Ossiarch Bonereaper Holiday Battleforce

[Sception]

Warhammer Community Link

The annual holiday battleforces have been previewed, and this time there's two for the forces of Death: one for Soulblight Gravelords and one for Ossiarch Bonereapers.  Of the two, the Soulblight Gravelord box definitely seems to have the better selection of staple units for new players.  The ossiarch box has a nice variety of very cool models, but from a game play perspective, especially for a new player just starting the faction, there's some more questionable inclusions.  A box of morteks is, of course, a strong starting foundation, but just one box will leave a new player a bit light on battleline, likely needing to pick up more morteks, some deathriders, or both.  The lack of deathriders in the box in particular is a bit disappointing, they probably would have been a better starting choice than the stalkers/immortis.

They'd probably have been a better choice than the crawler, too, which struggles a bit in 3e.  Still has some important utility, but not necessarily something a new player should be grabbing first.  Its the largest and most visually arresting Ossiarch model outside of special characters, so I can understand it's inclusion, but I would have gone with either the crawler or the harvester, rather than one of each, and, again, used the space that opened up for more battleline.

Heroes are a boneshaper - fine - and a soulreaper - unfortunate.  Maybe the next book will make the soulreaper better, but either of the other two generic heroes, the mason & the liege, would have been a better early pick up.

As a set of models, they all look really cool.  As the start of a new army, it's a bit scattershot, especially compared to the Soulblight Box, though that's typical of these sorts of boxes.  If anything the Soulblight box is a surprising exception.  For existing Ossiarch players?  I mean, Ossiarchs have been out for a bit now, anybody who jumped on with the battletome probably has all of these they need, especially with how the realities of how the points costs pan out for OBR means that, while you /might/ want more than one crawler or harvester, you'll almost /never/ want more than one boneshaper or soulreaper, and that's even if soulreapers magically get good next time around.

Still, there are worse ways to start an army, and at the very least the models are cool and varied so they should be fun for a new player to mess around with.  And this box would complement the Broken Realms box with 10 deathriders and a liege very well, so if your local store still has one of those, or if you or someone you know started OBR with that box and haven't gotten around to expanding past it yet then this box suddenly gets a lot more attractive imo.

[rattila]

Well i dont know, i will start an army of OBR in 2022 but this box only has one unit i want to play under 1000 pts : the mortek guard. So unless a big discount (like really big) i will not buy it, despite the fact that i’ m the public targeted.

[Sception]

Yeah, that's exactly my criticism of it.  This is not a great selection for starting an OBR army from scratch, but if you're an established OBR player you already have all this stuff.  The only people this is good for are those who already have the core staple HQ and battleline options covered, but haven't yet started to expand into ancillary and specialist units.

And the displayed image - which is unsurprisingly enough also the box art:

Mostly just reminds me how much I wish the bone fortress wall and gate pieces in the background were purchasable.  Take this box, leave it at the same price point, remove ALL of the models, and replace them with that terrain?  Immediate purchase for me.

[dicebod]

I've been thinking of buying into OBR for quite a while, to the point that I bought the Broken Realms OBR box (Liege-Kavalos & 10 Deathriders) back when it came out with BR:Teclis. I think that box + this one gives me a great foundation for an OBR army...but it certainly sounds like I'm a bit of an outlier.

[Sception]

This is a good follow up to the broken realms box if that's all you have so far.  You're probably the best positioned to make the most of it.