On Tuesday, Steamforged Games revealed the contents of the upcoming Old Umbrey Auxiliary Expansion for miniature wargame Warmachine, the latest addition to the game's new folk-horror coded faction. It's on pre-order now for $149.99 (£119.99) and contains 14 new models, almost half of which either are, or are riding, massive feral bears.
Warmachine offers several bundle deals for each faction, at least compared to other miniature wargames, but you should note that Auxiliary Expansions aren't starter sets and don't have everything needed to make a playable army. They're intended to bulk out an existing collection, containing a Leader unit who will greatly change your core strategy, and a variety of new infantry and solo models.
Let's start with those bear cavalry, the Liegemen Ursans. Old Umbrey is a rural province of the Khadoran Empire, renowned for its proud tradition of horsemanship. Reforms in the Khadoran military have seen the province lose much of its autonomy and its horses have been confiscated by the state Winter Korps, so the warriors of Old Umbrey have taken to riding magically taming bears.
Steamforged has revealed the rules for all the models in the expansion in a preview article: the Ursans are simple and brutal cavalry. They're fairly slow but they hit like trucks, are hard to kill (and become even harder once they're stuck in melee), and they have a handy high damage short range scattergun which they can unload even when engaging an enemy hand to hand.
There's also a Liegeman Ursan Champion, a mounted commander model who boosts the performance of all your other Liegemen. He makes all nearby Liegemen more accurate, and has a series of battleplans that can speed up Liegemen infantry, let your Liegemen move or even shoot through their fellows as if they weren't there, or simply power up their melee damage.
The box has five Liegemen Hunters, snipers who are skilled at moving through terrain and can even enter the battlefield during the game from one of the board edges. The most entertaining thing about all Liegemen models is that they are 'Marked'. Your army can contain Shifted models which only get placed on the battlefield when a Marked model is killed.
The box set introduces a new type of Shifted model, the Ursine shifted. They're protective, so as well as replacing a model when it dies, you can choose to replace a model if a friendly model nearby is targeted by an enemy ranged attack - the Marked model immediately warps into an Ursine Shifted and takes the hit instead. They also have the Shieldguard ability which lets them keep taking hits for their buddies even after they've transformed.
The Ursine Apex is the biggest, baddest bear of them all. Stronger and tougher than its comrades, it gets even stronger and tougher when it's injured by an enemy attack. If your opponent hits it in melee and fails to kill it, it gets to strike back; and it confers both these abilities to other Ursine Shifted nearby.
The solo Jezhana Agha is an agent of the Old Witch of Khador, the shadowy patron of Old Umbrey. She collects the corpses of slain models, and can use them to mess with your enemy, most notably with a spell that curses an enemy model so that the next time your leader would suffer damage, that enemy does instead.
The force contains a new army leader, the Warlock Olesea Reznikova, Mistress of Thorns. She's made a pact with a very ancient entity, the dark tree Wurmwood (which will be very familiar to former Hordes players). Her powers revolve around the dangers of the deep woods: she can create patches of forest, send roots up from underground to strangle her foes, fill her entire control area with grasping briars that slow and subdue the enemy while punishing them for attacking her forces…
For older Warmachine players, Reznikova seems really similar to classic Circle models, while the Ursan cavalry feel like a down the line Khador unit. The Ursine Shifters split the difference, as they're slow heavy infantry that can pop out of your light infantry without warning.
Excited for this release, or want to learn more about Warmachine? Join the gang in the Wargamer Discord community: we've got some really excellent Warmachine painters in the crew doing outstanding things with the minis.
I've received review samples of the Old Umbrey Command Cadre and Battlegroup box set - you can get my thoughts on the model quality in this article.