How to Choose Your First Trench Crusade Warband in Australia
Trench Crusade is a skirmish wargame set in a First World War that never happened, where the Faithful of Heaven and the Fallen of Hell have been fighting for centuries. Each player fields a small warband and you take turns activating one model at a time. The rules are free.
One of its designers, Tuomas Pirinen, co-designed Mordheim for Games Workshop in 1999. If you played that, the campaign side of Trench Crusade will feel familiar. Warbands earn experience, and injuries stay with a model from one game to the next.
Picking a warband matters more here than it does in a big army game. A starter warband box is around eight models, so each one carries a bigger share of your plan. Some warbands also make a first game much harder than others, and Trench Crusade stock is thin enough in Australia that it pays to decide before you go shopping.
Start with the free rules
Everything is on the Trench Crusade rules page. The PDFs are direct downloads, and Factory Fortress, the company behind the game, says the rules will stay free.
Read the Trench Crusade Quickstart Rules first. They're written to get you through a first game, and that's enough to find out whether you like how it plays. Warbands of Trench Crusade 1.0.2 is where you'll make the choice. Twenty minutes with the lists for the two or three you like the look of will tell you more than any review, including this one.
The Trench Crusade Digital Rulebook 1.0.2 holds the full core rules and the campaign rules. It reads far more easily once you've moved a few models around a table, so leave it until after your first game. Print the Warband Roster Sheet while you're on the page.
Don't bookmark the PDFs themselves. They get re-uploaded to new addresses, and the Warbands book has already moved once this year. Go back through the rules page each time.
Every warband box also carries a QR code that links to a compendium with that box's rules and assembly guide. The same compendiums sit on the rules page, so you can read one before you buy.
How the dice work
Most actions are a roll of two six-sided dice added together. Seven or more succeeds. Twelve or more is a critical success. Bonuses and penalties usually add dice rather than numbers, so with +1 DICE you roll three and keep the best two, and with -1 DICE you keep the worst two.
Trench Crusade tracks damage with Blood Markers instead of wounds or hit points. A hit that doesn't take a model Out of Action usually leaves it with a Blood Marker, and the other player decides how to spend the markers on that model. They can use them on an Injury Roll against it, to make taking it Out of Action more likely. Or they can spend them when that model rolls to act, so it rolls extra dice and keeps the worst two. A model can carry six at most.
Every warband makes those spending decisions, so pick on something else. The Court of the Seven-Headed Serpent and the Cult of the Black Grail change the maths the most, and both are harder warbands to start with.
The eight warbands
As at September 2026 there are eight warband lists. The Faithful are New Antioch, the Trench Pilgrims, the Iron Sultanate and the Procession of the Sacred Affliction. The Fallen are the Heretic Legion, the Cult of the Black Grail, the Court of the Seven-Headed Serpent and the Heretic Naval Raiders. Two of them, the Procession and the Naval Raiders, began as variants of the Pilgrims and the Heretic Legion, and became full lists in the Carcass Front box. That box pairs the two against each other, so they're a natural match if two of you are starting together. Most lists have variants of their own that change how they play, and New Antioch has six.
New Antioch is the Faithful's regular army, and it plays like one. It has cheap Yeomen, plus specialists such as engineers, medics, Sniper Priests and armoured heavy infantry. Fireteams let it pair models so they activate together. That spread is why it's forgiving. When your plan falls apart on your first night, there's usually another model that can do the job. Learn what the Sniper Priests do early, because your opponent can't spend Blood Markers to spoil their shots.
If you'd rather play the villains, the Heretic Legion is the Fallen's answer to New Antioch. It's Hell's human army and a generalist, though it runs more elite. Its leader, the Heretic Priest, can move your opponent's models somewhere they'd rather not be. The Artillery Witch, probably the most recognisable model in the game, lobs bombs from Hell's factories across the table. The War Wolf is a heavily armoured beast built for tearing through armour. It all runs on the core rules.
The Trench Pilgrims are zealots who want to reach melee, often with a lot of cheap bodies. A Pilgrim costs 30 ducats and you can take as many as you like. An Ecclesiastic Prisoner costs 20, and fitted with a Martyrdom Device it runs at the enemy with a bomb strapped to its back. At the heavy end sits the Anchorite Shrine, a walking church with a mace. If you like a plan you can explain in one sentence, this is your warband. You'll lose models getting there.
