It’s the most wonderful time of the year! The time where content creators get cheap clicks from adding up the notional cost of whatever sprues GW have stuffed into a big box this year, and telling you how much you’d save compared to buying it all separately.

Those articles can be useful and I do read them myself, but the “How much would it cost” stuff has already been done to death. So today we’ll take a critical look at the contents of each box from the viewpoint of how useful they will be to build out a somewhat affordable and playable army, which you would hope is the general idea of these things.

So today we will:

• Lazily piggy-back on Woehammer’s dollars-and-cents analysis of the box contents
• Look at how far each box gets you towards putting a full army on the tabletop
• Offer an opinion on the usefulness, or otherwise, this represents
• Close with a couple of cheap-ish and good-ish lists you can build out from the best boxes

I reckon two of the AOS ones this year are really sweet, the other two are crap and we’ll separate the one from the other. For the two good ones, we’ve got some 2000 point lists to share that make heavy use of the contents: one proven competitive list that’s ready to go out and win a bunch of games, and one that offers a great foundation for building an army that’s both fun and newcomer-friendly.

Shall we get into it?

I never said I wasn’t lazy

…but first, here’s my pick of the articles breaking down the box contents that are out there. Our friends at Woehammer have crunched the numbers, and this piece brings it together in a crisp and succinct article:

Age of Sigmar Battleforce Boxes 2025

And as you can see from their analysis, the boxes all land within a pretty tight range in dollar terms:

On paper this makes the Troggs the worst value for money, but this is Warhammer and not origami, and armies aren’t built on paper. The Troggs are all elite models with a true centerpiece included, so when we look at how many points you can put on the table, you can already see they’re looking like a pretty good prospect:

There’s a couple of different build options in each of these boxes, so let’s have a closer look at what you’re actually getting in there, and whether it’s good, shit or somewhere in-between.

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Are They Any Good?

Skaven

What you’re getting here includes a whole bunch of reheated crap from the Skaventide launch boxes they couldn’t sell:

It’s maybe a bit rough to call it crap – there are some nice minis with good rules in there – but it’s no rougher than repackaging the Skaventide boxes that GW have been giving away for free by the pallet load, and expecting people to get excited. Remember when these Christmas boxes were meant to feel special?

Build Options

You can build the weapons team into Ratling Guns, Warpfire Throwers or Warpvolt Scourgers. They all do the same little trick of “I can shoot you but you can’t shoot me”, but it’s the Ratling Guns that have seen the most competitive play. They offer a withering volume of fire and while they’re no longer as spammable as they were in early AOS4, I’d venture that they’re still the best option here.

Overall Grade: D for “Don’t buy this”

The inclusion of those Skaventide sprues is a deal breaker for me, when there are tons of them sitting unwanted and unloved in garages around the world. If you want those minis I’d look on eBay, or else put a WTB post on FB Marketplace. Those sprues have been handed out for free at loads of places, from 12-player Kill Team events in Melbourne to pallets full of the damn things at Adepticon. If you wanna pay full retail for those models be my guest, but I’ll pass.

Vamps

Ermagurd, Vhordrai! Any box that’s anchored by one of 2025’s sexiest models is automatically interesting.

Blood Knights are at the heart of any SBGL collection, and while the Fellbats are mainly there to stop the list of contents from looking too sparse, they’re not a bad thing to own. Any unit that is fast and cheap is just generically good at wargames, so they’ll see play over the years.

Vhrodrai is in a good place competitively too. If you want to see a strong tournament list centered around The Big V, then look no further:

Pat Goes 4-1 with SBGL: A Bathurst GT Review

Pat’s army was built to showcase Vhordrai and featured a unit of 10 Blood Knights, so it’s very relevant to anyone picking up this box.

