So is this book any good? Well I don’t think it’s super competitive. The devs obliterated this army’s win condition by swinging an axe at their Health pool and OC. And that’s fine, if they thought that dominating objectives with a DPS test was bad for the game, but if you’re turning them into just-another-combat-army you need to give them proper combat army damage, and that hasn’t really happened.

Their points crept down while their stats plummeted, and you’re left with an army that’s soft as butter: I reckon my Ogors could go through Sons of Behemat like prunes through a supermodel. And that’s a big part of the issue. Giants used to put you on the clock because you had to hack them down before they ran up an insurmountable lead on Primary – they were an easy army to lose against. Now that they’re much easier to kill and also much easier to outcap on objectives, you’re not on the clock in the same way and they make your life that much easier.

And yet. This book does have a lot of tricks and creativity packed into it, so rather than reading the whole battletome back at you today, our review will run through a few high-level thoughts on where the book is at, while using that as a framework to focus in on the cool stuff this book unlocks. Because regardless of power level, there is some really sweet bullshit you can pull.

Now let’s take a look at some of the tricks and combos in this book, because there’s some bangers.

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1) Strut into combat like you own it

The first part of your battle trait is movement tricks. The final section in Take A Run At It is notable for effectively replacing Longshanks – it’s a big miss from the warscroll, but you can usually get a better version now when you need it, and without dicking around measuring 4″ heights.

But the second part is really interesting. It gives you a 6″ pile-in, but it does not give you the right to pile in from 6″ away (so you would still need to be in combat, or have charged, to avail yourself of it):

That’s a bit of a shame, because piling in from 6″ away gives you pseudo-Strike First. But it’s still handy when you combine it with Looting Leviathans:

Now the Mega-gargant comes on a 130mm base, which is 5.1″, which means you only clear your own base with 0.9″ to spare, which is another way of saying that your big boys can’t even leapfrog 25mm chaff with this combo¹. So while it can still be a useful tool for moving diagonally across one unit and tagging something important, it’s on your smaller giants that it really shines. Getting a Mancrusher or some Boss Stompas where they need to be is no joke, and once you’ve put the cat amongst the pigeons, you can start grinding down a support hero with those Shitty D3 rolls phase after phase.

So it’s not as powerful as it could have been – not even close – but it still opens up some interesting possibilities and play patterns. Much like this book in microcosm, in fact.

2) Eager Louts is better than you think

The Battle Formations don’t really get the blood pumping and Conquering Stomp is the clear winner – this army needs all the defensive help it can get. Heirs of the Old Ways seems to be the next-most popular from what I can gather, but I honestly hate it: it flat-out doesn’t work against any Monster Wizard (so that’s powerhouses like Nagash and Teclis completely ruled out), and yet it’s only useful against multi-cast wizards. So it’s cramming you into this weird Venn diagram that you really don’t want to be in, where it’s effective against small foot wizards with a high number of casts, and you still have to roll for it.

I’m giving up my entire Battle Formation for that? Get fucked. Best scenario I can think of will be Lil Morathi, but I expect² much more generalised usefulness from a Battle Formation.

We’ve talked about Get to the Goods above, and quality of life is a little low but it could be fun when you want to change things up a bit. Which leaves what I think is the second-best option in the list, Eager Louts.

You got whacked with the Destro Stick here: there’s plenty of examples of this exact rule in other armies where it’s minimum 4″, and as Graal pointed out to me in the PC discord, OBR has exactly the same thing in their own Battle Formation with minimum 4″. This is represents an aggressive assault on versimilitude whereby the army with the biggest legs and longest strides gets the teeny-tiniest shuffle. It makes no sense, and Giants certainly don’t seem so OP to me that they needed to get the crap version of everything for balance purposes. Hey ho.

Regardless, this is still a bloody useful rule for this army, and here’s why: you can’t take a punch like you used to, so combat avoidance is your best defence. And 3″ is quite a big tipping point for a few reasons:

• If your opponent deepstrikes outside of 9″ away, your are now outside of 12″ away, and they can’t charge
• Similarly, a lot of shooting attacks with 12″ range become out of scope, and if you’re under Ma’s aura they can’t see you any more
• It turns a 3″ charge into a 7″ charge, moving from a 97% chance they hit it to a 60:40 in their favour
• There’s some limited synergy with the Spell Lore too, giving Run + Charge to Mancrushers from your unlimited spell.

