Introduction

I ordered some extra Termagants from the Battle for Macragge set to replace my 5-colored painting experiments, 6 empty Vallejo paint bottles, two boxes of Tyranid Warriors, and a Space Marine Dreadnought. The dreadnought will get its own review later, and I’m gonna review the Tyranid warrior box here in the usual fashion.

Box Contents

Included are 4 40mm bases, 3 Warrior sprues, a biomorph sprue, and a monstrous creature sprue.

The Warrior sprue has 2 legs, a lower body/tail piece, 2 scythe arms, a set of deathspitter arms, 2 choices of upper head armor, 2 choices of face, 2 sets of 3 flesh hooks, a set of front/back torso halves, and a large Ripper. The 2 face choices let you choose whether you want the normal open jaws with tongue or open jaws with a barbed flesh hook tongue. The 2 head armor choices are basically different styles of ridged crests, with one being more elaborate and pointier than the other. You get 3 of those sprues per box.

The biomorph sprue includes another Ripper, 3 sets of Devourer arms, 3 sets of spinefist arms, 3 sets of 2 toxin sacs each, 3 adrenal sacs, and 3 small chitinous armor plates. You get one of these sprues per box.

The monstrous creature sprue has a set of Barbed Strangler arms, a set of Venom Cannon arms, a set of huge scythe arms, a set of huge grabby Genestealer-style clawed hands, a horned Ripper, and 2 larger chitinous armor plates. You get one of these sprues per box. The scythe arms and grabby claw arms are aesthetically far too large to put on the Warriors in my opinion, but the 2 heavy weapon options are useful if you like meatguns. The Ripper is always useful, because these things are too cute to resist.

Build Notes

All told, there’s enough stuff here to build a set of 3 Warriors and 5 Rippers. You get enough options to tool up all 3 Warriors with the smaller biomorphs, which is cool.

Warrior assembly is pretty straightforward. You start with the legs and the lower body/tail piece, which have a hexagonal male-female interface that makes correctly aligning the legs a snap. Glue that to a 40mm base. Next, you glue the front/back torso halves together, then you glue that onto the quasi-hemispherical protuberance on top of the lower body piece. Pick a face and a head, glue ’em together, then glue that onto the rounded neck post on the torso. After this, pick the arms you want and glue them to the torso. That’s it.

You also have 5 Rippers that you can put on the extra 40mm base included. I think 5 Rippers looks more swarmy than the old 3-per-base rule of thumb, but I plan to base all of mine individually on 25mm bases. Rippers are my favorite Tyranid model, just so you know.

Conclusion

The Warriors are pretty big models, and I’m particularly fond of how they look when you replace their lower arms with Hormagaunt scythe arms. They’re my second favorite Tyranid model after the Rippers, with the new Carnifex in third place.

Incidentally, this boxed set has convinced me that I need plastic zombies. Specifically, the adrenal sac things look like armored brains with half-length Facehugger-style legs on the sides, and I want to glue them to the head of some hapless plastic model, sculpt the rest of the legs around the head with ProCreate, and add a little strangly tail wrapped around the figure’s neck. What for? Tyranid mind slaves in Advanced Space Crusade!