Hordes

Game Summary

Hordes is a games produced by Privateer Press. It is a tabletop miniatures combat game set in the Iron Kingdoms. Hordes shares this universe with Warmachine, but plays slightly differently. Where Warmachine is more of a resource management game, Hordes is more of a risk management game. The game plays with a warlock as the leader of your army (which is pretty much the same as a warcaster in Warmachine), with supporting monsters (called warbeasts, which are roughly equivalent to warjacks), units, and battle engines, etc. Go read the Warmachine page.

However, UNLIKE Warmachine, Hordes uses the fury mechanic rather than focus. A warbeast may be forced to do special attacks or do gain power and accuracy, but doing so creates fury. Unlike focus in Warmachine, fury stays around until it's spent. The warlock can remove it at the start of your next turn and use it himself as a warcaster would focus, but each warlock can only leech a finite total amount. If you've got too much fury on your warbeasts you risk them enraging, which causes them to charge the nearest model regardless of who controls it and then forfeit their turn, which can pretty well screw you over.

A warlock who leaves Fury on him or herself can spend it when they take damage to transfer the damage onto one of their beasts. However, you don't want them all dead, since then not only is your warlock unable to transfer but he or she can only gain fury by cutting themself for it and taking damage. Each warbeast also has an ability called an animus, which is essentially a spell that your warlock adds to their spell list. Beasts can also be forced to cast their own animi by accumulating a quantity of fury equivalent to the spell's cost.

Factions

Hordes has four playable factions and mercenary sub-faction: Trollbloods, Circle Orboros, Legion of Everblight and The Skorne, with Minions as the sub-faction.

Trollbloods

The Trollbloods are a race of Scottish/hillbilly half-trolls (though they're more comparable to Orcs from Warcraft then the typical fantasy troll, aside from their appetites and regenerative abilities) that use various species of full-blooded trolls for their warbeasts, the bigger ones being more like typically fantasy trolls. Their warbeasts are very durable and have the ability to regenerate some of the wounds they have suffered, and tend to have very good fury values. They also have access to lots of buffs to stack up on so they can end up with a front line packing absurd stats, which they need because their units on their own tend to be rather unimpressive apart from insane durability. Every Trollblood army has the same tactic at its core: advance. Advance some more. Kick the shit out of whatever's in range. Repeat.

Circle Orboros

The Circle are a group of very secretive druids who are trying to keep their god, the Devourer Wurm, Menoth's arch enemy, from destroying the world. They feel that if either god becomes to powerful it will mean the apocalypse, but at the moment they feel Menoth has things too much in his favor have decided that some judicious pruning of the tree of civilization is in order to bring the world back into balance. Unfortunately, they have managed to piss off every single other faction in both games with their unearned self-righeousness and manipulative disregard for the lives of anyone else. Not helping matters is the fact that the upper leadership are either too obsessed with their internal politicking and backstabbing to actually do anything or crazier than a bunch of shithouse rats, and given to mating with wolves and eating live human hearts and things. There was once decent man left in the Circle, and that was Baldur. Then he died, and came back as a complete dick. So, yeah.

The druids use giant werewolves (some with swords), kung-fu goatmen, and wood-and-stone constructs for their warbeasts, and focus on strong casting. Circle armies are also freakishly fast AND have the most teleportation shenanigans in the game. The Circle tends to focus on terrain manipulation, as almost all of its units can move across rough terrain without penalty. Aside from the relatively slow, durable constructs, Circle units tend to be quite fragile, and typically have limited hitting power, which some exceptions, relying on army synergies for good attacks, requiring a player to take advantage of their hit-and-run abilities to grasp their base strategy.

Legion of Everblight

The Legion of Everblight are an army of dragonspawn controlled by the shattered-heart-stone-thing of the great dragon Everblight, who is doing what all dragons do, plotting the death of the rest of his kind and then the take over of the world. The army has very powerful warbeasts, which are all different forms of dragonspawn that look somewhat like fire-breathing Tyranids crossed with western dragons, except they don't have eyes. All of their warbeasts are boss at murdering things, either up-close, at range, or BOTH, and most of them have a pile of nice special rules that keep them from charging their controller's warlock if enraged, allow them to either fly or move through cover, and target models that would normally be safe while ignoring things like cover.

It also fields units of corrupted Nyss elves from the north. The Legion excels at sudden precision strikes, but is not especially defensive. They're also fucking warped and twisted and many of their units inspire fear in the enemy and the few non-freakish units on their own side. Also notable is their intense love of having eyeless monsters, hence the "ignore all targeting rules."

The Skorne

The Skorne are a race of beings who have evolved in the harsh deserts of the east and now seek to conquer the rest of the world. They are Japanese/Chinese aesthetically, but their unit names all have Greece-Roman influences (for some reason they infantry called cataphracts, those things in real life were cavalry). Philosophical in a strange way but have a no bullshit, nihilistic attitude and and inspired, pain-worshipping belief that they use to kick shit out of anything that comes from the fact that they know life after death for them sucks. They use 6-armed elephant-like creatures called titans (some of which carry cannons), basilisks and cyclopes for their warbeasts, and some dinosaurs (their battle engine is a giant ankylosaurus). The Skorne focus on very highly armored infantry and high damaging warbeasts, and have on average the slowest models in Hordes or Warmachine. Also, they field tortured baby elephants to demoralize their foes. If that isn't awesome, I don't know what is. (Answer: beating it to death by throwing the enemy caster at it.)

Minions

Minions are just a bunch of freelancers that can be hired out (or enslaved) by other factions, mostly they're like a low-tech version of Warmachine's Mercenary faction, and a number of models are both Mercenaries AND Minions. That said they have two possible individual armies. Either redneck Cajun alligator people or redneck Redneck pig people. They lack the model for every rule-breaking exploit that the Mercs get and their relative youth and paucity of model selection doesn't really make up for their fine warlocks.

• Gatormen have tough infantry and excel at beating up living models, but have some difficulties with high armor, non-living models like warjacks. They have a few tricks to mitigate this problem, though (Bloody Barnabas' Swamp Pit spell and Calaban's Parasite spell, to name a few). They also love them some undead somethin' good.
• The farrow are pig people, which is awesomely ridiculous. They have some awesome warlocks with vastly different play styles, but no fucking variation in their faction list. Still, the War Hog is beastly enough to do the job in nearly every occasion. Also, the pig food puns!