Generic Gore Pilgrims 39: Letters I’ve Written, never meaning to send

Soulblight Gravelords
Bacchanal of Blood
General’s Handbook 2025-26
Drops: 3
Spell Lore – Lore of Undeath
Manifestation Lore – Manifestations of the Grave

Battle Tactic Cards: Restless Energy, Wrathful Cycles

General’s Regiment
Prince Vhordrai (490)
• General

Regiment 1
Vampire Lord on Nightmare Steed (190)
• Shard of Night
Barrow Knights (210)
Barrow Knights (210)
Blood Knights (440)
• Reinforced

Regiment 2
Vengorian Lord (220)
• Immortal Ego
Vargheists (240)
• Reinforced

Faction Terrain
Cursed Sepulchre
2000/2000 pts

Check out the article if you’re interested to learn the tech and combos built into in the list, and how Pat played it on the table.

From a marketing viewpoint, this Battleforce maybe sits in a funny spot: a lot of Vamp-curious edgelords already tipped out their wallets with the big Soulblight release earlier this year, so they might feel like they’ve missed the value, and GW might have already hoovered up a lot of the theoretical market for this one. If you were on the fence a couple of months back though, it’s the perfect temptation.

Knights of the Crimson Keep AOR

This box also lends itself very nicely to the Knights of the Crimson Keep Army of Renown. It’s a Kastelai box for a Kastelai army: both Monster options (see below) and the Blood Knights are all in scope, and the only thing that’s part of the AOR options but not in the box is the Vamp Lord on Nightmare Steed.

Two of these boxes gets you to 1550 points. Then you’re looking at a couple of extra purchases on the side to get a full 2000 point AOR cranking:

If you have a couple of soon-to-be-Legended Zombie Dragons burning a hole on your garage shelf, you might choose to repurpose them into Draconith Revenants¹, and then you’d just be looking to pick up 10 Blood Knights and the VLoNS:

Either way, you’ve got a few points of headroom for a premium Manifestation Lore, and you’re good to go with a cool and powerful all-mounted army.

Build Options

If you pick up two boxes (or already owned a Vhordrai but bought the box anyway), you’re looking at a Revenant Draconith for your second one. It’s a riderless monster that can fight a bit, and it’s saved from falling into the Bottomless Pit of Generic Somewhat-Fighty Monsters by having a deep strike, and also being able to piss off back into deep strike after it fights:

Costing you 200 points for 16 health (albeit on a 5+ save), it’s honestly not the worst thing to have in a list.

Overall Grade: B for “Bloody² good way to buy in”

This is a great box, no doubt about it. Even for existing players, if you own Vhordrai but also wanted a Rev Draconith in your collection (but baulked at the dollar-to-points ratio for a cheap-ass monster costing centrepiece dollars³), maybe this is the time to jump on it.

Troggs

This is a really well-crafted and consumer friendly package. The units are in the right ratios: it would have been the easiest thing in the world to dump 6 Fellwaters on you and go stingy on the Rockguts, but to GW’s credit they’ve done the opposite and given you these models in the numbers that you actually want to run them.

Fellwaters are an harassment unit: they delight in taking on some lonely chaff that’s holding an objective, and winning that skirmish, but their real selling point is cracking armour. One unit of 3 models is certainly an asset in most lists:

Rockguts are the artchetypal anvil, and they love being deployed in slabs of six. They take buffs really well and in particular extra attacks – you can easily do nothing at all when you’re throwing a tiny handful of dice, hitting on 4s. Units of 6 solves that problem and buffed units of 6 – which the Heroes in this box can do – really gets the engine firing.

Build Options

Dankboss or Dankhold Troggoth? None of your opponents will care or even know how they’re each “meant” to look. I’d suggest modelling your first one whichever way you think looks coolest, and when you end up owning a second one, do that one the other way so you can tell them apart.

In the current Battletome I would expect the Dankhold Troggoth to see more play in general, because that 60 point saving is significant and he has a pretty cool hook:

You can slot one of these fellas into any army – doesn’t have to be Troggoth-heavy – and he’ll do a job for you. The Troggboss on the other hand offers a good buff to reinforced units of Troggs and as you’ll see below, I’ve put both into the lists I’ve written.

