We would like to offer our thanks to Mantic Games for supplying Kings of War: Ambush kits to our authors for this article.
What is Kings of War: Ambush?
For those unfamiliar with Kings of War, if you’re looking for a rank and flank game that can be picked up quickly while still offering huge amounts of tactical depth, you’re in the right place. Even better, with streamlined rules games can be contained to a couple of hours at their full size, and Ambush offers a bite sized portion of all this. Promising to be playable in a lunch break, we wanted to put this to the test after a recent visit to Mantic Games.
Meet the Generals
Mike Bettle-Shaffer: I collect systems a little bit like armies, and the promise of clean rules and short play times was music to my ears. I’ve been lucky enough to playtest Epic Warpath, and have been playing Dungeon Saga Origins and Hellboy with friends recently. Throughout all of these the design DNA of Mantic is evident in clean rules that still leave plenty of room for interesting choices. While I’ve been painting up models for Conquest, I’ll likely be getting Ambush to the table first and I’m excited to see how my Northern Alliance perform.
JellyMuppet: I’ve coming off a huge Horus Heresy push and keen to try out some Kings of War. Back when I was a wee lad, I did work experience at Mantic (both in the office and warehouse), and made Alessio and Ronnie lots of coffee during meetings for the early concepting for the Kings of War ruleset back in 2012 or so. I hope the twelve intervening years will help prevent any overwhelming bias. I’m going to be picking up the Twilight Kin faction, and putting together various Corsairs and Voidtouched monsters.
Evie Moriarty: I spend my time making miniature games so what better way to relax than to spend my off time painting miniatures and playing games with them? I’ve liked the Kings of War ruleset for a while, it seems like a nice level of abstraction for big battles, but I’ve always hesitated over the number of minis needed and the quality of those minis (some of the earlier Mantic offerings were, charitably, a but rough). But now? With these gorgeous revolting Nightstalkers? With an encouragement to ignore model counts and make every base a little scenic delight? I’m all in and I can’t wait to scar you all with the grossest models I can paint.
Lenoon: Okay, so I haven’t played a rank and flank without muskets in it for quite some time. But then there were Frogs. Frogs! In a box! With Flint weapons! And I hear Kings of War is pretty good, so why not go for it? I have a million things on my plate at the moment, and very little time to play so Ambush seemed like a really good shout. Dive, or I suppose, jump-frog-like, in and what’s the worst that could happen?
Michael O “mugginns”: I’ve been a huge Mantic fan for a long time, mostly since they launched The Walking: Dead All Out War. I bought into Hellboy and a little bit of Deadzone, and along the way grabbed a bunch of guys for Kings of War: Vanguard, the Mordheim-alike warband level skirmish game (it’s amazing, guys). Each con I go to I buy some KoW guys to eventually have an army but just have not gotten around to playing it yet. I’ve loved halflings ever since Everquest came out (yes, I’m old) and so I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to make an entire army of them.
Meet the Mentors
Stephanie Bee: I’ve been wargaming for my whole adult life, but only got into Kings of War at the start of 2024 after a break from the hobby. It’s entirely reignited my competitive spark, and I’ve also been pushing myself on the hobby front, having finished Nightstalkers and Varangur projects so far. I’m excited to see how my precious baby generals do, to help them with the many questions I had myself not so long ago, and to see what their fresh perspectives offer to the scene. My specialist field of advice will be in how to fit as many models on a base as possible, for intimidation purposes.
Cytoplasm: The wargaming bug has possessed me ever since I first got my hands on Goblins from Moria at 10 years old, but it was only in 2021 that a workmate at the time got me to try Kings of War. I haven’t looked back and now have five armies on the go. While my competitive credentials are somewhat lacking, I wholeheartedly throw myself into the hobby side of things, particularly when it comes to multibasing my units. I hope I can provide ideas and critique to get these budding generals a collection they will be proud of.
Urr: Over the years I’ve played my fair share of tabletop games, but Kings of War is the one that grabbed my attention and held it for the longest. Cytoplasm’s been getting the hobby awards, and now I’m starting to pick up on the competitive side of things,with a trip to Aussie Master’s locked in for November. Hopefully I can give some quality advice, like “Did you try charging the flank?”
Faction Overview and Kit Impressions
Northern Alliance – Mike BS
It’s apparently grim up north, grim enough that Elves and Dwarfs are willing to work together. Made up of a coalition of races spanning Humans, Elves, Dwarfs, and Naiads, they’re all ruled over by the Elven prince Talannar. There’s a huge variety of units here outside the aforementioned fantasy races including trolls, and dwarfs riding giant ravens.
The Ambush kit for the Northern Alliance lets you build either Ice Kin Hunters or Half-Elf Berserkers with one of the kits, and Frostclaw Riders.
The kits themselves have a good amount of detail, without being incredibly busy. This is a blessing when you’re painting lots of them and they’re still going to look great all ranked up. Normally I get a little nervous when I see instructions asking me to assemble chest cavities, but the build on the Frostclaw Riders wasn’t bad at all. The riders themselves had an appropriate number of pockets, with armour that offered just enough detail to make for an enjoyable evening project. The faces have crisp details and I was enjoying them so much I took a shot at painting in the eyes properly. Their mounts had well defined feathers, which allowed me to use the edge of the brush to apply fast highlight passes catching the sculpted detail as I went.
The Half-Elf Berserkers were also fairly straightforward to put together, with a couple of matched builds for bodies and cloaks and a reasonable amount of flexibility in which weapons can be placed with each body if you’re trying to match pauldrons to chest armour. They have enough detail to be interesting without overwhelming, fur-lined armour complemented with sharp axes adds some visual texture to the sculpts. I’m hoping my mixed leather scheme will look cohesive once they’re all ranked up, and I’ll be cribbing the studio scheme with shocks of white hair to further pull things together.