Even something like Annihilators, who can present a big threat to this army, will slide in maximum 3″ then watch you slide back minimum 3″. It tilts the tables quite a bit and might help your overall survivability more than Neg 1 to hit for a round. Maybe.

3) The Mancrusher getting right up in your business is finally scary

Shout out to Nate Sudek for this one. Whenever a new book comes out, it’s worth cross-checking with the latest Scourge rules to see if there’s anything outside the book that synergises well, and this one’s a peach.

Perhaps the coolest rule in this whole book is dwarf-tossing a Mancrusher straight into combat:

Now keep an eye on those keywords: don’t fuck yourself out of being able to shoot by doing this with a Gatebreaker for example. But the big combo here is taking Up For It from the Cracked Heels enhancements:

So you can chuck them straight into melee with five attacks at Damage 3 and one at Damage 4. If you pick Kill the Big ‘Eads for their warscroll ability, you’ve got +1 attack on both profiles too. Note that you don’t even have to direct your attacks into Heroes or Monsters: you can also farm them for the extra attacks just by standing near them, and hit something else:

And get him fighting twice for a CP:

Here’s what that looks like fighting twice with the +1 attacks and +1 damage, but without AOA (if you’re willing to pump 2 CPs into this, even better, but I’ve worked with only 1 here):

I mean you’re not one-shotting big units, but it’s a decent amount of damage placed where you need it. And then he’s in there pumping out the D3s too. At the very least, it’s cool to have a genuinely scary Mancrusher option available at last.

4) Step up, step back with Mancrushers

While we’re looking at Mancrushers: Check out that Get There Before Me option from Bet You Can’t… above. There’s a couple of directions you can go with this:

• You can use it to alpha strike. With an 8″ pregame move plus their normal move that’s 16″ straight up, then you’ve got run + charge from the Energy Surge spell. This ties in with the Eager Louts battle formation we looked at above for minimum 3″ run rolls, giving you anywhere between 19″ and 22″ movement turn 1.
• Alternatively: you can step up in the Deployment phase, capture centreline objectives pregame, and then in the movement phase you can wander off to score tactics (such as Blazing 1 or Flanking 1) or step back into your castle and bunker down with Conquering Stomp.

I reckon the latter option will generally be more competitive than trying to smash everything with Mancrushers, but this is an immensely powerful rule.

5) Infinite Health glitch

Ma Meagran has a signature ability that lets you trade up a Mancrusher for a Mega-gargant:

So then the game becomes: how quickly can we heal that Mega back up to full 25 Health?

• Well there’s Rally of course
• You can also grab Primal Energy for access to Emerald Lifeswarm
• Then we’ve got the Might of the Earth prayer to add a few more pips:

So if you hit lucky with a few rolls, you can actually get back up to full health in one swoop, and it’s certainly achievable across two turns.

Best of all, and shout out to Jayke in the Sons Whatsapp group for identifying this one: you’re setting up a new unit, so assuming the Aqshy Gatebreaker keeps their signature It’s Goin’ Down ability, you can use it again on the new unit:

Same would apply to the Kraken-eater’s once per battle ability to pick a loot hoard, but it’s the Gatebreaker shooting that’s really exciting. Good on ya Jayke.

6) Max attacks

I’ve always been a King Brodd’s Stomp guy: Sons is the army I’ve played most in AOS4, and almost always with KBS. The good news is it hasn’t changed too much here, and you can really ratchet up the attacks in this army both inside and outside of KBS.

First up, and in either affiliation, you’ll be using the Warstomper’s Rampage for +D3 Almighty Stomp attacks on himself:

Within KBS

Then we’ve got the AOR’s Prayer Lore. There’s only one prayer, but it’s a good ‘un, and I usually save it up for one big go-turn with +2 attacks on every profile.

This got inherently weaker with the deletion of the Death Grip profile (you’re only getting extra attacks on two profiles now instead of three), but on the plus side, you might have an extra model to get within the aura to compensate.