The Iron Sultanate asks for decisions earlier than most. It has answers at every range but leans towards shooting. Alchemical ammunition makes its guns more accurate. It builds its own monsters too, in the Brazen Bull and the Lions of Jabir. The variant you pick decides how it plays, though, more than it does for most warbands. Fidai of Alamut centres on assassins. House of Wisdom lets its alchemists grow homunculi of their own, while Defenders of the Iron Wall bring the big guns. Each wants different models, so read the variants before you buy anything.
I'd save the last two for a second warband. The Cult of the Black Grail serves Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, so expect plague and rot. Its models are hard to kill and mostly want to be in melee. Its weapons can cause Infection Markers, which grow each time the infected model activates. Most of the healing that clears Blood Markers doesn't touch them, so a long game gets steadily worse for your opponent. Almost every model has one narrow job, and the warband only works once you know what each of them is for.
The Court of the Seven-Headed Serpent is harder again. It's Hell's demonic nobility, and your opponent will nearly always have more models. Your elites are among the strongest models in the game, and they cast Goetic spells that cost Blood Markers. The Desecrated Saint is the largest official model Trench Crusade makes. You dedicate the warband to one of the seven deadly sins, which sets your spells and powers. Your own Yoke Fiends torture part of your force to keep the Blood Markers coming. That's a lot to learn in a first game.
Carcass Front, if you're starting with a friend
Carcass Front is Factory Fortress's first starter set. Its 16 models build two complete 700-ducat warbands that fight in opposite ways. The Procession of the Sacred Affliction are leper-pilgrims who come forward in numbers and shrug off wounds. The Heretic Naval Raiders are a smaller, faster force that infiltrates and shoots.
The box also has two three-model intro warbands with simplified rules and a quickstart reference sheet. Terrain, dice, rulers, tokens and a campaign book with two campaigns are in there too. Factory Fortress calls it the most accessible way into the game so far, and going by the contents list I'd agree.
What changes in a campaign
The rulebook includes full campaign rules, and a campaign is where your warband choice starts to have consequences. After each battle, every elite taken Out of Action rolls on the Trauma chart and usually comes away with a Battle Scar. Survivors earn experience and promotions, and between games you recruit reinforcements.
A warband that leans on a few strong elites feels every one of those scars, while cheap infantry are easy to replace. That's a point in favour of New Antioch or the Pilgrims for a first campaign. The Court cuts both ways. It can recruit four kinds of elite where most warbands have three, which means more models earning skills and more models collecting scars.
If your group wants more structure, the Carcass Front box adds a map campaign for two to eight players, over four, eight or twelve games.
Finding a game
Start with the Trench Crusade Australia group on Facebook, and ask who's playing near you.
If the answer is nobody, bring the game with you. Warbands are small enough that one person can own and paint both sides. Build two, or buy Carcass Front, and take the whole game to a club night at a shop that runs Warhammer. Set it up on a spare table and someone will come over to ask what it is, because nothing else in the room looks like it. A demo game is the best answer you can give.
What else you need
The current kits are multipart plastic with bases included, so you'll want sprue clippers and plastic glue, and a primer before any paint goes on. Paint can be whatever brand your local shop carries. Trench Crusade is forgiving to paint because its whole look is mud and rust. Flat base colours and a dark brown wash will get a warband on the table quickly, and the grime reads as deliberate.
Where I'd start
Most people should start with New Antioch, for the reasons above. It's the only warband I stock at the moment, so factor that in. I'd give the same answer if it weren't.
The Prussian Stosstruppen Warband is a ready-to-play New Antioch starter built for the Stosstruppen of the Free State of Prussia, a close-assault variant that fights with grenades and clubs. It has eight models: a Hauptmann, a Feldkaplan, three Stosstruppen and three Yeomen. It runs a bit over ninety dollars, and the reinforcement boxes that go with it are on the Trench Crusade page.
The rest costs nothing. Download the Quickstart Rules and read the lists for the two warbands you keep coming back to. Then pick the one whose plan you'd enjoy losing with.
If you're in Queensland, or anywhere else, and you want a game, come and say so on The Hobby Armoury Facebook page. The same goes if there's a warband you'd like me to carry.