Deathwatch!

It’s Deathwatch time at Games Workshop, with a third week of releases for the elite xenos-hunting Space Marines – and what a week it is, too! Following on from the boxed game Death Masque, which featured the Emperor’s elites pitted against the Harlequins in Shield of Baal style, and last week’s re-packs of existing Space Marine kits with the Deathwatch upgrade sprue, this week sees pre-orders for some new kits alongside more re-packaged boxes.

Last week, we had bikers and tanks, with some captains and the minis from Overkill. This week, we’ve got terminators and vanguard veterans, a venerable dreadnought, and a librarian and a chaplain. These are all just packaged along with the upgrade sprue (the terminators, hilariously, have three such sprues because of how the terminator shoulder pads are distributed), and while it’s nice to have these options, I’m not exactly going to rush to buy any of them. More importantly, however, this week sees the actual Kill Team box go up for pre-order, with a new Watch Master mini and the new Corvus Blackstar flyer.

The new ship looks really nice, though I don’t know that I’d rush to get it first. I’ve not built a lot of these kinds of big kits, mainly as I prefer troops and the like, but I’ll no doubt get one in due course. I mean, the iconography on the thing is enough to get me interested! The main thing, for me, is the new Kill Team box. Well, not exactly new, as it’s the five-man squad from Death Masque, but still…

I built the Death Masque minis in a pretty random fashion, trying to pay some attention to the way I was loading the weapons, but mainly aiming for some cool minis. I still don’t actually have the Codex, so I was going of some of the spoilers that stated these guys can be built in any configuration, rather than the usual one heavy weapon per five models, and all that stuff. I still believe that’s the way it goes, but I’ll be getting at least one other box of these chaps, so I can always make up another group to bulk out the squad properly.

And speaking of building miniatures, we get to why I really wanted to write this blog today – Warhammer TV have put up another video, this time showing how you can build the models from the Kill Team box:

I have to say, I’m incredibly impressed with Games Workshop lately. I know I regularly sound like a fan boy here on this blog, but I don’t really care – GW are putting out some amazing stuff, and I love it! While videos with Duncan are hardly a novelty, videos where he just builds miniatures definitely are – until now, I think we’ve only seen this sort of thing with the Dark Vengeance and Age of Sigmar starter boxes, which are meant for new entrants into the hobby anyway. Seeing this, with the glut of weapons options available and the awesome way you can pose these guys, it really speaks to me of what the hobby is all about!

(Oh yeah, and if you watch to the end, it looks like they’re going to put out a video on painting the Corvus Blackstar too – it’s currently private, but that’s definitely a ship!)

The minis look incredible, I have to say – Mark VIII armour didn’t appeal to me in artwork, but having not only seen actual minis kitted out this way but built my own as well, I really like the look overall! I’ve started to paint mine following the GW scheme, anyway, and tomorrow’s hobby progress blog will feature them in no small dosage – look out for that one, it’s gonna be huge!

Overall, this Deathwatch stuff has gotten me really excited. I’m guessing that three weeks will be the extent of the release window, as I don’t know what else we could have for these guys, so I’m excited to see what the Bank Holiday weekend will bring for us…