Thank you to Wargames Atlantic for providing a box of their Classic Fantasy Battles: Orc Horde for review. If you’d like to pick up this kit and support Goonhammer while you’re at it, get it through our affiliate link.
The Contents
Arriving to much fanfare earlier this year, the Classic Fantasy Battles Orc Horde is Wargames Atlantic’s first foray into 10mm “grand battle scale” ranked fantasy troops, after their Samurai and Ashigaru historical sets. Their arrival heralds the impending release of the company’s Classic Fantasy Battles rule set written by Andy Hobday, with skeleton, elven, dwarf and ogre units currently visible on the release timeline, as well as movement trays and a two player game-in-a-box.
The kit produces a number of different types of orc warriors, designed to fit on the included 20x40mm bases, armed with Wargames Atlantic’s now ubiquitous magnet hole and puddle base recess. As listed by the box, the kit can build 6 bases of bowmen, 3 of spearmen, 3 each of light and heavy swordsmen, 3 of heavy axemen, and 6 bases of warg riders. That’s a lot of green muscle for your money! For the observant among you, both that base size and units in multiples of three bases might seem familiar – more on that later.
The Build
Each box proclaims to hold 252 figures, 84 each on three identical frames. In reality, a lot of these figures are multibased together, although there’s a bit more variety here than I’ve seen in other 10mm offerings. For each type of orc there is a mix of stands with 1, 2, 3 or 5, figures, so that they can be mixed together across different bases and add a touch more variety to your units. In addition to enough miniatures to build the quoted number of bases of each type, each sprue also has a couple of different command groups on it for indicating unit leadership. To top it off, there are some lovely casualty sculpts too.
Thus we arrive at my first stumbling block with the kit: there is no indication of what we should be doing with the command models. Should they be going on a base of their own as a leadership unit, or mixed into the other orcs? I ended up making sure each type of unit except the warg riders had one command model included on a stand, as this felt most in line with what is depicted on the box art. It seems like a silly thing to ask for in a kit of single-piece models, but I would love if WA included some instructions here to tell you how they’re expecting you to build the units.
This extends to the bases too. Given that the models have integrated puddle bases I chose to set them into the recessed side of the supplied bases, but found that in a lot of cases this means that you can’t get 6 models abreast in a line as shown in the photos. The puddles are slightly too big to fit, meaning lines had to be staggered to fit the right number of models onto the bases. Now, to be fair, this may be intent – it’s an orc horde, after all, not a highly-regimented Greek Phalanx, and the bases look perfectly good with off-centre rows of models. I was left feeling though that maybe I was supposed to put the models on the non-recessed side of the base, where the extra couple of millimetres of space would have let me fit more lined up ranks of models. This isn’t a huge issue by any means, but another case where I found myself thinking that I’d quite like some instructions to just tell me what I’m supposed to do.
More positively, these issues aside (which is maybe just my concern over doing it “right” rather than real issues) the build was a pleasure. It’s really just a case of picking how you want to mix up the different sized groups of orcs to fill out bases, meaning that you can get a real mix of different layouts. Cleaning up the attachment points to the sprue is a little time consuming, but they’re all in sensible places and thankfully there are a minimum of mold lines – a quick swipe with a knife on each piece to get rid of the biggest offenders is more than enough at this scale. The kit went together over two sessions – an hour or so of clipping things off, organising them, and trimming the bases of mold lines, then another hour or two of cleanup and assembly. I chose to glue everything to its bases, arguing that if I couldn’t get a brush to it during painting then it didn’t really need to be painted. I did start trying to get texture paint into all of the base recesses, but gave up as I was getting more on the minis than the bases!
Painting and Basing
When painting small scale stuff, it’s always good to be conscious of a couple of things. Firstly, these are not 28mm minis, and you can’t afford to spend a 28mm mini’s worth of time on them if you want to pump out an army. Secondly, it’s good to paint everything a lot brighter than you initially think you should. Less light is hitting the minis overall, so less is reflected at the eye, and so the same colour will not look the same on a 10mm orc compared to a 28mm orc (please don’t write in about this science).
