The Chaos Lord on Chaos Dragon is one of the most eagerly anticipated models for Warhammer The Old World. Ridiculously powerful in game, and previously without an official model players have been counting down the days until an official one drops. Today the Chaos Lord on Chaos Dragon is finally up for pre order and it is an absolute beast!

In this full review we’ll be checking out the new kit, seeing how it goes together and painting it up to see what it looks like in the flesh and just how it compares to other models in size!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us one over to check out on the site. If you would like to support the site then why not order your old World goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

The new The March of Chaos Arcane Journal is also up for pre order today – you can check out our full review here

We’ve also filmed full unboxings of the new Dragon and the Arcane Journal which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So let’s crack this thing open and see just how big it is!

Chaos Lord on Chaos Dragon Review

Since the Old World was released we’ve seen a lot of models from the World That Was return to the range, but we’ve also been treated to some absolutely fantastic brand new models too! From the Tomb Kings Dragon to the Cathay Sentinel and Sky Lantern we’ve had some massive kits too that really show off the kinds of things that can be done in plastic now.

One kit that a lot of people have been looking forward to was the Chaos Lord on Chaos Dragon. This is a kit that up until now people have had to convert in order to get in their lists. I was a little surprised that the classic two headed dragon wasn’t released for the game, but that makes a little more sense now that this epic kit is finally up for pre order.

Costing £118 it isn’t a cheap kit, but it sure is a big one!

Inside the box we get 4 sprues that build up the dragon, a choice of rider (Chaos Lord or Sorcerer) and the option of putting whatever rider you don’t build on foot.

As with most recent Old World kits you’ll want to have a good read of the instructions first and make sure to dry fit every part before gluing it together. This isn’t quite as hard to build as the Cathay Sentinel, but it’s still a big complex kit, and if you don’t have the parts just right then you’re going to end up with gaps later on. Every part fits perfectly, you just need to spend a bit of time testing the pieces to find that sweet spot!

There’s actually quite a few options here too – the rider has multiple weapons that can be given to him along with multiple different heads, and the heads of the dragon itself can be swapped to make it so that if you have two of them in your army they look different.

I opted to build mine as the Chaos Lord on Chaos Dragon, leaving me the Sorcerer on foot to run alongside my army. I did have a play to see if it would be possible to have the two riders able to swap, but the construction of the throne itself is actually altered depending on which variant you build, making it very tricky to have a build that can swap out the riders. This isn’t the end of the world, and I love that you get the foot character too, especially as the foot Sorcerer in this box looks incredible compared to the currently available ones.

One of the things that I love about this dragon is the fact that everything down to the colour scheme on the box is inspired by the classic Egrimm Van Horstmann model, just brought up to date and made a LOT bigger.

I’ve seen some people moan about the price of this one, and it is an expensive kit, but it is huge! A lot of people use Ionus Cryptborn (An £80 kit) as the basis of their Chaos Lord on Chaos Dragon conversion, but the brand new Old World Dragon stands about twice as big as it!

I’m surprised Games Workshop didn’t include some side by side shots of this thing against other models in the range, as you can see from the photos this dragon towers over everything – if you play Age of Sigmar, it’s about as tall as Archaon – and that’s currently the biggest model in the range!

One good design feature of this kit is the fact that the both the rider and the throne can be removed from the dragon – they simply click in place allowing you to use the unridden dragon as Galrauch. I do wonder if they will amend the base size of Galrauch to make this useable in games – it’s got a massive base so I’d deffo ask before using this one one as him, but it really works for him!

From a painting point of view I has this build in 3 subassembles – the Lord himself, the Throne and the Dragon. Getting the wings together is tricky, and while you could probably do some clever stuff to make them removable, I decided to just glue the entire thing together – he’s so big he’s going to live in the display cabinet, and is going to need a custom case just to move him to events anyway regardless on if the wings are attached or not!

The model has lots of nice texture too, so he’ll be really nice to work on using contrast as well as traditional paints – I used a combination of both across the model, and he was a joy to paint up! It’s certainly easier having the lord and his throne able to be removed, as there’s a lot of detail on the rider that would be really hard to get to if you just glued it all together.

I will say that he was so tall that his wings often got in the way of my overhead lamp, and there were a couple of heart stopping moments when the lamp knocked the wings as I was moving it – just make sure you have enough clearance to paint him!

This is a fantastic kit however, and really is the centerpiece of the entire Old World range so far! The Specialist Games team are really showing what they can do with plastic kits, and just shows that they really can work with plastic as well as they can with resin.

I’m excited to see what the future holds for other kits like this – could we see a new modular Elven Dragon that can be taken by High and Wood Elves perhaps? Or a Bone Giant to a similar scale to the Sentinel? I have a feeling we’re going to see more epic kits like this going forwards, and I’m excited to see what they have cooking up for the game!

The Chaos Lord on Chaos Dragon is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 22nd August.

Games Workshop provided Sprues & Brews with a free copy for review purposes.