James Wilson Codes

I was very excited to try out Fourth Edition Kastore, because he’s probably the master I have played the most in the game. I started with him partly because my wife who has a bit of a thing for toadstools in art liked Gwyll, but then I gradually fell in love with his playstyle. After reading one of my blogs, /u/headbangerxfacerip on reddit convinved me to try Kastore, Awakened in Third more, and I had a lot of fun with him sometimes, although he still felt generally less powerful than Fervent.

I was expecting the crew to change significantly with the move to Fourth – not just because he is solely in Neverborn now (not a problem, he’s always played largely in keyword anyway, and there are no upgrades anymore, it just means I can’t switch between him and Reva at tournaments anymore) – but because Faith in the Flesh and the general overhealing mechanics seem to not fit with the general design in Fourth.

They have changed! They have a whole new mechanic based on Hunger tokens. The lowdown is that if you have a Hunger token, you have to take one damage at the end of your activation (I forgot this a lot) or ping an ally within 1 inch and remove the token. The new Feast on the Faithful crew card ability means Kastore’s crew can ping an enemy instead.

However, most of what Hunger tokens are about is Returned models gaining one in order to get some benefit. Some of this is on individual cards – for example, Barbaros can move three inches when he activates if he already has one. The crew card however gives an advantage when gaining one.

The Returned crew cards are flippable – the general idea being that if you meet a condition, you flip it to the strong side and your whole crew gets buffed. The downside is that if the enemy meets a condition, you have to drain a soulstone to prevent it flipping back.

In the case of Kastore, Awakened, at the end of a Returned model’s actiation, if there are three Scheme markers in LOS, you can flip it to the strong (from Weakened Resolve to Strengthened Resolve) in this title’s case. The main difference is that instead of unique Returned models getting a 3 inch interact if they gain a Hunger Token (Bound to Purpose), all Returned models get a 5 inch interact (Glorious Purpose) if they gain one.

That takes some time to sink in! A 5 inch interact is Crazy Peas.

However, like most good design, it comes at a cost. The immediate cost is the 1 ping damage from the Hunger Token. The more interesting cost is that once you’ve got a hunger token, you can’t do it – or any other ability that requires you to gain a Hunger Token, unless you remove it at the end of your activation. (or someone else removes it!)

Explaining how this crew works to your opponent was always an interesting experience in Third Edition – it seems that Wyrd have kept that aspect!

I think going forward, Hunger Token management is going to be really important – Gwyll can remove general tokens, as can the Leech King – but other than that, you need to be next to another model at the end of your activation, which has some interesting consequences, especially as this crew doesn’t have much defensive tech and probably doesn’t want to be next to enemy models at the end of their activation.

However, it can make for a very strong Turn 1.

In my case I spotted a neat trick (I’ve highlighted it in a report on the Wyrd Forums – the official mechanism for feeding back on the Open Beta in case they want to tweak things so it doesn’t work as it might be a Negative Play Experience) – using a Blood Vessel.

My first activation, he Interacted twice – there are no restrictions on where Scheme markers can be placed now – then used Rite of Sacrifice to gain a Hunger token and Interact again. This meant I could proc Wise Council and flip the crew card. It stayed that way for the rest of the game.

This meant I was set up to do some long range Interacting – and it quickly let me Recover Evidence without leaving my table half. I also would have (I think) been able to score 2 Scheme points from Light The Beacons, if I hadn’t got confused about which line the centre line was.

The Cavern Nephilim are great in this edition. They’re not faster than most models anymore, but Ambush is very powerful – letting you move your Speed + 2 inches. You do have to discard a card if you aren’t in Concealing terrain still, but combined with the Flight that they now have, this lets them seriously shift – and with a potential 5 inch interact, you can really Scheme! Also, Stealth makes it quite hard for the enemy to take them down. Although, if they do get to hit them, they can’t take much of a beating.

Another idea I’d had which worked quite well was to put the two Cavern Nephilim next to each other – this meant that they could fly around Scheming together, and one of them could ping the other to remove Hunger at the end of the turn.

While all this was going on, Adam was using Merris to buff all his crew, and I have to say, all those Ophelia guns with +1 damage are scary. He nearly took down Athorak who I’d left exposed on a bridge, mainly using him to Interact and move Kastore and the Leech King forward. Barbaros, the 10 stone beater, spent his first activation walking and Luring Athorak to safety!