This was my first time doing multi-basing at 28mm, and I wanted to try and paint everything based. Which meant making peace with potentially not being able to paint everything. If the brush can’t get to it, it will stay black. One of my hopes with this approach would be a slightly faster time to the table, while also practising a new approach using familiar techniques.
I wanted to keep the project relatively simple, but still decided to make my own ice out of UV set resin using blue stuff moulds. Apparently I just can’t help myself. When actually basing the Berserkers, one of the things I regret not checking was how well multiple stands would rank up. The two I’ve built aren’t perfect, so it’s something I’ll have to fix with future stands being set slightly further back, or higher up. Maybe on more ice.
Halflings – Muggins
It was a hard choice for me between Halflings and Empire of Dust, but in the end I had to roll with my diminutive dudes and doggs. They give me a very Empire from WHFB vibe, with a huge variety of troops, ranging from dogrider guys to baloon flying guys to guys riding enslaved trolls. They even have a captain on a frickin’ winged dog. Super super awesome.
I’ve actually bought three Ambush boxes for Halflings, I think, as I get one at each convention I go to where I see Mantic. I built my kit as 20 basic infantry Braves, with hand weapons and shields, and then ten light cavalry with rifles. This was based purely on vibes.
I love the infantry a lot, with a ton of options for hand weapons and shields, and super cool head options with lots of diversity in hairstyles, hats, etc. I super enjoy that I can make female halflings who are pissed off and ready to fight.
I also purchased the upgrade STL kits from MyMiniFactory so I can make some Stalwarts, Knights, and Aeronauts – I’m super pumped for ‘eavy armored infantry and cavalry. Overall I really like the kits – some of the dudes holding rifles with one hand have their arms outstretched in an odd manner, but other than that I love them. You’ll notice that I single based my guys differently from everyone else, all of them on their own bases. I did that because I’m going to use them for Kings of War: Vanguard, their warband skirmish game, and possibly for other stuff like Midgard.
Twilight Kin – JellyMuppet
I got my Twilight Kin a little later than everyone else and am looking to get started soon! I’m stuck between making mine in a vibrant acid green or a dark midnight blue. I have a single Corsair built, ready for some basecoats. Let me know what you think, dear reader.
Trident Realms – Lenoon
Right ok, confession time. When I saw these were to be multibased (you really do learn something every day), I promptly spent all the time I should have been painting working out what that would look like. As a result, I have painted one (1) frog, and one base. Oops.
While everyone else, it seems, did the sensible thing and found a good, quick scheme, my one frog is painted in the most painstakingly slow way I possibly could, a nice and bright cartoonish scheme that eschews contrast, washes, shading and drybrushing for several carefully placed layers on every component. With one glorious frog down in the time it took Evie to paint, well, you’ll see below, I think it’s time for a rethink of how I’m doing this.
What I can say is that these are very nice kits. My main exposure to mantic multi-part plastics has been the ever-reliable Zombie box, which I love for all sorts of strange projects, but is a significantly older kit. The frogs all come with very nice options, lovely sculpting, crisp detail and ooze character (along with slime). I’m going to really enjoy working with them.
Nightstalkers – Evie
I absolutely love the weirdest guys you can find. If it’s a horrible monster, I’m all in. And my goodness are these some horrible monsters, some of the weirdest little guys you can location in hard plastic. The range has a whole has some misses for me (I’m not looking forward to the weird scarecrow people), but overall? Weird twisted flesh and horrible gnashing maws as far as the eye can see. The Ambush set in particular is such a win: two units of Butchers/Ravagers and one unit of Reapers/Tormentors…. or maybe two, we’ll come back to this.
Let’s start with the big guys because I liked them a little less. They’re suitably weird (I love the little hand mouths) but the joints and fits weren’t the best. They’re very flat and I ended up using a lot of putty and extra thin plastic cement to smooth the fit out and make them look organic, and I mostly succeeded. Still, the overall effect is a good one, and I do like how chonky they are. Probably I won’t add more of these to my army over time unless there’s a really compelling reason, but I did enjoy painting them and I think they look suitably imposing. I would say the builds are surprisingly restrictive – you really do need to match the right arms with the right bodies, so be careful when you’re putting them together.
Now we get to the Reapers/Tormentors and oh my. These are maybe my favourite models from Mantic full stop now I’ve gotten my hands on them. I wasn’t 100% convinced from the store photos but in person they are delightfully grotesque. My biggest complaint, however, was that the awesome dynamic posing meant that I couldn’t quite fit ten on a tiny little base that I would need to. I uh, couldn’t even fit eight, which is supposedly the minimum number you should get on there. In the end I went with five, and honestly I don’t think the base is particularly empty looking!
After some chats with the mentors they assured me as long as it looks good and it’s clear what it is, no one will care, so I’m pleased with it. I have another unit built and primed because of this, but I haven’t gotten around to actually painting it up – coming soon, with some extra basing gubbins to make it fancier, because I love the idea of these being tiny dioramas I push around the battlefield.
For me, given this is a mass battle game, and I have noped out of that kind of project before, I’m keeping this all super simple. The scheme is a basecoat, wash, a single highlight step and then straight into effect paints. Metals aren’t metals at all, just gribbly rust effects, and then plenty of blood splattered everywhere. Delightful.
Over the coming months, our generals will be mustering their forces and working towards the limit for Ambush. In our next instalment we’ll be taking to the field for glorious combat, and taking from counsel from our mentors on how to expand our forces and crush our foes.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
