The Swarmsage is a serious impressive piece of plastic: sculpted with an enormous cloud of tiny bee-like insects swarming around its head, this model is extremely impressive. But it does beg the question: how on earth do you paint it?
The bees are seriously minute, each wing not all that much bigger than the Swarmsage’s eye. It’s going to be a significant challenge if you want to paint these – especially to the same level of detail or colouring that’s displayed on the box art. That said, you could always hit these with whatever ethereal, spirit-colour you’d use on your non-wooden Sylvaneth bits, and this’d still look cool as hell.
Twistroot Wardens
After the high of the Swarmsage, things begin to go go downhill for the Sylvaneth side of the box quite rapidly. The Twistroot Wardens are extremely similar to many other Sylvaneth units – particularly the Tree-Revenants.
The virtue with these chaps is their weapon options: you have a choice of three different weapons for each Warden, so you’ll be able to take some time personalising these as you see fit.
Twistroot Revenants
The Twistroot Revenants can be built in a number of different ways, but this doesn’t spare them from suffering as the Wardens do: they are still not really anything new. They look a great deal like the Tree-Revenants or Spite-Revenants you might buy – with one exception: the model on the below-right.
The Twistroot Spite-Revenant with Briarlash stands head and shoulders above a lot of the other Sylvaneth miniatures in this box by being themed more towards the Swarmsage: their huge, lashing tentacle-arm is something different and exciting, matching the aesthetic of the Swwarmsage’s head. But there’s none of this available on the alternate builds for these two models: they’re just regular old Tree-Revenants for the most part, which seems like a missed opportunity.
Twistroot Dryads
Whilst undoubtedly an update on the old Sylvaneth Dryads model, the Twistroot Dryads are, again, a little samey: they look just like the now out-of-production Branchwych (that you can find in the Spearhead: Sylvaneth box) minus the bugs.
I think the issue we’re circling here – particularly with the Sylvaneth models – is that they’re just that. The Sylvaneth models in particular are just Sylvaneth models. They don’t try to do anything exciting, which is a huge shame.
In the past, we’ve seen some wild and whacky faction-alternative figures in Warcry sets – look at the models in Bloodhunt, Red Harvest before that, and in the not-so-distant past we had the Ogor Mawpack and the Cities of Sigmar Wildercorps. But the last two Warcry sets we’ve seen have contained what feel like extremely generic and rather uninspired miniatures.
It’s a missed opportunity. Warcry, just like Underworlds, has in the past been a great opportunity to get your hands on something a little bit different for your chosen faction(s) of choice, but now there’s a sense that we’re sliding towards the more generic. Here? Give the Sylvaneth more bees. Give them all kinds of swarmy little bugs. Double down on the inspect element – that’d make for a great set.
The same with the Ossiarchs above: make more of the hunter-pack sort of thing. Instead of oddly Morghast harpies, have some bigger, more animalistic birds to match the weird dogs – a horrible parallel of the Cities of Sigmar set referenced above. Make the Cykloptians bigger and more obviously Cykloptian. Warhammer has always taken fantasy and made it big and absurd – and these sets could do with a splash more of that absurdity.
Terrain and Scenery
In addition to the miniatures in this set, there’s also a single piece of scenery for you to have your new miniatures fight on, around, over and under.
Ravening Gnarloak
See?! Absurdity!
It’s a giant meat tree with a fanged mouth, for gods sake. It’s whacky. It’s weird. It’s exciting. It’s brilliant.
This sort of bonkers energy is what’s lacking from the rest of this set. Horse-dude with a whip? Fine, I guess. Two big Mortek Guard? Kinda cool. Some tree-people? Eh. Giant tree-monster thing with a big meaty mouth and teeth and leg-like roots?!
There’s the Age of Sigmar we know and love.
Warcry: Briar and Bone Review – Price and Availability
As we’ve analysed in previous reviews, the new price point that these Warcry sets are now entering at – £80.00GBP/$130.00USD/€105.00EUR – is a pretty standard saving of arounf 40%ish. As we’ve seen, Warcry Warbands and their decks of cards and the terrain features you usually see released in a set like this tend to then be released individually with a price point of around £35.00GBP/$60.00USD/€45.00EUR each. In a couple of months time, if you want to re-create this box from scratch, you’ll be looking at spending in the region of £105.00GBP/$180.00USD/€135.00EUR alone – and that’s before we start getting into trying to grab a copy of the latest Warband Tome (if it’s released separately).
Warcry: Briar and Bone Review – Conclusion
| The Good | The Bad |
| Reasonable savings One or two stand-out models | The whole set is just a bit boring. |
This box is reminding me a little too much of Warcry: Pyre and Flood for its own good. At the end of that review, I surmised that the box was “mediocre”, and that whilst some of the models were worth a second look, there was not enough going on with them to really make the box worth its price tag.
And I’m afraid to say that it’s the same story with Briar and Bone. The Ossiarch Bonereapers carry the ailing set: the Kavalos Centari is something nice, new and exciting for Bonereapers fans, as are the Teratic Prowlers and the Aviarch Harpies – but even these are a touch derivative of other models in the Bonereapers range. The Cykloptians are just Mortek Guard upscaled and with one eye. Sure, kinda cool, but not blowing anyone’s mind.
The Sylvaneth side of the box, however, is inherently disappointing. There’s really nothing special going on with any of these miniature aside from the Swarmsage (which, credit where credit is due, is a testament to the miracles of modern miniature sculpting and manufacturing). The other figures could’ve been lifted from just about any other Sylvaneth box currently on the market – which is a real shame.
It’s mediocre again. As I said above, it feels like a missed opportunity: Warcry sets have historically been a great place to pick up something a little bit different, but the models in this set – just like the models in the previous Warcry release – are just a bit too generic for their own good. Sure, all the models are pretty much just fine: they very clearly represent their chosen factions and extol the aesthetics of each appropriately, but there’s nothing in this set that will make you go wow.
Huge Ossiarch Bonereapers or Sylvaneth fan? Wait until these models are released separately. Anyone else? Sorry, just like the last set, Warcry: Briar and Bone isn’t the one.
Please Note: This site uses affiliate links. Our Affiliate Partners are shown below
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Click this link & buy your hobby stuff from Element Games for the UK & Europe to support FauxHammer.com – Use Code “FAUX2768” at the checkout for double reward points.
Our Affiliates / Hobby Stores
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