Nine bodies. Seventeen heads. Eight left arms, six right arms, four sets of two-handed shoota arms, and three squigs, which Games Workshop insists on calling “three – yes, three – little Squig-y guys.” That’s the new Ork Boyz kit, shown off on Tuesday ahead of pre-orders this weekend. When GW got to the part where they’d normally do the maths and tell you how many unique models you can build, they quit on purpose. “If we were talking about the Adeptus Mechanicus, this would be a great place to calculate the exact number of unique combinations you can make with this kit, but… we’re talking about Orks, so we’ll settle with ‘lots’.”
There’s a smaller line in the same article that I’ve read about five times now. Boyz squads can hold two Nobz in 11th, and GW notes that it’d be “downright embarrassing for them to turn up looking the same.” It’s a joke about sprue options. It’s also, by accident, a claim about Ork biology, and the codices have been circling that one since before I was legally allowed to buy a pint. The relevant bit is in the reproduction section.
Orks don’t have parents. There’s no mechanism for it.
Where an Ork actually comes from
Imperial scholars reckon Orks reproduce by releasing fungal spores, which sink into the soil and grow into something the wiki entries describe as a plant-like womb, and that’s where the gestating bodies come from. Squigs first. Then Snotlings to farm the squigs and the fungus. Then Gretchin to do the building. Then the Orks. A whole ecosystem, in order, out of dirt. Orks shed spores their entire lives and dump an enormous load of them at the moment of death, which is why you can win a war against Orks, hold a planet for a century, and then have Feral Ork tribes come strolling out of the treeline like nothing happened.
The bit I find genuinely strange is the split in their physiology. An Ork’s animal cells carry the genetic information for that individual Orkoid subspecies only. The fungal half of him, the algae-ish component living in his bloodstream and skin that makes him green, carries the genetic information for all of them. Every Ork walks around with the blueprints for Gretchin and Snotlings and Meks and Weirdboyz inside him.
And the knowledge is in there too. The Brainboyz are supposed to have written a techno-gene into Ork DNA that unpacks itself as an Ork matures, handing him language, weapon handling and a working grasp of violence with no teaching involved. If he happens to get the specialist package he becomes an Oddboy, a Mek or a Painboy or a Runtherd. If he doesn’t get any of it, he joins the Boyz.
So the average Ork Boy arrives already carrying a language, a job, a religion and a working understanding of how to keep a slugga firing. Everything past that he picks up out in the open, from whatever the fighting happens to hand him.
The Ork Boyz kit is nine rungs of a ladder
White Dwarf #454 has a Skarboyz piece from 2020 that states it flatly: “It’s a proven fact that the more Orks fight, the bigger they get.” Years of constant warfare, and they get taller and heavier, shoulders spreading, arms and legs thickening. Goff Skarboyz are the extreme case because Goffs are always at the front. The same article mentions that when a Skarboy does need patching up, the Dok’s work involves fungus brew, a dirty syringe and a load of metal staples, and that the staples get worn afterwards as a status symbol long after the wound has closed.
That’s the whole system. An Ork’s body is a running record of how much fighting he’s survived, which makes the model itself a CV. The scrappiest, skinniest Boy in the mob is the newest one out of the ground, and the enormous slab of muscle two ranks over has been at this a while.
‘Ardboyz work the same way. They’re the ones in ‘eavy armour, and the lore is specific that only veterans who’ve lived through enough battles have had the time and the opportunity to scavenge enough plate to make a suit. They sit just below the Nobz in the pecking order and the other Boyz call them walking magnets behind their backs, on account of their habit of picking up scrap mid-combat. Which tells you something about how Ork seniority actually works. It accumulates. It’s a bit like the way people at an office job slowly cover their desk in objects. The longer you’ve lasted, the more junk you’re carrying around, which on an Ork means plates, trophies and staples.
Nine bodies at nine different sizes and builds, all cross-compatible with the same arms, is that ladder rendered in polystyrene. I don’t think GW sat down and mapped it against a 2020 White Dwarf article. But the kit lands on it anyway.
So yeah. Nine. And honestly, nine isn’t loads if you’re building twenty of them, is it. You’re doubling up no matter what you do, two of each with a couple left over. Doesn’t matter though. Nobody leans over a table and counts bodies. They count faces, and there’s seventeen of those, ranging from old-school pointy helmets through to modern goggles, and that’s before the four Nob-only heads.