Kastore was hiding behind a building in my deployment zone from Ophelia. Kastore, Awakened always felt like he couldn’t do very much in Turn 1 in Third Edition – because you couldn’t push him forward like Fervent, and he needed to activate to move Marathine, which as a Quick action he could only do once per turn and it was a problem I never quite solved. In this specific case, it didn’t matter. I hid behind the building and just moved Marathine multiple times, dropping a Scheme Marker each time. In fact, one of these was the one Marker I could have scored Light The Beacons with, my Centreline Blindness.

This meant that Marathine was near a small group of Ophelia’s crew, and had yet to activate. Marathine is a divisive model – it can’t be killed, for one. It can’t pulse out ping damage like in Third Edition, but it does have Blade Rush, meaning it can ping damage when it charges through models. Being a Peon, it’s limited to one attack per activation, but that can still be a significant attack, especially with Puncture and Quick Reflexes triggers, which could be 5 damage in total if you flip, cheat or Empower the suits, not accounting for any additional raises from the difference in duel totals. I did not have the suits, but it might be something to plan for in future. Marathine managed to take out Merris in Turn 2, meaning the Demise(Flashover) did not cause me as much trouble as in my last game against Adam’s Ophelia. Marathine basically hung around in this part of the board for the rest of the game causing trouble.

I’d regretted taking the Leech King as soon as I actually read the rules for Recover Evidence. The Leeches he summons (more reliably now, but costing a soulstone) have 4 health, low stats and would create a Strategy marker for your opponent to pick up as the are Minions not Peons. However, I do love the changes to him. I’ll miss the madness of Third Edition’s I’ll Have What They’re Having (one time I healed Barbaros 8 and gave him Focused +1, did 4 damage and 2 Injured to an enemy and gave an Urnbearer Shielded +4 in one activation with Gwyll, just because he was standing nearby) but I love that that ability is now a demise that turns him into a Giant Leech on full health. How thematic! Essentially he climbed onto a rooftop for cover, got shot by Raphael, turned into a Leech and snuck off, to try but not achieve very much. I think he could be great fun in a different Strategy though, and can’t wait to field him again. He’s still squishy, which I think is good design to offset his other powers.

Barbaros also has a crazy looking card – he could move and melee three times in an activation, so it’s kind of like being able to charge multiple times around corners, and if he spends a stone, he gets to pulse out ping damage. He didn’t get to shine in this game, because he Lured Athorak at first, then did general actions to score in Turn 2, then attacked Francois and got killed. I think it might be the case that the Awakened crew does better when not fighting, and that was certainly how it worked in this game! I’ve heard a lot of comments saying the game is much killier, but it feels more like there’s fewer ways of just frustrating attacks – like if you are in the middle of enemies, you’re probably going to go down – which doesn’t feel unreasonable to me.

Adam also threw Pere Ravage into Kastore – he explained that he knew it probably wasn’t an optimal play, but he was trying to evaluate the model. Ophelia also charged in, trying to kill Athorak. Meanwhile the Cavern Nephilim were Scheming like crazy, but in order to try and recover the Strategy marker that Merris dropped, I had to over expose one of them, and he died. We had a lot of discussion about them afterwards – they seem incredibly powerful – especially against a gun crew, but I like that they have these sorts of limitations – I had no way of healing them (no more Regeneration +2 alas!) so they’d likely take 4 damage over a game from Hunger alone, and they still have to fend off enemy attacks. They were very suited to this board, adapted from Carnevale terrain, however, due to **Flight**.

Overall I ended up winning, but it was not as close as it looked like it might have been, and I’m not sure it’s helpful to give detailed scores at this point in the beta (although we did in the Battle Report for the forums). I think it’s an interesting crew – I definitely wasn’t anywhere near close to optimal Hunger management, and I think without that they’re very frontloaded as it’ll be much easier to get the Interact boost in the early turns. I think Adam had a bad match-up with Ophelia, Red Cage Raider, on this board, due to the problems with the Interacts and the Cavern Nephilim, but I also don’t think any of them are questions without answers, and hopefully they’ll be roughly similar when it comes to be released! I still need to try Kastore, Fervent and White Eyes and Gwyll so there’s definitely more to learn here.