Hordes

Hordes is a tabletop wargame produced by Privateer Press set in the Iron Kingdoms setting. It is the sister game to Warmachine, with which it is fully compatible. Most discussion and tournaments include both Warmachine and Hordes, leading to the portmanteau "Warmahordes" (unsurprisingly more widely-used than the alternative portmanteau "Hormachine").

Game Summary

Hordes is a game 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, meaning they can't go over the amount the start with. In addition to fury, warbeasts have a stat called threshold, and at the end of each turn, if there is still fury on the creature, their controller rolls 2D6 and adds it to the amount of fury still on it, and if it goes over the threshold the beast frenzies. If a warbeast frenzies they immediately charge the nearest model regardless of who controls it, make a single super-attack, 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 pawn it off 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 be forced to cast their own animi by accumulating a quantity of fury equivalent to the spell's cost.

While never stated in the rules, compared to Warmachine, the factions in Hordes don't have as a good a ranged game since they don't get to attach big guns to their units (as the armies in Warmachine have the benefit of the industrial revolution and only one of the Hordes armies even has its own gunpowder, though another has giant piles of the stuff donated/stolen from Cygnar) and most of their warbeasts are either running around with just their bare hands (in a manner of speaking) or big melee weapon. This balances the fact that warbeasts have a much higher limit to how much fury is on them and don't take always need warlock's resources to charge up, so they are often a lot nastier in melee than warjacks.

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. Their main weakness is that they're very slow, also some of the units are lacking the armor department without buffs.

Circle Orboros

Main article: Circle Orboros

The Circle are a group of very secretive druids who are trying to keep the heavenly war between Menoth (god of civilisation) and the Devourer Wurm (god of chaos) from spilling into the material world and causing the apocalypse. At the moment they feel that Menoth has things too much in his favor and so 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-righteousness and manipulative disregard for the lives of anyone else. Not helping matters is the fact that the upper leadership are all 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. Oh and, also not helping matters, the Devourer Wurm is a bigger jerk than Menoth, the Circle are really the only ones who AREN'T convinced that the thing is evil (or, at least, that it doesn't have any non-evil aspects), and many amongst the Iron Kingdoms think the thing spawned Toruk the Dragonfather. Cryx doesn't think so, but Toruk's not telling.

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 with 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. Because of this they're often considered the most difficult faction in the game to start out even though they are benefiting from a certain sort of renaissance with the release of Epic Morvahnna.

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, which makes them look extra scary. All of their warbeasts are boss at murdering things, either up-close, at range (range is something this faction is VERY good at due their warbeasts having special rules that negate abilities that make enemies harder to hit), 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, and they also have some really good units for managing their warbeasts. The downside is that their warbeasts tend to be not so good at taking hits.

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

Main article: 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 have infantry called cataphracts, those things were cavalry in real life). 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, but arguably the hardest hitting. 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 voodoo Cajun alligator people or 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 do justice to 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. As a consequence, expect every fucking Minions player to field Rask as one of his warlocks; he's pretty much the fishman version of Eiryss. They also love them some undead somethin' good with their voodoo witchcraft and their prechance to speak in a southern drawl.
• 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. They have some weird voodoo like magic of their own what with their bone grinders making protective amulets out of various parts of dead bodies (grimdark). Also, the pig food puns!