Undead Project: Raising the Dead

Horde of Zombies!
My wife is at work; My 1500 word paper is written; Cassandra is playing with her train set. I actually have a few hours to play with my toy soldiers! Of course by the time I had got myself set up on the table, my assistant has given up playing trains and is trying to hack one of the sprues apart with the pliers...



Mantic's Zombies
Each sprue has parts for three full zombies and two bits allowing you do make four possible zombies from each sprue. There are 10 sprues in a box although I had an extra one as an appology for a shipping error they made. Mantic had said the zombies would be compatible with their ghoul range so I decided to see about mixing a few ghoul parts into the horde and see if I could make forty zombies from a single box.



Sadly the size of the hip joints on the ghouls is not quite the same as the zombies so the parts do not mix very well together. At least the meat cleaver and other spare weapons from the ghouls where useful in adding some extra variety to the zombies. I found I loved the style of the 'legless' zombie pulling itself along the ground so much that there were still a couple of pairs of legs left when I had finished. Since I still had some spinal columes I just made more! So I finished with 42 zombies.

Pictures of the infantry
I made one zombie who was missing a head and in the process of putting in back on. His buddies can be seen in the background lurching around. To help with the limited number of poses I used a craft knife and repositioned some of the arms at shoulder or elbow.


These are the two ghoul torsos together with a group of spinal-tap zombies. The ghouls have zomibe head and hands to help them fit in to the group. Also pictures is my zombie champion rebuilding himself from bits after having lost a fight. You can not see it in the photo but there are some severed hands crawling along with the spinal-tap zombies.


Here you can see the extra weapons added; meat cleaver; dagger; rake-hand, together with a row of legless zombies. As well as the champion above I made six of these crawling minions.


The last of the shambling horde. Corpse at the back is holding up a second head that is looking around for its body. The way the parts combine means some of these are really hunched over. Fortunately with a half-zombies in front of them they still rank up.


Results
I pre-ordered the zombie horde when they were advertised as a box of 50. Since they then changed the size to 60 and with half-zombies you could make a possible 80. I therefore sold off my second box as I did not need that many! In the end I spent £14 on a box, which with the free sprue made me 40 zombies; which equates to 0.35p per zombie!

I would say that pushing a single 'thirty zombie' box all the way to 40 models is a bit of a stretch since you would end up with a lot of spinal-tap zombies. I would expect most people to get 35 models from a box. The extra models are great for raising the dead in WHFB but not much use for Mantic's own KoW rules (they have fixed unit sizes) unless you buy six boxes to get enough spares for a whole regiment.