Warhammer Alliance

So, I've probably mentioned already that there are issues that have prevented me from continuing my high school tabletop roleplaying club. As far as I'm aware, there are investigations still ongoing, and I'm not allowed to publicly disclose what's happening. However, I'm also aware that there are a few regular readers of the blog who know exactly what's going on. I've got a half dozen students who ask me on at least a weekly basis to give them updates on the situation, and I know that as soon as the club is ready to go again, it will resume with a bang.

 

In the meantime, I couldn't let this opportunity pass me by.

 

I reached out to the Warhammer Alliance, to get the tools ready to start a new club, or at least expand the potential within the club once it resumes activities. The starter kit had to be sent to a school address, so I was thankful that the front office staff notified me immediately on it's arrival yesterday. This evening I unboxed it.

 

It was well packaged with sealed-air bubbles, and had two parts to the package. A large box and a shrink wrapped pile of 12 magazines/booklets.

First the big box.

 

Opening it revealed a large printed envelope filling the top of the box, containing cardboard of some type. It once again has the alliance logo on it, with the same imagery depicting the Warhammer games, but this time faded to white rather than black. 

The back of the envelope has a welcome to the alliance message in a variety of languages and indicates the contents of the pack... I'll get to that, but it all seems in order. It feels like a great introductory pack, and I can uderstand why it would be directed at schools only, there's a lot of stuff in here, a lot of duplicates for a dozen students to really get a feel for what's on offer in the Games Workshop hobby.

Inside the envelope, a bunch of cardboard sheets (as I had suspected), including gloss coated sheets marked as painting pallets, a bunch of tokens, and some crude cardboard terrain. Conveniently, there is a pair of fold out glossy terrain maps for playing battles on, so it looks like this kit is pretty comprehensive.

Here's an example of one of the pieces of cardboard terrain on the battle map. 

There's also a bunch of shiny, holographic foil cards. I was hoping they might have images on one side, with combat stats on the other. But they're just the two signature concepts... one side a 40k picture, while the other side has an Age of Sigmar image.

Now to delve deeper into the box.

 

Sprues, lot of sprues. I'm guessing 24 in all. Each of the sprues has 2 characters on them from opposing factions in the games. The Warhammer 40K sprue has a Space Marine (because, well, of course it does), as well as a Necron (immortal cybernetic entity that is basically the sci-fi equivalent of skeletal undead). The Age of Sigmar sprue has a Stormcast Eternal (who are basically the fantasy equivalent of Space Marines), and what looks to be some kind of Orc or Ogre (I'm actually wrong on this, but I'll explain that later).

 

In one side of the box is a starter range of ten paints too. "Abaddon Black", "Steel Legion Drab", "Leadbelcher" (which is a dark iron metallic), "Retributor Armour" (which is a dark coppery metallic), "Mephistor Red", "Macragge Blue" (which if I remember correctly is basically the signature blue of the most commonly depicted Space Marines, the Ultramarines), "Orruk Flesh" (which is a dark suntanned skin tone), "Rakarth Flesh" (which is not so much a lighter skin tone, but perhaps a more pallid one, maybe more appropriate for undead flesh), "Averland Sunset" (which looks like a dull yellow, perhaps a bit sandy in colour), and "Corax White" (which in the bottle, but it could just be the dull night-light of the bedroom, looks more like a pale grey).       

(Looking a the photo I've just taken of the paint line-up, my colour blindness might have been playing tricks on me regarding the paint shades.)

Once the sprues and paints are removed, the centre partition of the box splits open to reveal a bunch of dice and paint brushes... that's pretty cool. So basically it looks like pretty much everything to start things off is there.

 

The shrink-wrapped magazines have 48 pages, and they include a basic intro to the hobby including a quick guide on how to paint, an overview of the settings, a very brief overview of the faction clusters (Warhammer 40k gets Humans, Xenos, and Chaos... while Sigmar gets Order, Chaos, Death, and Destruction), some quickstart rules for playing single-figure one-on-one games, some in-world fiction, and assorted web-links to get students deeper into the hobby. 

There's enough here in the kit to serve as a hook to lure people deeper, and I guess that's the whole point. It's probably about what I expected from a kit of this type. Honestly, this is a pretty good set for a fledgling club, and I'll certainly be making use of it (hopefully soon). I'll probably be making use of it with a bunch of extra assorted sprues I picked up from locals on Facebook marketplace. Maybe we ca even get some of the other local high schools to get their own kits and start a multi-campus competition between different clubs/teams. Once we can get our own club running again.