The thing I bought and never finished
Around 2019 I bid on a job lot of thirty second-hand Ork Boyz on eBay. I wasn’t collecting Orks and I’m still not. The plan was to raid them for bits, partly for Kill Team terrain and partly because I had a vague idea about grafting Ork scrap onto some Drukhari raider hull, which in hindsight was never going to look like anything. The listing photo showed a big green mob on a kitchen table and it read as characterful at thumbnail size.
They arrived and every single one was the same. The previous owner had built all thirty with the identical head and identical arms, in what I assume was a very long evening, then hit the lot with about four coats of thick green emulsion. Not paint. Emulsion. I put a batch in a tub of Fairy Power Spray, scrubbed two of them with an old toothbrush, decided this was the worst thirty quid I’d ever spent, and put the rest in a lidded box on the shelf where they have been ever since. Kiran found them a couple of years later while looking for a spare movement tray, held one up, and asked whether I’d bought a unit of clones on purpose. I said something defensive about how they were for terrain.
They weren’t for terrain. I just never got round to it and I’ve since moved house twice with that box.
Glyphs, kill marks and a red squig
Alongside the arms and heads, the kit throws in a spread of little cosmetic parts. Slung shootas and axes for the backs, pouches, bandoliers, shoulder pads, trophies. Normally that’s the sprue filler you glue on last while the plastic cement dries. In Ork fiction those same parts are where nearly all the information about a given Boy lives, and the sources have been specific about it since the mid-2000s.
White Dwarf #452’s glyph feature explains that Orks mark territory by slapping a big colourful symbol on it, and the symbol is “fanged maws, skulls, leering moons or suns, flames, a really killy axe or whatever the Ork Warboss in question fancies as his own personal symbol.” Waaagh! Ghazghkull covers the tally marks, and notes that since Orks love killing and bragging but are bad at counting, they scratch the record straight onto the gear. Goffs favour kill rings around a kannon barrel, one concentric ring per worthy kill. Other mobs use hash marks. Snakebites and Evil Sunz go in for kill dags.
The clan material in White Dwarf #349 is where it gets properly good. Death Skulls strip the fallen of everything down to bootlaces, which produces mish-mashed outfits assembled from whatever the last battlefield had lying around. There’s a line in there about the Boneheadz tribe overrunning an Imperial penal colony and then wearing scraps of convict clothing, printed with black arrows, for generations afterwards. Not one Ork. Generations. Some greenskin in the 41st Millennium is walking around with a jailhouse arrow on his shoulder plate because his great-great-whatever thought it looked hard.
Colour does real work as well. White Dwarf #310 has Orks copying Imperial camouflage patterns as a kind of totem, because Orks are superstitious and slightly psychic, so certain colours take on supernatural weight. Red vehicles genuinely move faster. Blue is lucky, which is why Death Skulls paint their faces with it. This is the same mechanism that makes Ork tech work at all, applied to bandoliers and shoulder pads.
There’s even a hint that clan identity might be partly genetic rather than chosen. Bad Moons are identified by their teeth growing faster than everyone else’s, which is a physical trait they’re stuck with, and it’s the source of the entire clan’s wealth. Whether the Blood Axes are born sneaky or simply keep recruiting Orks who already are, the sources don’t say and I’d be making it up if I claimed otherwise.
Right, the honest caveat. There’s a decent chance I’m reading a plastic kit like it’s a codex chapter. GW gave the Boyz nine bodies and seventeen heads because a twenty-model infantry box where every model is identical is a hard sell in 2026 and because Codex: Orks needs a flagship troops kit that photographs well, and the Skarboyz article had nothing to do with it. That’s almost certainly the actual chain of events, and I’ve no evidence for anything grander.
Except the reason the Ork range survives being that cynical is that the fiction has always been about scavenged individuality, and GW keeps landing on it by feel even when they’re just trying to sell sprues. The Boneheadz and their convict arrows didn’t come out of a rules brief either.
Pre-orders go up Saturday alongside the codex, Nazdreg, the Warboss, the Mek, the Warbikers and the rest of the wave. If you’re picking up a box, the thing I’d say is don’t build the special weapons first. The burna, big shoota and rokkit launcha backpacks each only fit one specific body, so those three are decided for you before you start, and you want to know which three bodies are gone before you commit the rest. Then work out where the red squig goes.