You’ve also got this bespoke KBS Rampage:

So within KBS, for a typical Mega’s combat profile, you’re looking at a maximum of:

• 8x Damage 4 attacks and
• 14x Damage D3 Stomps

Within Sons Allegiance

You’ve got a slightly different Prayer for +1 attacks:

Then +1 to attacks (plus rend and damage) from the Sandals:

And you still have the Almightier Stompin’ warscroll Rampage too. So in this case you’ve got:

• 7x Rend 2, Damage 4 attacks and
• 8x Rend 3, Damage D3+1 Stomps

Finally, you can ratchet the excitement up a little more with Crit effects:

• You can use a friendly Beast-smasher to add Crit 2 Hits (in either Sons or KBS)
• Within Sons Allegiance only, you can cast Crit Mortals on both weapon profiles:

So it does get pretty out of control and they actually feel like Giants: you can roll hot and just massively overkill units. Feels pretty fucken good tbh.

7) Infinite Movement Glitch

As we noted with the Beast-smasher just now, the Megas bring quite a bit of tech with them on their warscrolls so you can profit within Sons allegiance or AORs alike.

One that I really like is this Warstomper ability, which notably is not keyworded Move or Core so you can take your normal move as well:

You can just waltz right out of combat without retreating, and charge into another target. That’s great to get extra movement in general, and explains why the Warstomper now carries the premium price tag, but it’s especially cool with the Aqshy Gatebreaker (again, assuming the latter keeps its warscroll abilities):

Bearing in mind that you can make that Move characteristic 4D6″ once per game, per Gatebreaker³, that’s a serious threat range:

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There’s a bunch more stuff you can do, but those are my favourites, along with the Hillbilly Smash that we already covered separately. I’ll close off by noting that there’s a fair amount of Strike First / Last in this book which I didn’t cover above because it’s not a combo as such, but vitally important in helping this army keep its head above water competitively⁴. You can actually guarantee it with one Mega if you want to, and that’s not to be sniffed at.

I will follow up over the next couple of weeks with some more coverage on the book⁵; my honest opinion is that Gargants are undercooked right now, but that’s said with a low degree of confidence. I’ve been steadfastly avoiding other people’s reviews before publishing my own as a point of principle⁶, and without being a dick about it⁷, I’ve won enough games with Sons over the years to have earned an opinion on the subject. But of course I’ve been talking a lot over the last week with the Craicheads and various mates who play this army competitively and the mood is still very mixed. Some of the best Gargants players I know are really keen on the book because there’s enough crazy tricks that they believe they can make it work, including one guy who happened to win Cancon with them last year:

Joel McGrath’s 5-0 Sons of Behemat: Best Overall at Cancon 2025

And even if (as I expect) this book proves not to be top-tables competitive, it still does a lot of cool stuff that no other army has access to. All in all I reckon that there are enough good rules in here that there’s big upside if points come down over time (and my opinion is that they will need to).

So is it fun?

I don’t want to give you unrealistic expectations here. Is getting tabled by DOK inside two turns your idea of fun? If it is, then boy are you in for a treat.

I wouldn’t be confident in taking Sons of Behemat to an event right now because I think a lot of aggressive armies will absolutely wipe they floor with them, so I’m happy putting time into my Ogors until the points for this army come down. But there are other people whose opinions I respect who do think there’s plenty here to work with⁸, so if you like the book, don’t let a miserable old fucker like me put you off it.

And if you’re wondering what my idea of fun is:

• Drinking cold beer
• Watching Aussie Rules
• And banging one out over your sister’s Insta

Now how about them points drops, GW?

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1. If you want the numbers: your own 130mm base + their 25mm base gives 155mm. And 155mm in modern measurements is equal to 6.1″ in archaic bullshit units, so this 6″ pile in doesn’t quite clear a basic screen. ↩︎
2. Nay, demand. ↩︎
3. Including the one that Ma brings back, don’t forget. ↩︎
4. In addition to the Strike First stuff in this book, there’s also the ever-popular Big Pigs ROR to consider. ↩︎
5. A few things I want to look at in some details are the various Regiments of Renown, and the (excellent) Prayer and Spell Lores. ↩︎
6. Always do. ↩︎
7. Fair enough, you can be the judge of that. ↩︎
8. Shout out to Joel and Nate 🤙 ↩︎