When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

~ Marcus Aurelius

by Peter Atkinson

Let me be clear: buying Bonesplitterz right now feels like it would be the worst investment since buying shares in Blockbuster Video.  The word is that they’re getting the elbow when we roll over to 4^th Edition, so unless you’ve got a clear Plan B for what you’ll do with the models after that, don’t pour your money down the sink. 

Here at Plastic Craic we’ll give them the send off they deserve, don’t you worry about that.  But in the meantime, it’s a matter of smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.  I’ve got a GT coming up this weekend – Sovereign Smash in Ballarat – and I’m taking my favourite army while I still can. 

The Approach

I’m running this army for the love, and I love Wurrgogs and pigs. So we’ll be marching a couple of the former up the board, screened by the latter.

In Icebone those pigs are covering our Battleline too, and we’ll take a couple of other heroes.  With the points we have left we need:

• A serious hammer, ideally with extended weapon range to bash over the top of the pigs, and then step forward after our screening turns to layeth the smacketh downeth.
  • Shortlist: Big Stabbas or Allies
• A Monster to Roar at shit and smash Loonshrines
  • Shortlist: Allied Skitterstrand Arachnarok or Merc Mega-Gargant
• A bit of beef to weather the storm.  Some bases on objectives, but also something that can hold up the opposition across a double turn as our army rapidly melts.
  • Shortlist: Morrboys, Arrowboys, Allied Grots

So there’s our outline list and gameplan.  The first decision point is whether to use the Allies slot for our hammer or to give us some cattle; we’ll plug the other gap with Big Stabbas or foot Orruks as required.

And this is what I went with.

Big Drogg Energy

Hipsters do love to trot out the line that universal options are always either overpowered or irrelevant, but it’s just not true.  Every now and then, they hit the nail on the head, and Merc Mega-Gargants add a bit of stardust to any list they join.  Shout out to my guy Mikey Gilson for banging the drum on Big Drogg in the Bonesplitterz WhatsApp – I gave him a go and I’m really enjoying him with the army:

• He’s an anvil that can anchor one side of the board, which is otherwise mostly on 6+ saves and low bravery.
• He’s a great Hoarfrost receptacle with that big weapon hitting on 4s.  You don’t need the extra rend on it, but getting it hitting on 2s feels pretty sweet.
• 3” reach on your big weapons lets you reach over the top of those same screens our Wurrgogs will be perched behind.
• He looks absolutely baller on the table.

Every game I’ve played with him, my opponents say two things:

• How come he only counts as 5 models on objectives?  I thought he’d be 20.
• Have you thought about dropping him for a Krondspine?

Well as for the first point, that’s a Sons of Behemat thing and so it should be.  You get him a bit cheaper to reflect that status and fair’s fair. 

As for the second point: been there, done that.  I ran Krondspine last year when Bonesplitterz were way stronger and I was gunning for podiums with the army.  I’ve got zero interest in going back, and zero interest in lowering myself to running that piece of shit again.  Big Drogg is way cooler than a Krondspine and at this point I’d rather run 5 units of Big Stabbas than the world’s 75^th-best Krondspine army.

I’ll be using a 3rd-party Gatebreaker, Papworth the Pillager from Mierce Miniatures:

Hang on, he’s not finished yet. Doesn’t this event start tomorrow?

Motherfucker you don’t think I know that? We’ll get there. Trust me.

C-C-C-Combo

We’ve got two rend spells here: Hoarfrost and also our very own Glowy Green Tusks.  Slap Hoarfrost on the riders and Glowy on the Boars, and you’re off to the races with heavy rend on both melee profiles.  Shout out to our guy Calvin for flagging that one up.  It’s a lot of work to generate a volume of damage which isn’t exactly getting Chaos Chosen players excited, but it does give you something to do early game other than screen and march.  Launch those disposable Pork Torpedoes across the board to nail something while your screens, ‘Gogs and Gargant strut up the middle of the board for the big showdown.

Enhancements and Battalions

First name on the teamsheet is the Wurrgog with Glowin’ Tattoos.  If you’re not aware yet, you should be: it puts him on a 4+ ward (or a 2+ in combat on the Waaagh turn), which is huge for staring in particular and gives you tremendous value out of any healing you can slap on him.  He’s a respectable Bravery 8 which means you can stare at the start of the Hero Phase, and still be in your window for Heroic Recovery afterwards.  Noice.

That healing is exactly why the Wardokk is there: stare something down, heal back up with a Wardokk dance and you’re ready to go again.  This dance is also “start of”, so you can see how that goes before you invest your Heroic Action into healing too. 

And if you’re going first, and your Wurrgogs haven’t copped any damage yet, investing the Wardokk dance into +1 to Unbind on a Wurrgog (with their two unbinds) can stand you in good stead across a potential double turn.

Our General will be a Savage Big Boss with the 8” pregame move CT.  You won’t generally be Zerg Rushing people like Squigs do – you don’t have the output for that to work – but when you tell people what your rules are, they seem to assume you will, so it fucks with their deployment if nothing else.  You can also reshuffle your wizards to enable early Battle Tactics like Don’t Get Unbound*.