Manifestly failing to think very hard about that second point, I primed my minis in Trench Brown from the Colour Forge. In my defense, for this project I was very focused on the first point, speed, and I really didn’t want to end up with bright white areas glaring out from the middle of the unit if I didn’t catch them with the paint. I think when I paint some more though, I might give them an ivory or white zenithal to make them pop a bit more.
Brown base down, I set about my test minis with Karandras Green contrast paint on all of their exposed skin. Knowing that I’d be using some other pretty opaque paints I was able to be quite messy here, safe in the knowledge that I’d be covering any spills later. I covered the cloth and banners with Blood Angels Red, then painted in metal areas with Leadbelcher and wood/saddles with Two Thin Coats Death Reaper, a dark grey-black. The bases were coated in Garaghak’s Sewer to cover any overspill.
Next, I gave everything a drybrush of TTC Vampire Fang (a Screaming Skull equivalent). As well as providing a consistent highlight on everything, this helped to pick out things like helmet horns and orc fangs without an extra step, and added some texture to the wargs’ fur. Finally, everything got an all over wash with Army Painter Grimdark Shadow (from the John Blanche sets), mixed down with a bit of medium. After it dried I went back to pick out a couple of straps in ivory, and then we were done!
To base the units I covered the bases in some thinned down PVA glue, then dunked them in a Geek Gaming Scenics Base Ready Mediterranean Soil, this one designed for small scale minis with smaller bits of stone and grass.
And that’s it for the test minis! I’m pretty happy with how they came out, other than them being a bit dark as mentioned above, and I reckon with some effort I could get the box done in a couple of hobby sessions. Honestly though, the sculpts are lovely with just the right amount of detail to be rewarding without being over-busy for the scale, and a dedicated painter could have a lot of fun painting a strip of these at a time. You may look at the blown up photos here and think “they don’t look very good or exciting”, and I’m right there with you, but when you’ve got hundreds of clamouring warriors lined up on the table in front of you the effect of the whole becomes much more important than the detail of the individual bases.
A Word on Warmaster
Warmaster Revolution, the fan-maintained set of Warmaster rules for 10mm Warhammer Fantasy battles, has been having something of a resurgence recently. As I mentioned in the intro, Wargames Atlantic are making this Classic Fantasy Battles range with a view to releasing their own ruleset later in the year, so it doesn’t really feel fair to review the set in terms of how well it maps to Warmaster: Revolution rules, but at the same time the choice of base size, scale, and general layout of models on bases does put one in mind of Warmaster armies, and no doubt an affordable, hard plastic sprue is a compelling alternative to 3d printed miniatures or trying to source collectable old metals from Warhammer’s official range.
That said, this box at least doesn’t really map onto Warmaster Revolution’s army lists in a satisfying way. WMR’s “Orcs” army list doesn’t really have unit options that map to the contents of this box in a satisfying way. Warg riders can be Wolf Riders, your spearmen and swordsmen could be Orc Warriors, and the heavy swordsmen and axemen could be Black Orcs, but then your orcs with bows don’t really map to any option in the army list (they could be goblins, who have a ranged attack, I suppose). Characters and other unit options are also an issue, as there aren’t any command models in the kit that can be based singly. Wargames Atlantic’s base sprue does include the pill-shaped and circular bases that you might want to put Warmaster characters on, so the bases at least will be useful for people delving into WMR, even if the models may require some support to work.
Again, this isn’t a heavy criticism of the kit itself, because ultimately Wargames Atlantic are targeting it at their own ruleset, but given a lot of the chatter online about using these sprues for Warmaster Revolution it felt based to touch on the topic. There’s no guarantee that this mismatch will remain true for other future kits, so keep an eye out.
Final Thoughts
Overall, there’s a lot to love here. A big selection of orcs with characterful sculpts that don’t venture too far into hard-to-paint unnecessary detail at their intended scale. For the moment we don’t really have any idea of how these will work in the rules, or how many kits you might need for a full game, but in the meantime they’re a fun self-contained project, and a 10mm army is a fun diversion from larger-scale minis if you feel like you want to try something different.
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