I close my eyes
Only for a moment and the moment’s gone

Dust in the Wind, Kansas

So Da Boyz have gone to the Great Hunt in the Sky. It’s taken me while to rustle up the energy to write about this: Splitterz are my all-time favourite army and the one I’ve played right through the first half of 2025, but the truth is I do still feel pretty flat about them being pushed out of the game. As long ago as the 3rd Edition Battletome it was obvious that they had the life expectancy of an Iranian nuclear scientist, and while plenty of other players have performed well with the army in AOS4, I’ve really felt the cloud hanging over them. Still, the Ladz deserve a decent send-off, so that’s what I’ll be aiming to do today¹.

This will be a two-parter: today’s article will be a victory lap for the Ladz, looking back on their journey through AOS including the art and lore for the army, as well as the evolving army archetypes we saw on the table. Then I’ll follow up in a second article with a focus on what’s next, including a few ideas on how you can continue to use your models and keep the green flame burning.

Ready? Let’s go.

1st Edition: Um, did anyone read this before it went to print?

Geez it was a wild time. Age of Sigmar’s rules barely held together, but that’s ok – as a community we found consensus on how things should work, and we ran with it. The two big dynamics in army structure were micro-factions and GA armies: we had the umbrella of Grand Alliance armies, and below that GW split factions pretty haphazardly into tiny little groupings of a couple of units each².

Most so-called Factions just operated as Grand Alliance armies with extra Battleline choices, but Bonesplitterz and Sylvaneth were the first to get proper books with their own army rules. So now we have a fully-fledged army, born out of basically two kits: Savage Orruks, and Savage Orruks riding pigs. There was a tiny smattering of small heroes and if you were looking forward to an eventual Wave 2 of new models and units, well, good luck with that. You’d still be waiting today.

There was no centrepiece model, by design: this is a horde, and boy did it look like one as it swarmed across the table. The big innovation was that our foot troops had two wounds each and that was a pretty big deal at the time, as damage output in general was way lower than the modern game.

The army will always be remembered for the Kunnin Rukk, which, let’s be honest, was pretty bent:

You rolled a million dice, you rerolled them and your opponent picked up entire units. Then the actual shooting phase rolled around, you did the whole thing again and your opponent was ready to quit the game hobby. The problem wasn’t just getting blasted off the board, it was the time it took people to pick out 1s to reroll and pick out 6s to generate extra shots. So Bonesplitterz acquired a stigma that took a very long time to shake.

Kunnin Rukk understandably swamped the conversation, but there was loads more going on for those who were open to exploring. You could buff up your pigs and roll just as many dice, fighting in the hero phase and then twice more in combat. Savage Big Stabbas could just rip Monsters apart, so even the likes of a Nagash could be brought crashing down with only a handful of successful attacks:

A couple of other things to note from this era are that the Wurrgog Mask made its first appearance, as an Artefect; there were loads of cheap Battalions available to the army, so it was common for most of your heroes to have an enhancement; and Bonesplitterz made a very solid and popular choice as Battleline units in GA Destruction armies.

This book was deeply beloved by Bonesplitterz fans. I mean it certainly didn’t hurt that the army was uber-powerful at launch, but it was more than that: there was a lot of joy, love and extra effort that went into books around this time – GHBs just as much as the army books – and I know a lot of people who read every single word of the lore in this Battletome.

Probably my favourite piece of Bonesplitterz art is this piece, notable in that it shows the army away from the field of battle. Just going about their business, bringing down a mighty prize.

I did have a lot of success with Da Boyz on the tabletop around this time³: Kunnin Rukk wasn’t exactly hard mode and when I launched into competitive AOS by banging everyone off the table, I thought this is easy! I must be God’s gift to Warhammer. It’s not the sort of thing you can play for very long though, so next up I went hard on Big Stabbas and Teef Rukk, but Kunnin Rukk would remain a welcome “escape hatch” for a long time to come whenever the meta⁴ made Ironjawz unplayable. My competitive highlight from 1st Ed was winning Badgacon with a rightly-feared Bonesplitterz / Beastclaw Mixed Destruction army.

