Ogres Have Layers – Designing The Hard Plastics – Kings Of War

16th Sep 2022

Jonny Mann

After teasing the new hard plastic ogres as part of our Kings of War Super Duper X-Force Edition Rulebook hype, we wanted to get the low down on the design choices behind these awesome new minis.

So, here’s Dave from the studio team to peel back the layers…

The Goal

The goal for this kit was to replace and expand upon the now venerable PVC ogres, first released in the Kings of War Kickstarter. The original models were hand sculpted and had limited options for posing and variety – it was what we were capable of at the time.

Now we can get much more out of a kit!

While we were happy with the overall style of the models, we did want to add new ogres so that you could get more variety into your force. More poses, more heads, more weapons. Something you could really build an army from. So we were looking at re-executing the original designs and building on them to expand the range.

Sculpting The Lore

I remember explaining to Luigi (sculptor) that ogres buy their armour one piece at a time. Each warrior earns their pay as a mercenary, then spends their hard-earned coin on outfitting themselves. This means there’s a variety of textures and designs present on each model – although they are kept cohesive. They carry forward the style of the original models and deigns, including little flourishes cast in the ogres’ own distinctive style.

One important update we wanted to make was to the ogres’ stature. The old models were a little too top-heavy, they’d had “skipped leg day”. Using the heroes sculpted for Vanguard as a base, we’ve done an update to the proportions to make them consistently bulky all around. Ogres should look and feel like living battering rams! We’ve also taken this opportunity to introduce some female ogres – based on the Matriarch model. They’re as stocky and well armoured as their male counterparts – perfect for any battlefield.

Let’s talk mechanical stuff. Each set of frames comes with six individual ogres, each of whom can be armed with either a hand weapon and shield, a two-handed weapon, or a blunderbuss (aka Boomer)*. Each one also has access to a wide variety of different heads. We’ve worked carefully so that the heads and arms from the old models will fit onto the new ones – if you have any spares or want to mix and match.

*The crossbows were left off because it’s difficult to efficiently tool them in hard plastic, but they will be coming later as a resin upgrade!

AWOOOGA AWOOOGA – Late addition to the blog!!

Ronnie has just got back from his trip to Poland and managed to smuggle back some delicious plastic goodness. So the moment you have all been waiting for. Here is the first look at the brand new Ogre miniatures…. Here we are showing some of the infantry build options and one half of the infantry sprue itself.