Overall Grade: A for “A force to be reckoned with”

Trees

I feel like I’ve seen Drycha pop up in a few of these things now. She, Durthu and the Revs are good minis but they’re hardly cutting edge – Sylvaneth have had a newer and more interesting wave of minis since then – and the Dryads are as old and outdated as the IGYG turn system itself.

Build Options

If I did grab the box I’d probably make 5 Tree Revenants to use for teleporting around the board and keeping your opponent honest, and one unit of 10 Spite Revenants as a precision combat unit. But overall this hasn’t got my sap rising.

Overall Grade: D for “Dryad stock dump”

Endgame: Building Out Your Army

So you know my opinion by now – Troggs are Da Best. It’s the most consumer-friendly because it offers a huge chunk of the army, and the units are provided in the ratios you’d want. So here’s my idea for building a playable 2000 point army from a Battleforce (or two).

Needs Moar Troggs

What if we bought two of these boxes?

You clearly don’t want two Trugg models, so if you buy two boxes, you’d be looking at flipping one Trugg on the second hand market. You should get enough for that to just about cover a Gobbapalooza, and badda bing, you’ve got a 2000 point army!

This will be fun to paint and look cool on the table – it also has some synergy going on and it’s bloody tough. The Heroic Trait lets you chuck a few more dice at Rally – which could be important, because with 9 Rally dice you have a reasonable chance⁴ of rezzing back one full 5-health Rockgut:

We’ve taken the Frazzlegit lore to allow a Hero phase retreat, which will in turn allow you to have a crack at that Rally. The army is one-paced though and (annoyingly) can’t use the +2″ move spell on your Troggs, so without Hand of Gork in our arsenal we’ll chuck Forbidden Power in there to get a teleport or two back.

Gobbapalooza are crazy tough in the early game and then later on they can come back through the Shrine. You don’t have a huge amount of board presence, but there are two ways to add extra attacks (Trugg and the Troggboss), and loads of ways to add rend:

• Rend 2 base on your Rockguts
• Trugg rend +1
• Gobbapalooza rend +1
• Fellwater vomit

The army might struggle for board control and this is isn’t a 5-0 list, but it’s not gonna get smacked around bottom tables all weekend either. It should have a high floor, which makes it ideal for newer players: Rockguts are so bloody tough that even somebody quite new to tourneys should win a game or two, and more importantly feel like they’re able to compete in most games. The army will be easy to play in a garage setting too and a manageable painting load, so I reckon it’s a great on-ramp into Gloomspite Gitz.

You could branch out from a single Battleforce and include some Gitmob (for speed and movement tricks) or Squigs (for hitting power), and I’ve already written extensively about my love for Grots. Whichever way you go, this is a newcomer-friendly box that’ll have you rolling dice and having fun in double-quick time – and I’m not shoe-shining when I say this box is a great buy, because if I thought it was a sack of shit, I’d say so⁵.

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If you do decide to pick up any of these boxes – please support your local store. And if you don’t have one, you’re welcome to check out our affiliate links below with Gap Games (AUS) and Just Play (UK). They’re both good, independently-owned businesses too, and that’s why we deal with them.

But what about the FMK though?

So to answer this article’s premise, I’m gonna:

• Fuck the Vamps. You date crazy, you don’t marry crazy.
• Marry the Troggs. 1100 glorious points, setting you up for a lifetime of happiness with Gloomspite.
• Kill the Rats and the Trees. Chuck down some rodent bait, spray the weeds with Roundup and move on to better opportunities.

Have a good weekend, nerds – catch you on the other side.

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1. That’s what I would do 🤷‍♂️ I’m all about upcycling older models. Just remember they’ll need the full 160mm pie-plate base. ↩︎
2. Baddum Tiss. ↩︎
3. Also known at the Killaboss on Corpse-rippa Vulcha Paradox. ↩︎
4. Exactly 50:50, if you’re curious. Here’s the quick way to head math it: from 9 dice you can expect 4 to hit, 4 to miss, and so it comes down to a coin flip on the lucky last. You can do it properly with binomial distributions if you like, but it’s still exactly 50%. ↩︎
5. For example I’ve made my thoughts on the other two boxes pretty clear, no? ↩︎