2nd Edition: That’s a paddlin’

When GW released the 2nd Ed rules, I took one look at them and knew they’d stuffed up: making Command Abilities stack unless specified otherwise was hubris of the highest order. It put the onus on GW to catch everything bent and unintentional, and there was no way they would pick them all up manually. And so it came to pass.

This was the era of Moonclan Grots pumping out 128 damage per attack, and in the Bonesplitterz space, quad-banging your exploding attacks Command Ability from the Savage Big Boss. Hilariously, you could also buy as many CPs as you liked to fuel this engine. I could have told them exactly how that would end up, but playtesting around this time didn’t exactly have the hallmarks of a rigorous drive at process improvement.

So the Kunnin Rukk was back to being a power build: buy a bunch of spare CPs, buff the bejaysus out of your Arrow Boys and make every 6 count for a million extra shots. It was stupid, but so were the FEC and Skaven books that came out in 2nd Ed, so it was somewhere for Destro to seek refuge from that insanity. Good luck if you tried pushing Ironjawz into them instead⁵.

And then the Warclans book dropped:

This was the moment where Bonesplitterz went from being the truly standalone army that GW had sold us just a couple of years earlier, to being tacked-on. Looking back this was already the beginning of the end for proper support. The book was bloody competitive nonetheless, and the highlights from this era were:

• Bonegrinz, as exemplified by the great Benjamin Savva. You stacked your army up with wound density and wrapped your opponent up in a green blanket that they could not get out from. You needed to play it well, but the upside was there for a top player.
• Big Waaagh, particularly using Bonesplitterz and Ironjawz in tandem to buff up the Rogue Idol (who had both keywords). There was a really cool event in Geelong where Joel Graham, Dalton Copeland and I took out the full podium between us, all three of us using different Big Waaagh lists: in my case, starring the “Pain Train” of 8x Big Stabbas taking all the buffs (and scalps).

I personally played quite a lot of Drakkfoot in this book (whole army switches off wards), because it played well into a lot of top armies in the Australian meta at the time. Things like Fyreslayers (Hearthguard on a 4++) and Skaven (key units like Thanquol and Verminlords) really leaned on those wards, so it was pretty damn handy.

So while being bundled up into half a book was a clear indication that GW had no intention of supporting this army properly, quality of life on the tabletop was excellent. The lore in the 2nd Ed book was great too: check out this snippet, which I’ve always thought would make a fantastic premise for a map campaign.

I’ve been happy to pick up a fair few Best Sports / Best Opponent awards over the years with my Bonesplitterz⁶, and in 2nd Ed that included this one from Vic GT. Always a massive honour.

3rd Edition: The storm clouds gather

Warclans was the first cab off the rank, and we knew as soon as we looked at that book that Bonesplitterz were fucked. GW sucked out all the life from them: every shred of joy, every piece of their soul and identity. It was a clear move to nudge Splitterz towards the exit door, and all of us who called it for what it was at the time have sadly been entirely vindicated since.

But before that, we had a brief window of being extremely effective.

At the very start of the edition, before the Battletome, we had cheapass Priests (still dangling over from the 2nd Ed book) bolstered by a bangin’ new generic Prayer Lore. Drakkfoot Kunnin Rukk with some Wardokks to deliver Curse was an absolute menace, and a 5-0 list for sure. I wrote up a list at the start of 3rd but we were in lockdown at the time, so I never got to take it to an event before the book dropped. But I did see someone else independently wrote a near-identical list and won an event with it in the USA, so if that person happens to be reading this: well done mate, and I’m rapt that you managed to get the WWWWW with it.

Then GW dropped the book, and the players dropped the army. Splitterz were always an underdog faction but it’s from this point onwards that their representation dropped off a cliff, and the idea that “nobody plays this army” really took hold. There was no joie de vivre, so people got the memo and moved on to other things while GW told the family to prepare themselves and started ramping up the morphine.

