Four upper bodies. Four jaws. The new plastic Ork Warboss that GW showed off in the Big Summer Preview builds sixteen different bosses out of one box, and that’s before the bionik eyes, the horned helm, the squig-hair topknot, or the little Commissar cap you can bolt on if you want your boss to look like he’s been reading Imperial Guard drill manuals in secret. Build-your-own-boss, basically. It’s a Mr Potato Head for people who own an airbrush, and it’s the most Ork thing GW could possibly have done with the model that leads Codex: Orks.
Because Codex: Orks is the first codex of 11th edition. The greenskins beat the Space Marines to the front of the queue for once, and I honestly can’t remember the last time that happened. The blue boys almost always get to go first. This time the face of a whole new edition’s opening codex is a generic Warboss you have to assemble yourself, one decision at a time.
I’ll make the case that this is exactly right, and that the sixteen-combos thing is the single most lore-accurate design choice on the whole model. A warboss is meant to be one of a kind. It’s built into what the Orks are as a species, and GW just turned that into a set of assembly options.
A boss is whatever he beat and looted
If you’ve read more or less any Ork material you know the rule that runs the whole race: might is right. The biggest Ork in the room is in charge, and he stays in charge until a bigger one caves his skull in. What’s easy to skim past is that the rule is physical as much as social. