Ogres

Filed Under: Hobby

Tagged: Kings of War, Mantic

Three Warriors, primed, drybrushed and ready to go.

I’ve been wanting to try Mantic Games’ flagship rank-and-flank wargame Kings of War for several years, and the tail months of 2022 presented the best opportunity to do so I’d had so far.

This was thanks to a convergence of factors:

• Ambush: a set of rules for playing Kings of War with smaller armies on smaller battlefields, good for beginners as well as experienced players who have limited time.
• I asked around on local channels and found someone willing to try the game with me. She’s been busily building and painting up some Dwarfs in preparation for our first battle, which will hopefully take place later in the month.
• New hard plastic ogres, appearing in the Sands of Ahmun starter set, which I split with a friend¹. They’re great models, and a low model count army, so ideal for a first foray into the system.

The starter set split left me with 4 sprues of hard plastic Ogres (technically 2 each of 2 sprues – one has male bodies and one has female bodies) and a resin Warlord.

I built the plastic ogres as regiments, 3 models each: 1 of Warriors with hand weapons and shields, 1 of Warriors with two-handed weapons and 2 of Boomers (oversized blunderbuss wielders). They went together well, but not all the arms/arm pairs are compatible with all the bodies – they’re labelled so you can tell how to build the ‘expected’ combinations but in a rather confusing fashion.

The resin Warlord went together easily with the help of some Zip Kicker (superglue accelerant). Mantic resin seems to generally be pretty good and I’ve never had any issues with it.

The “It’s all getting a bit out of hand” stage of any hobby project.

I painted them all up in a simple scheme, giving the Ogres bold red skin – this is how they’re depicted in artwork but, for some reason, not in the studio models – steel armour and green cloth accents. The Warlord got some gold trim and decorations to denote his status. I painted all their hair black, with dark grey highlights, except for the Warlord, whose beard is white because he’s old and grizzled. His name, I think, is Baz.

The Warlord, first to pass muster.

I multi-based the regiments. Multibasing is something mostly unique to Kings of War. Because you don’t remove models when a unit takes damage, you can put all the models on one big base. This is convenient and also gives you an opportunity to do some cool group posing, decorations, scenery and so on. I kept it simple, with mostly flat bases without much extra detail.

Warriors

I painted the bases a nice dusty yellow to contrast well with the models and added the occasional dry grass tuft.

These 5 units/13 models come to a total of 675 points.

We decided to aim for 750 points for our first battle, so I had 75 points to play with. There are only 4 options in the Ogre list that fit in that little space:

1. An Army Standard, which sounds cool but I’d have to do some kitbashing and possibly even sculpting (70 points)
2. A Red Goblin Biggit, a goblin hero (55 points)
3. A Red Goblin Blaster, a cart full of explosives (65 points)
4. A regiment of Red Goblin Rabble (75 points exactly)

Number 4 was my choice – I’ve wanted to paint some of Mantic’s (relatively new) hard plastic goblins since they were released, and this gave me an opportunity to paint a whole unit of them. While it would have been nice to paint another character or a cool weird thing like the Blaster, the army really needs more units than it needs toys.

I haven’t started the goblins yet, apart from having built one of them. I’ll get to them very soon though, so stay tuned!

675 points of Ogres, badly lit.