A New Nightmare

Just when you thought it was safe to dream again, Mantic release two brand new hard plastic sprues for the Nightstalkers.  And they conveniently packages two of each of them in the brand new Nightstalkers Ambush Starter Set.

For those of you hiding under a rock since the big red 'one book to rule them all' came out last year, Ambush is a new composition rule set for playing smaller games of Kings of War.  It is meant to get people playing quickly without needing dozens to hundreds of models.

The new Ambush starter sets come with a booklet of King of War rules - this harkens back to first edition when it was common to get booklets of the rules for free (before everything was available for free online).

One of the fantastic parts of these new Ambush starter boxes is that they come with stat blocks for the units inside (at least one way to build them), and assembly instructions.  Not detailed, but still better than the nothing that comes with the models otherwise.

Instructions?  What am I going to have to write about if they keep this up?

The paperwork is cool, but it is the plastic crack we all want to see.  So we'll start with the big guys - the butchers / Ravagers.

A sprue makes 3 butchers or ravagers (or a mix if you so want).  As they have done with all the latest hard plastic sprues, the parts are labeled on the sprues, so it is simply a matter of finding and clipping the pieces for model A, B or C.

The butchers have been out since the Nightstalkers were introduced - but what are the Ravagers.    I won't go into too many details, but the spectres (made from the scarecrow sprue) were viewed was one of the worst units of the game, so they have been dropped.  Instead their is not the alternate build for the butchers that has a shooting attack - basically replacing the spectres.  The scarecrow sprue not officially makes scarecrows and dopplegangers (who did not have their own models before - being a hybrid of scarecrows/zombies/ghouls.)  (You can see my review of the scarecrows (and the previous butchers and reapers - here ).

Previously butchers were PVC, so pretty much monopose (they had two arms to choose from), so the introduction of hard plastic is great.  Not perfect, but great.  There are some minor issues with these - just some things I hope Mantic might think about for future hard plastic releases.

As I mentioned, the models are all labeled.  However the labels are hard to read, and not obvious - you have to follow the little arrow for each part.  In addition, they seem to be 'randomly' scattered throughout the sprue.  I don't see any obvious pattern to where the parts are located.  They generally aren't groups by type, and definitely aren't grouped by model.  It becomes quite a bit of a quest to find all the pieces for a given model.

I did not expect more than the three bodies provided, however I would have expected to have more than three heads.  In addition, there are only three left arms.  There are six right arms - three for butchers (holding weapons) and three for ravagers (with tentacles and mouths that are the void cannons).  As such, regiments will look great, but hordes will start repeating quickly.   (I would have thought ravagers would have different heads and left arms).  However there is not much space left on the sprue to fit anything else.

Also, I noticed that these were especially difficult to remove from the sprues AND clean up.  Not mold lines - I really didn't notice those.  They just did not clip off the sprues cleanly.  Some of the connections were simply huge for models - being over a 1/4" with a curve - so no matter how your flat sprue cutters were positioned, you could not clip it cleanly from the sprue, leaving bit chunk to clean up.

I do like the models, and they are now noticeably larger and more imposing, as they should be.

One thing they did add however was some terrain pieces, to go with the idea of more multibasing (Ambush boxes come with unit bases, NOT individual bases).  (though maybe instead of the terrain for the butchers they could have done more heads?)

The reapers have the same treatment - the new plastic sprue replaces the older pvc reapers, but also has alternate bits to make the new tormentors.

These have the same terrain pieces as the butchers.  

The reapers are not as straightforward to assemble as the butchers, especially because they come in 8 pieces per model instead of 5.

I found the legs to be especially troublesome - they are slightly keyed to fit - but this was too shallow for me - I could never tell when the leg was in place or not.  And these seemed to be keyed to specific bodies as well.

In the end, it wasn't being able to tell when the pieces actually fit together, but instead looking at their butts - the best fit is when their butts looked the best.

These did have different heads for the reapers v the tomentors - at least it seemed that way to me.  Since In only have the 10 new models, I'm keeping my old troop of reapers and adding a new troop of tormentors.  For these though, I took advantage of the scenery elements from all four sprues.

Tormentors have the fly rule, and basically draw line of sight as if they were one size taller than they are.  So putting them all up on pieces of terrain helped to show this.  Reapers have hands, tormentors just have spikes on the ends of their arms.  I also used all the heads with 'split' mouths for the tormentors.

New Tormentors behind existing Reapers.

When I first made this demo army, I only had 7 reapers available, so there are only the 7 on the base.  I wanted to do the same thing now (even though I had 10), but this became challenging itself due to the way the legs were so splayed out for all the models.  

Overall, a huge improvement over the previous PVC models, both for convenience as well as availability, though these are not my favorite of Mantics hard plastic kits.

Because it is all fun and games . . .