Chicago Skirmish Wargames

Recently I added two new units to my Kings of War chaos army: a unit of warjacks and a block of chaos knights. Now, I know what you're thinking: "Wait, what? Warjacks

in Kings of War? I thought you could only use them in that other game?"

Well, if you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that Chicago Skirmish Wargames generally scoffs at games that limit the models you can use in your army. If something looks cool, we'll find a way to get it onto the battlefield! In this case, I'm using the warjacks as "Lesser Obsidian Golems" in Kings of War. I've always wanted to paint a warjack, and when this opportunity arose, I figured "Why not paint six of them!"

Thanks to fellow club members Tim and Mattias, who helped me source these figures at the bargain basement prices, which in turn made this project possible. There's no way I'd be able to do a unit of warjacks at anything near MSRP.

My chaos army is mostly drawn from the Kingdoms of Man army list, with allies from Undead and Abyssal Dwarves lists. Golems are a hard-hitting (if slow-moving) unit of soulless automatons. The official Mantic miniatures are fine figures, but the Khador warjacks are a better visual fit with my army's style. With their axes and large armored shoulders, they look a lot like mechanical versions of the chaos warriors and knights that make up the core of my force.

The pic below shows the difference in height between shorter original metal models and the taller current plastic models.

The two plastic jacks below are the leader models for the group. The jack on the left is stock. On the right, I modified the legs for a more dynamic pose and converted a left arm to arm it with two axes.

Except for a plastic head on the right, the two metal jacks below are built from stock metal parts. However, I think in Warmachine one of them would have a gun arm. Kings of War golems don't have ranged weapons, so I did a lot of mixing and matching in order to make them all armed with different variations of hand weapons.

The two metal warjacks below benefited from a bag of Khador warjack spare parts that Tim found, which yielded some alternate heads to give a bit more variation to the unit. The one on the right I call "The Boxer." He has two plastic fists and a face with a jaw that juts out. The one on the left has a plastic fist and I converted a double-bladed axe for his right hand.

These guys were painted quickly with base colors and a dip. I matte varnished the red areas, but left most of the metalic areas a bit glossy. They've only got about four colors anyway, so it was an easy job. The bases are just bits of pine bark with sand and gravel.

It's lucky that Lesser Obsidian Golems are the only infantry unit in KoW that are on 50mm bases, because these guys are just barely able to rank up on the tabletop with the 50mm round bases that they come with. The 40mm bases used by most large infantry in the game would have been unworkable.

Also, I recently took possession of these six chaos knights, straight from Mattias's workbench.

You might recognize them -- they are actually just the plastic chaos knights from Battlemasters, the 1990s board game from Games Workshop and Milton Bradley. The figures don't have much fine details, but they're workable. I think you'll agree that Mattias has taken them to a whole new level with his painting. All I did was clean them up and glue some skully-bits to their shields and then give them the rocky basing style to match the rest of the army.

For our Song of Blades and Heroes games, I created a bit of background, calling them the "Night Herons of the Black Crown." Mattias took that literally and gave them a starscape motif on their armor, bringing real visual interest to figures that don't possess an abundance of detail.

I chose one knight and overbrushed various decorative elements and rivets in bronze, though I probably should have been a bit more thorough. He may serve as a mounted general for the army.

Thanks Mattias!

The addition of these two units brings my Kings of War army close to a solid 2,000 points. I've got a few more units on the way, but for now I can slow down a bit knowing that the army is almost big enough for most any game that we would play. In case you missed it, both units took part in a huge Kings of War battle earlier this month, though I didn't finish basing them until afterwards.

-- Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member