OK I’m gonna lose a few of you here, but….

To illustrate this, I can show you loads of times where Bonesplitterz had better meta representation than plenty of other factions. Armies build support through years of consistently good rules, waves of new models and the confidence that when they are down, they won’t be down for long. The opposite is also true, and Splitterz were living proof of that.

As an illustration, in the table above Bonesplitterz aren’t exactly killing it on 1.32% of the Meta. But they’re beating OBR (0.77%), Ogor Mawtribes (0.73%), Slaves to Darkness (0.15%) and dead level with Kharadron Overlords (1.32%). This is far from an isolated case – I just picked this one up from THWG’s old socials, but you can go back and watch the old THWG stats shows and see the same thing time and again.

Now you might argue – correctly – that OBR (for example) were at a low ebb then, and that’s the whole point. What would be the lowest point in any other army’s cycle is where Bonesplitterz were made to live permanently. The fact is that Bonesplitterz have never had a wave of new-release models to judge them by; they had their own book taken off them three editions ago; and when they were good, it was usually briefly and by accident. Post the whole Kunnin Rukk debacle, Bonesplitterz were smacked down hard any time they had the nerve to perform well; and while they clearly were never super popular, I also can’t look at their history and say they’ve been given a fair go.

On the tabletop, the highlight of our 3rd Ed book was undoubtedly the Wurrgog Mask: rather than being an artefact it came as factory settings on the warscroll, and you could combine it with a 4++ ward to take some insane scalps. Starey McLaserface was feared throughout the game in this edition, mostly seen in Big Waaagh.

Competitvely, the high watermark was during the notorious “Foot troop” Handbook (notable for its rules that facilitated the mass-slaughter of foot troops) which made Damage 2 Morrboys very much A Thing, and likewise the cheap Bonesplitterz cav. MSU Big Stabbas were already well-established as a solid trading piece and it all came together for a tournament-crushing window of opportunity:

Staring is Caring: Drakkfoot at Snake Eyes GT, Part Two

The Wurrgog understandably got the headlines but my own favourite tech in this Battletome was the Bonesplitterz Waaagh, which made the army a juggernaut of Battle Tactic denial:

I went 4-0 myself⁷ with this list and I know a few other people like Orkmann and Calvin Rarie picked up the list and scored 5-0s with it. It does feel good to write a list from scratch that you see people you respect doing well with, and it’s something I’ve managed to do a few times over the years, but this build might have been my favourite. It was tight, exciting to play and performed like a dream into the meta at the time.

But as has often been the case for Bonesplitterz players, that door was immediately slammed shut on us without checking whether our fingers were in there first. Bonesplitterz and BOC went into the upcoming Battlescroll update as two of the top armies in the game: BOC came out as still the best, while Bonesplitterz were smashed into the dirt. The message from GW was crystal clear: do not play this army, and if you do, we’ll go out of our way to make sure it’s an absolute misery.

Well, fucking challenge accepted. I spent the back end of 3rd edition playing Spiderfang and Bonesplitterz and consistently winning the majority of my games with both:

DA FINAL FLING: Competing with Bonesplitterz at Summer Smash ’24

The Full 9″: Competing with Spiderfang at Vic GT 2024

So my challenge to the Dev Team would be this: If you’re going to attend competitive events with rules you’ve written yourself, how about you do it with underdog armies instead of your own favourites? It makes sense, if the rationale for going to GTs is to keep up to date with life in the real world.

So as 3rd Ed wrapped up, if this was going to be the end, I was satisfied that I’d done Da Boyz justice.

4th Edition: The storm clouds gather

And so at the start of AOS4, we had the whole “We need to talk” talk. Wholesale obliteration of entire model ranges, on a 12-month timer. The very first article I wrote on Plastic Craic addressed this subject, and a 12-month runout was one of the things I asked for in there, so I’m glad they read and paid attention⁹.

