Monday 19 June 2023

Kings of War Proyect Kick-off



Last year I played a couple of games of Kings of War and I got aboard the hype train.

I have always wanted to play some small scale fantasy games, I have tried a few, including Warmaster, simply because I love how nicely the armies look like as an horde in the table, but I never found a rule system that I really liked. Up until now with KoW.
The fact that it is 10mm and not 28mm is great because it is just small enough so I won't feel bad about not painting all possible details. And also it helps increase the feeling of huge army vs skirmish.

I always wanted to play Undead and Bretonnia but never got around to do that due to the amount of time it takes to collect and paint a new Army, on average, it takes me 2.5 years to collect and paint a 28mm Army. Choosing them for this project was a no-brainer. In addition, they are natural enemies and they look amazing in the table, especially if you paint your zombies in the same livery colours as the Bretonnia, so that the Necromancers and Vampires are actually feeding on them!

Kings of War

It is a relative easy system that would feel familiar to many Warhammer players despite having key differences with it, that actually take time to master. I am still making many mistakes especially when moving or placing units ready to counter-attack thinking in "old fantasy" while I should be thinking on how combat is done in Kings of War.

Nevertheless, I really enjoy the fast and streamlined gameplay. On top of that, the basic rules are free, you can find them here. And you can also create your armies for free here, although only two lists without a paid subscription.

Important to mention that the rulebook assumes bigger scale (typically 28 or 32mm) so what we do is we just divide by two all measures, for example a unit with Speed 10" would mean 5". We play in a table that is half the size and you can transport a full Army in a tiny cookie box (eating the cookies first is an added benefit!).

If you are interested in this combination of KoW and 10mm check out the following links. Here is an introduction to the armies being collected by my local club and here is an article about one of the armies.

Miniatures

I browsed many different armies, catalogues and manufacturers until I settled for Forest Dragon, You can find the store here and the patreon here. I bought the STLs and asked a colleague from the Berlin Club to print them and another person to cut the MDF bases. To choose the list of figures that I wanted to print I created two 2300 points army lists that I could use as a base from where to expand in the future, and printed that.

I have followed the rule of cool to base the miniatures, and not necessarily sticking to the guidelines of the rulebook since at this scale it does not matter too much and the exact figure count does not matter for KoW. That is why you will see for example that each Regiment of Zombies have 24 zombies instead of 20. Each stripe contains 6 so I was not about to cut one from each :)

Without further ado, here are the two lists and pictures of the unpainted miniatures!

Vampires (Undead)

  • Infantry
    • 4 Regiments of Zombies
    • 2 Regiments of Soul Reavers
    • 2 Troops of Wraiths
  • Swarm
    • 2 Regiments of Deathpack
  • Large Infantry
    • 4 Regiments of Zombie Trolls
    • 4 Regiments of Wights (not pictured below as I have not found miniatures for them yet)
  • Heroes
    • 1 Hero on Black Pegasus
  • Dragon
  • Monsters
    • 2 Goreblights
Since I am adding a magnet sheet into each MDF base, I will be able to combine each 2 Regiments into 1 Horde if so desired, for example, for the Zombies. After printing I realized that the zombie trolls were too big for the scale as they are for 15mm and not 10mm, I should have scaled them down, they look like giants!


Bretonnia (Order of the Green Lady)

  • Infantry
    • 2 Regiments of Men-at-Arms
  • Cavalry
    • 2 Regiments of Order of the Brotherhood
    • 2 Regiments of Order of Redemption
  • Large Cavalry
    • 2 Regiments of Order of the Forsaken (Pegasus)
  • Hippogriff
  • 2 Unicorns
  • 2 Pegasus
  • Lots of mounted characters

I made a few creative decisions with the miniatures as I really do not like the Beast of Nature style of figures but I want to use them in my Army, so I will have a few "count as" miniatures.

And just to round it all up, I also got a few terrain pieces printed that make the table look amazing. Need to build now a few forest and hill pieces to round it up, but that should be hopefully be easy.