The Beast Snagga Ork Army Set was released this weekend, and I had been lucky enough to snag one from Element Games before they sold out!

While we haven’t had enough time to do a deep dive and review, I thought I’d film an unboxing, have a look at the contents and share my first impressions after a couple of hours with the new 2021 Ork Codex! You can see my unboxing below!

If you have picked up the Adepta Sororitas or Lumineth Army Sets then you know what to expect here – You get a big old box filled with new miniatures, Datacards and a Limited Codex all in advance of the general release of the army, a sneak peak so to speak!

Even the packaging is really nice, with the inner box depicting the Great White Squig taking on the Death Korps of Krieg and the plastic components being separated by a card divider covered in yet more Krieg VS Ork artwork. We know a plastic Krieg kit is coming in Kill Team, but this gives me hopes that the Astra Militarum codex will be accompanied by more Krieg kits – hopefully plastic Death Riders and a Command Squad!

As for the miniatures themselves they are as expected amazing, but there are a couple of surprises. Firstly the Beast Snaggas don’t have much in the way of options, with the only customisation being able to build the nob as a boy or giving one of your Orks a Thump Gun (arguably, I’d think these guys want to be stuck in with choppas anyway). The Beast Snagga Boyz are across two identical frames of 10, so you can put them together as either 1 big unit or split them into 2 to fill out your troop choices.

The other surprise is that the Nob on Smasha Squig is actually part of the Squighog Boys and not a separate kit as i originally thought it would be. Rules wise, for every unit of Squighogs you can actually include 2 Nobs in the army without taking a battlefield role – allowing you to use 2 sets of kits as a unit of 6 while still being able to use both Nobs. Making this easier is the fact that the Nob has quite a lot of customisation options, with a couple of head positions for the squig, multiple head plates for it, 2 heads for the Nob and 2 different weapon wielding arms, meaning if you do go for a big unit of squigs that you can have 2 distinct looking Nobs. Unfortunately the Squighog Boys themselves do not look to have this level of customisation, so some cutting and repositioning may be needed to get some variety across multiple kits.

Zodgrod Wortsnagga also looks ace, though i’m probably going to leave his head as a separate subassembly to make things a little easier to paint!

Datacards are useful as ever, I tend to pick up a set for each release as I find it so much easier to look up Psychic Powers and Stratagems by using cards than flicking through the book.

As for the Codex, our full review will follow once I’ve worked my way through it, but I wanted to shout out some of the cool things I’ve seen and my first Impressions of the book.

Firstly, Ork characters are going to be amazing – in particular the Beastboss on Squigosaur is going to be very popular indeed! Toughness 7 with 9 wounds, a 4+save, a 5+ invulnerable save AND the ability to reduce incoming damage by 1 is going to make them very resilient. Add to this the the amazing combat statline of 6 S6 -2AP Damage 2 attacks, plus 3 additional S7 ap-3 damage 3 attacks from the Squig and you have an absolute beatstick before you factor in traits such as Might is Right that gives them +1 attack and +1 strength!

All of the buggies from the previous Ork release have also had a considerable update with both reductions in points, increases in performance and all of them reducing inbound damage below S9 by 1 making them a lot more survivable than they used to be! My Evil Sunz are going to be very happy with their vehicle heavy force!

The prize for the best unit in the book (and potentially one of the best units in the game) has to go to the Kill Rig. This thing is truly insane – A toughness 8 16 wound vehicle that is also a transport, and a character, and a psyker, and is covered in loads of guns, the main one hitting automatically and getting extra shots if you manged to use a psychic power, oh and its amazing in combat too with up to 14 attacks. Plus it’s really cheap! I reckon everyone will fill their heavy slots with these, and as its a psyker that would give you access to the entirety of the new psychic discipline without having to take Beastbosses out of your precious HQ slots!

Obviously things are always different on paper than when you actually use them in a game, but I can see the above options being very, very good!

Things look good for the Orks and I really think they will be able to go toe to toe with some of the very powerful 40k armies around at the moment!

So that’s some initial thoughts on the new Beast Snagga Army Set and Codex – we’ll be back soon with the full review once we have taken it all in!

Published by Matt Crowther

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