After that pregame move, he’s basically fired his shot and he won’t do much else for the army.  But his complete lack of importance or value means he can at least scurry around for the Three Board Edges Battle Tactic, or you can chuck him and his 6+ save under the bus to enable the Avenge Your Dead General BT.  Battle Tactics are a real scramble in this faction, so it does bear thinking about.**

The AL Battalion is essential for this army, and we really want a Spell enhancement too for redundancy on key spells, so it looks like we’re going high drop.  The Wurrgogs take the buff spells, because if they’re up close they’re staring instead of casting: so we’ll give them both the rend spells we talked about, and while they’re out at longer range they can use their spells to buff and launch a unit of pigs, maybe casting their 24” anti-horde spell and mystic shield too. 

The smaller wizards can have redundancy on Merciless Blizzard to keep that threat alive, and a tech spell each too.  Nothing in the army has Fly so a cheeky punt on Levitate is situationally nice to have.  The dream is that your opposition crashes into your screens, and you can unleash double staring from the Wurggogs backed up by a mortal wound bombardment of Merciless Blizzard and the Pendulum from your other spellcasters.

We lost our little Maniak Weirdnob gimmick at the last update.  He used to be able to Fast Un up the board and make it snow at point blank range, but he was collateral damage when they stopped teleporting Blizzard Wizards.  I do kinda wish they’d limited the restrictions to setups only (not moves), or dropped the range to 9” (almost all teleports are outside 9”) but eh, it is what it is.

Fast Un is still awesome on the wee man for a few reasons:

• You can still zip up the side and chuck an Endless Spell through their ranks from an unexpected angle.
• He’s an Andtorian Locus (the Mount doesn’t matter, it’s purely done on wounds and he has fewer than 10).  This means he’s awesome for zipping around stealing objectives on Fountains of Frost, or reeling in extra VPs on Power Flux.
• One other nice trick I’ve been able to pull off is making him moonwalk backwards in the hero phase, to get out of unbind range and secure the Don’t Get Unbound Battle Tactic.

And speaking of Battle Tactics: Bonesplitterz have been reamed harder than pretty much any other army in the game.  Having access to Kill Something With Magic is quite important, and remembering that staring with Wurrgogs won’t count, I’ve included the Pendulum to get better access to that.  It’s also an extra step towards flooding your opponent’s RAM, giving you another impactful spell that you can push through after soaking up their prized unbinds.

So move up with Fast Un then cast Blizzard has been replaced by move up with Fast Un then cast Pendulum.  It’s worse, it costs 40 points more, and it loses me a Triumph. 

Seraphon were too strong, so Bonesplitterz cop a nerf – such is the life of the Greenskin.

Battle Tactics

I won’t do the whole shebang – that’s a separate article in its own right – but I’ve been consistently hitting 4 BTs in practice games.  I’ve made myself a structured cheat sheet of the ones that are possible for this army, which you can take a look at here if you’re interested:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L8ZqZ46g1oNxSDAMUlWOLi1yYDBc_3xl/view?usp=sharing

They’re divided into Early Game, Mid Game and Oh Shit We’re Struggling Situational sections, to help reduce in-game head-scratching. 

As for Grand Strats, again we got shafted pretty hard in the book and have had no subsequent support.  You’ve only got two: the Bonesplitterz-specific Get Dem Bones, and the Orruk-Agnostic Waaagh! 

You could try Get Dem Bones, but the first time you line up on a table with precisely zero terrain pieces that are wholly within your enemy’s deployment zone – it’s not uncommon to have a small part poking out on maps with “quarters” instead of “halves”, meaning you’ve got literally no opportunity to score your GS – that alone will be enough to never make you even consider it again.  The GHB ones don’t appeal so we’re stuck with Waaagh!, which is OK if not amazing. 

Quite often you can run one remaining Boarboy off into the corner and secure it that way.  I guess we’re taking that, then.

Stylin’ and Profilin’

I’ve had a bit of fun painting up some alternative models for this army, including a converted unit of Boarboy Maniak Centorcs:

I also painted up the Aethervoid Pendulum which has been sitting on sprue for a long time:

There’s a few Mierce Minis in this army, but for avoidance of doubt, there’s no sponsorship or promotion here. We’ve got no business relationship with Mierce, I just bought these models out of my own pocket cos I liked em.

And meet Colin Wood, the real star of the show. Big Drogg is just there to cheer him on.

Summary and Expectations

This might be the worst army I’ve taken to an event since the days of playing Gutbusters, back when GW couldn’t even be bothered to give them a single page of faction rules.  The near-absence of faction BTs and GSs makes it feel like you’re playing different game than everyone else, and the failure to support them with improved Battle Tactics when Ironjawz and Kruleboyz got the same tells you all you need to know about the present and future of this army.

Anyway.  We’ve done what we can to make a competitive list from ostentatiously unpromising materials.  We’ve got a clear playstyle, we’ve plotted out a path to 4+ Battle Tactics and we’ve given ourselves multiple opportunities to get lucky (via Staring, Staring again, rolling hot with a Hoarfrost-assisted Big Drogg and / or hitting a big cast on Merciless Blizzard). 

I’ve played a few practice games at this point and the army is honestly quite cool – for all my whinging about secondaries, it’s an interesting challenge to play, as long as you can let go the idea of consistently winning most of your games.  I would settle for a 3-2 if you offered it to me now but I can see a career-worst result looming.

Anyway, we’ve worked in a few fun little interactions and combos, and the rest is up to the dice.  I’ll report back on how the tournament went next week, or perhaps conveniently sweep it under the carpet.

Wish me luck, because I reckon I’m gonna need it.

*Anyone else finding they still cbf learning the names of the BTs? 

**Every opponent: “But I thought Orruks had really easy Battle Tactics?”

Credit for cover image to GW

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