I have had a chaos army painted since Warhammer 5th Edition was released way back in 1996. While the army now has two versions of Chaos Warrior models, starting with the much maligned hunchback pose of 5th edition, two versions of Marauder Horsemen, and three versions of Chaos Knights I have never painted a unit of foot Marauders. I started rebasing the army back in March of this year but haven’t made any progress since as I’ve been in one painting challenge after another, but I figured this new box was the perfect excuse to jumpstart that project and remedy this problem!
The Chaos Marauders Army Reinforcement Set retails at $180 USD and comes with 40 foot Marauders and 10 Marauder Horsemen. While the units are not available outside of this box they certainly will be. When looking at price comparisons I have seen some commentators rely on the Darkoath models for Age of Sigmar, but I feel comparing the price to units within The Old World to be a more accurate assessment. Recently the Grand Army of Cathay released a box of Jade Warriors (infantry) with 20 models for $90 and the Jade Lancers (cavalry) with 10 models for $90. Using this as a baseline it is likely this box contains $270 worth of models for The Old World, a saving of $90. While other The Old World models are cheaper they are older sculpts and come in different numbers and so I’m pretty comfortable with my choice of comparison models.
The box comes with an assembly guide, the requisite bases, and two sheets of waterslide transfers for both the unit banners and the Marauders themselves. You get four of each of the foot Marauder sprues and two of each of the Marauder Horsemen sprues pictured below, I figured it would be easier to see the details if they weren’t stacked on top of each other!
The foot Marauders can be assembled with hand weapons and shields, flails, or great weapons and come with enough command accessories for four units.
The Horsemen can be assembled with spears, or flails and have enough command options to break the 10 models down into two units of 5.
If you look at these new models you will see there appears to be some scale creep, and it does appear as if The Old World plans on taking advantage of the new, bigger base sizes. I assembled one of each unit type for comparison. As I said, I don’t have any of the previous plastic Marauders assembled but it is worth comparing this Marauder to the two iterations of Chaos Warriors that I have. To no ones surprise he towers over the hunchback Warrior from 5th edition, but to my surprise he scales nicely with the current Chaos Warrior. His more dynamic pose means he takes up more area, and if he were standing straight up like his more heavily armored brethren he might be as tall. In my opinion a unit of these wouldn’t look out of place next to a unit of Chaos Warriors, but you can see they are definitely beefier than you’d think an unarmored man would be next to a follower of Chaos in full Chaos Armor.
I can compare the current Marauder Horsemen with the previous generations, as well as the current version of the Chaos Knights. Looking at the sprue I could tell the horse would dwarf the previous Marauder models and I was right. For this picture I probably should have had the models facing the other way so you’d get a better shot of the Marauder himself, but I think you can see he is slightly beefier than the last edition. Compared to the foot marauder you can see the Marauder Horsemen is pretty big next to the current Chaos Knight models. The horses clearly come from the same stock now, whether that’s a good thing or not is up to you! The marauder himself however looks more appropriately scaled to the the Chaos Knight than the foot Marauder does to a foot Chaos Warrior and I’m happy to see that. I didn’t bother comparing the Horseman to the older generations of Chaos Knights, but I can assure you he is much bigger than they are!
I will mention these kits have not been easy to put together. On the foot Marauder the weapon arm didn’t fit in the cloak very easy. The Marauder Horseman has a very <ahem> interesting design in that the torso is in two parts, plus the cloak. The two parts don’t fit together in a logical way and took a few tries to get right. The flail has the left hand sculpted onto the haft and the right arm and wrist sculpted onto the other side. I felt like I was assembling old school Space Marines trying to get the arms to align properly, and once I finally got them in place getting the head to fit behind the haft was a pain the butt as well. I can’t say I’m looking forward to assembling these, but they look good and I’m hoping they’ll be worth it!
While I didn’t need more Marauder Horsemen this box essentially gives you the unit for free, and I’m glad to finally get some foot Marauders. I might even give the Wolves of the Sea list a go! If you need Marauders I recommend you pick up this box!
-Wachtmeister
The Wachtmeister's Patrol 