These send-off rules were pretty solid and I did appreciate that Bonesplitterz and BOC both got some storyline to wrap things up¹⁰. Probably the most notable Bonesplitterz build in AOS4 was Kragnos and Savage Boarboyz, leveraging their outstanding Wild Enthusiasm ability:

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

From a personal viewpoint: I made the most of my time with the army in the sense that I played them a lot, but I couldn’t really get a good tune out of them on the tabletop. I know that’s very much a “Me Thing”, because plenty of other players did well with Splitterz. I did have time to grab one last trophy with my favourite army though:

My final Matched Play game with Bonesplitterz was against the legendary NC Dave, who has more Best Opponent trophies than anyone I know. Dave’s Kruleboyz against my Bonesplitterz, and I managed to send the Ladz off with one last win.

Gorkspeed, you green emperors.

It’s the Bones we Split along the way

Considering I’ve applied Athonian Camoshade to about 200 green arse cracks at this stage, it’s no surprise that Bonesplitterz have had disproportionate coverage here on Plastic Craic over the journey. Bonesplitterz are an army that people fall in love with and from talking about the army here, on Twitter and other places like TGA forums back when they were a thing, I’ve met a lot of very cool people who love this army just as much as I do¹¹.

So let’s hear it for a few green legends. My colleague here at Plastic Craic, the great Calvin Rarie. Kiwi King Seth “The Goonboss” Cook, long out of the hobby but a beautiful and unforgettable person. Matt Gammie, whose interview on Runeaxe motivated me to get into this whole blogging caper – I just wanted to read more stuff like that, and at the time it wasn’t out there. Chris Riley, collecting big trophy skulls right to the bitter end. Ian Spink, another bearded superstar whose departure from the hobby is all of our loss. Benjamin Savva, one of the most creative list writers in AOS and a blessing to the Bonesplitterz community as such. And our small but dedicated Bonesplitterz Whatsapp group, which right now is focused on conversions: the most active people in the chat being Will, Martian, Linus, Pete, Mehdi, Jacky D and Ricky Mee.

I could name a bunch more people, I could share a lot more art and articles, and without being too much of a smart-arse I do have a bunch more trophies I could show off too. But these are some of my own highlights from playing the army over the years: I’ve got a lot of good memories there, and I hope you have too.

So what’s next?

I’ll follow up with a second part on what’s next, coming at the same question from two different angles:

• What are we gonna do with these green paperweights we’ve all ended up owning?
• How can we keep the green flag flying high, and continue to represent Bonesplitterz on the tabletop?

So I’ll share a whole bunch of ideas for conversions, proxying, kitbashes, counts-as and other-game-system uses for Da Boyz. If you’ve got any minis of your own that you’d like to see showcased in that article, please shoot me a message – and I’ll catch you in a week or two, either way.

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1. Probably with all the accuracy of a debuffed Arrow Boy. ↩︎
2. There were exceptions like Seraphon who kept their whole army as one big thing. See what I mean? Haphazard. ↩︎
3. Boasting about winning some games with Kunnin Rukk? That’s a Golf Clap for sure 👏 ↩︎
4. Looking at you, 2nd Ed FEC. ↩︎
5. Some things in AOS change, others don’t. ↩︎
6. Including, bafflingly, a couple when I was running Kunnin Rukk. I recommend buying your opponent a beer, and if needed, follow that up with a wristy under the gaming table. ↩︎
7. If you’re wondering how one goes 4-0 rather than 3-0 or 5-0, click dat link. ↩︎
8. Credit to Woehammer for that win rate table. GW’s Jan 23 Metawatch article did not include their own stats table but the point remains: BOC were left as top dogs, while Bonesplitterz were entirely obliterated from the Meta. Which I correctly called out as soon as the October 22 Battlescroll landed. ↩︎
9. I’m not joking by the way – I happen to know for a fact that they did read and pay attention. ↩︎
10. Unlike Greenskinz, for example ↩︎
11. I’ll also miss The Bonesplitterz Joke™, when you line up against your opponent at deployment: “I bet you’re sick of playing against this army all the time?” ↩︎