I smell a rat

Mantic teased about it when the new Abyssal Dwarfs were released, as well as the new Kings of War 2 player starter set - but now the new Ratkin are finally being released - starting with Vanguard then being followed up with an army set and mega-army set.

The starter comes with cards for Vanguard, including the standard special abilities and faction specific spells.

Then there are the cards for the model (and more) that come in the set.

5 Ratkin warriors
5 Scurriers
2 Wretch
3 Shock Troops
1 War Chief
1 Swarm Crier
1 Nightmare Driller
1 Nightmare Gunner
1 Night Terror

As for models, you start with a full sprue of the new ratkin warriors (you can see those here). This can make 10 warriors, but in a standard 200 pt game, you are limited to 5 of any model. Also, ratkin warriors cannot take spears in Vanguard. So what do you do with the other five models? Well Mantic gives you the parts to make 5 scurriers!

These are 5 resin arms with guns. The shoulder connection on ratkin warriors are flat (as opposed to the round sockets on the sci-fi veer-myn), and in addition these are a little 'lower tech' - looking less like ray guns than the veer-myn carry.

In addition you can buy these arms on the Mantic web site (though there it says they are metal - I hope this is not true as the resin works MUCH better with plastic models than metal).

The one drawback is that scurries are special choices in Vanguard - so to actually take the 5 you can build would mean you have to have 15 warriors/grunt models - which, while possible, will be a bit challenging.

The other choice would be to make some of these as wretches - though Mantic does make excellent new wretch models (listed under the Abyssal Dwarf vanguard models).

There is also a sprue of Veer-myn nightmares.

This plastic sprue (originally for warpath) makes two models, with six heads and several arm choices.

When using these for Vanguard or Kings of War you will want to use some of the less 'futuristic' heads an arms, when possible.

The starter also includes a new resin model for the warlord (I plan to use this for my 1000 pt Ratkin all-mantic demo army).

Finally there are three nest tokens include in the starter set. While it is possible to play a Ratkin warband without them (they get 3 for free), they give some powerful abilities (for example, a birthing daughter close to a nest upgrades her power die, and there is a 50% chance a dead grunt will re-appear from a nest when it is killed).

Of course there is also a booster box

It contains more cards

2 wretch
1 hackpaw
1 warlock
1 brute enforcer
1 Twitch Kineer*

There are three models - the brute enforcer is my favorite.

I really like this model, and while I can understand Mantic choosing to replace these with the Nightmare models they made, I still really liked the Brutes.

There is a warlock model

This is nice as there are two heads and two left arms to add variety to your models. ( I liked the head wearing a skull and the emaciated arm)

Finally is a hackpaw - the ratkin cavalry. This uses the same mawbeast model as the new goblin mounted heroes (well, one of them). So I expect they will soon release a regiment box of these for Kings of War.

There are then two individual packs available for ratkin. The first are the vermintide. These are grunts for Vanguard, but it is nice that it comes in packs of three - which is a regiment for Kings of War. It also comes with 3 vermintide cards.