The Kithguard are troll like creatures who are experts of guerrilla tactics and jungle fighting, leaving behind the high seas of their Brineblood brethren to cut their teeth on iron through training and tactics.

In today’s article we’re taking a look at two recent kits for the Kithguard, The Command Starter Set and the incredible and massive Fortress King! In this review we’ll be taking a look at the kits, chatting about how they go together and painting them up to see what they look like in the flesh!

Massive thanks to Steamforged Games for sending us over these kits to check out on the site. If you would like to support the site then why not pick up your Warmachine goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We’ve also filmed a full unboxing and review of these sets which you can see just below or over on YouTube!

So without further ado let’s jump into the sets and have a look at what’s inside!

Kithguard Command Starter and Fortress King Review

Ever since I painted the Southern Kriel Brinebloods, I’ve had somewhat of a fondness for big blue trolls. While pirate trolls are pretty cool, Steamforged recently released something even cooler – Jungle Warfare Trollls! Think of all the 80’s movies you’ve seen, and add some trolls and you’re halfway there. These are veteran, elite military Trolls who specialise in Guerilla warfare within the depths of the jungle – Ok, yeah, they are Rambo in Troll form, and that is something very cool indeed!

Warmachine now has a number of different boxed sets for all it’s factions – essentially these put together a fixed number of points in each box to make it really easy to pick up an army and have it ready for the battlefield. A Command Starter such as this one gives you enough points for a 30 point game, and this is really the perfect way to dip your toe into Warmachine before progressing to bigger game sizes. You and a friend can both pick up a different Command Starter each and know that you both have equal pointed armies that can be pitted against each other. This box retails at £74.99

The Kithguard set comes with 5 units over 7 models and includes a trio of Trap Door markers too. If you’ve not built any Warmachine models before, then the scale of them is a little bigger than other tabletop games, with the modern sculpts standing to around 35mm scale. While Steamforged are starting to move towards plastic miniatures, a lot of the range are still in resin – including this set we’re reviewing. The pieces are commercially 3D printed, and are fantastic quality. I remember having some older miniatures from before the Steamforged Games acquisition, and the quality was a little hit or miss at times – however the quality of these kits is fantastic with minimal cleanup needed and gorgeous details!

From an assembly point of view they are really quick and easy to put together having very few parts – you’ll want to use superglue however, as the resin will not react and melt from plastic glue. You might find some supports still in place, but these are easily clipped off and on the whole this was a pretty painless build!

They were a real joy to paint up too! First up we have Corporal Rhud Felleye, who just oozes charm and style, camouflaged and read to strike with his rifle. The larger scale to the models makes them so nice to paint up, and the lack of clean up meant I could get this sprayed up and painted asap!

Next up we have the Scrappers, a unit of trolls armed with picks and dynamite – there’s lots of cool details here and even though they are a unit each model has it’s own personality, which is really nice!

Pvt. Rattles accompanies them with his mining gear – I particularly love the candle on his helmet, and as one of the smallest models in the set he’s still a really fun one to work on.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Kithguard are joined by a Heavy Warbeast, Klangor. Yes, this is a massive Troll with a sword bigger than most of the warband who is chucking artillary shells at targets! Ridiculously bonkers and again another really fun one to work on in the set!

Leading the force is Sergeant Craghorn, the Warlock of this set. In Warmachine every force is lead my a Warlock or Warcaster who uses their powers to command the beasts and robots under their command. The Warlock/Warcaster doesn’t cost any points, but you’ll want to synergise them with your forces to make the most out of them. Craghorn is a gorgeous model who again leans into that awesome jungle warfare vibe that the Kithguard have going on!

The kit also contains a trio of markers to represent your trap doors too, which is very cool!

While a little pricey compared to some other miniatures ranges, the contents of this box does give you enough to start playing with and is a great themed box to get you starting with. If you want to expand the army there are a few other themed boxes that can be combined together to create bigger armies, which is great for people new to the game.

Now, the Kithguard to have something a little bigger they can add to their numbers…

Currently the biggest kit in the Warmachine range, the Fortress King is a gigantic model that will act as an awesome centrepiece to a Kithguard army! The kit costs £174.99 and is made up of multiple massive chunks of resin! There’s a lot of parts here, but the kit isn’t too difficult to build – just make sure you support the parts until they cure properly as the weight of them will rip them out if you dont let the glue set!

A lot of models in Warmachine have multiple different weapon and equipment options, and this kit is no different! There’s two different main weapons, 2 heads, 2 aux weapons and 2 weapon platforms that can all be swapped out. Each piece has pre drilled magnet holes to allow you to fix some magnets into them and swap them out between games. This is a really nice touch as you don’t need to commit to a single loadout, simply build them all and use whichever you fancy for each game! Just make sure you get the polarity the right way round – which can be tricky when sticking magnets into the recesses. I found that using a little blu-tac to attach the magnet to the bottom a brush, dabbing glue on the end of the magnet and then placing it into position using the brush was the easiest way, and allowed me to fit these without getting covered in glue or having the magnets flip round on me!

This is without a doubt one of the coolest models I’ve had the pleasure to work on, and I fell in love with this thing as soon as it was assembled. It is very big and very heavy so does take a little work on getting it tabletop ready – but it is well worth the effort!

What’s really nice about this kit are all the little details, Pygs working on cranes to move ammo into the main gun, an engineer working on the arm, a very angry Pyg shouting as his companion – loads of little details!

I’d recommend not gluing most of these to the model until you’ve painted them. I simply attached them to corks and paint bottle lids so that I had something to hold onto in order to make painting these little guys a little easier.

For the Fortress King himself a lot of the groundwork was done with an airbrush – this way I could block in the main colours and tranisitions before moving to a brush for the details – but there’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to paint this all by hand from scratch!

I’m really excited to see other kits come out for Warmachine with a similar scale to this, as it looks really nice in the display cabinet when finished too! From a gameplay point of view it may be all your bags in one basket, but when that basket is a massive troll with a heavily fortified mountain on his back then regardless of tactics it has to go in the army!

Warmachine has been going from strength to strength recently, and I can’t wait to see what else is on the way for the range!

These kits are out now and available from all stockits including our affiliate Element Games

Steamforged Games provided Sprues & Brews with free copies for review purposes.