The forces of the Tomb Kings are reanimated today with the awesome Host of Nehekhara Army Reinforcement Set up for pre order today! Updating the classic Skeletons and Chariots, this is a great set for either starting a brand new Tomb Kings army or for expanding an existing one!

In this full review we’ll be checking out the Host of Nehekhara Army Set, seeing what the new kits look like and painting them up to see what they look like in the flesh!

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

This isn’t the only Warhammer The Old World release we’ve taken a look at today though, as we’ve also got a full review of the new River of Bones Arcane Journal too!

We’ve also filmed full unboxings and reviews for both of these releases which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So without further ado, let’s crack open the box and see what’s inside!

Host of Nehekhara Army Reinforcement Set Review

Back when Warhammer The Old World exploded onto the scene back in January 2024, one of the initial armies released were the Tomb Kings. While we got an amazing new plastic Bone Dragon, the rest of the box was made up of the classic plastic models who served for a very long time indeed!

Recently, we’ve had some amazing new models for the Warriors of Chaos and now it is the turn of the Tomb Kings to get some brand new models!

I have to say this is a pretty exciting box – costing £140 it contains 36 Skeleton Warriors, 36 Skeleton Archers and 6 Skeleton Chariots! I suspect box sizes will change compared to the old ones when these get released individually, but even if we base these on the prices of the current boxes this works out as around £228 of kits!

Inside the box we get the full kits and instructions, and these are much more efficient kits from a sprue point of view compared to the old ones. The Skeleton Warriors and Archers each contain 18 models across a 3 part sprue, which is much better set out than the old kit they replace. Likewise the Chariots now come 2 to a sprue with each pair also containing all the command options. This does of course mean that Chariots will now come in even numbers in the box, so I’m interested to see if these end up being 2, 4 or 6 to a kit!

Also included in the box is a brand new transfer sheet, though outside of shields and the chariot bodies there’s not much in the way of flat spaces to use these on.

There’s lots of optional parts, but the main assembly of these follows the same sort of construction that Horus Heresy kits do – multiples of 5 models, but these also have an additional frame that has the command group too. What’s nice is that each of the command models can be built a different way – so for example you could build two units of archers and have a horn in one unit but a drum in the other, which goes a long way to making your units look different!

The models are also much, much easier to build than the old ones. The skeletons have on average 4 parts each, more in line with the Tomb Guard than the old fiddly skeleton warriors.

The Skeleton Warriors and Archers have a lot more detail to them though. The old ones were mostly bone, but these have a lot more armour and clothing on them, which makes them take a little longer to paint as you’ll need to block in these details rather than just spraying them wraithbone and slapping Skeleton Horde over them all – you can still do that, but you’ll have the extra steps of painting all the other detail too.

This might be a turn off for some people, but I think they really capture the Egyptian vibe now and look very much their own distinct thing compared to the older ones.

The archers have a lot of dynamism to them now too, some are getting ready to shoot, others pulling arrows from their quivers, and there’s lots of spare parts to add some decoration to the bases if you want to too. Again, there’s a lot more detail, so they take a little longer to paint, but look great when finished.

I used a fairly quick scheme for these and it took me around 3 hours a unit to knock them out. I could absolutely go back and add in some more detail, but for units such as these that have a lot of models across the army I wanted to get the Host of Nehekhara box painted up as quickly as possible to show what it’s possible to do over a weekend for a battle ready army.

The chariots are my favourite models in the box, but also one that may mean you have to do some serious rebasing for your current chariots…

Games Workshop have popped brand new sized bases in the box – 60mm x 120 mm. I suspect this is going to be the new size for all chariots going forward and they are massive compared to the 50×100 that the old ones are on.

The finished Chariots really do look amazing on these bases, but they have a much bigger footprint now and i suspect we’ll see an FAQ that updates both the standard chariots, character chariots and Tomb Guard to these new sizes. Hopefully GW will be selling packs of these to allow for the rebasing of old ones – though with the lack of slots for the classic horses you’re going to have to be careful cutting those runners off and getting decent contact points for the hooves. In all honesty the new chariots blow the old ones out of the water, but if you already have a lot of the old ones then it’s going to be something you have to consider.

I suspect the Host of Nehekhara box is a prologue to a bigger Tomb Kings wave including new Chariot characters (we’ve already seen the new cav, and the new Arcane Journal heavily features Setra too in his assault upon Brettonia)

I think you’ll get away with mixing in some of the old models, but the quality between them is night and day and especially in regards to the chariots I think they will look a little odd next to each other. I’ll be using my classic chariots as the basis for Tomb Guard conversions, while the new ones will be my standard Chariots.

Summary

Even with the chariot sizes getting bigger, I still think this is an amazing box. For £140 you’re getting a massive chunk of a Tomb Kings army, pretty much covering your entire min core allowance. Add in some Tomb Guard, your characters and some Rare choices to flavour and you have a full army good to go – And if you already have the new dragon and character boxes then you’ve got a much more modern looking army compared to the classic sculpts too.

I suspect this is something we’re going to see for all the other armies over time. Those old boxes were massive because of the very inefficient sprue layout – so it’ll be in Games Workshop’s interest too to start replacing those old kits with something that can hold just as many models in a smaller box in order to reduce warehouse space and maximise what can sit on a shelf too. The upshot for us is that we get much easier to build kits that take full advantage of the 20+ years that have passed since the original kits were released, and not to mention some gorgeous new sculpts to paint up!

The Host of Nehekhara Army Reinforcement Set is up for pre order today and is released on Saturday 7th November.

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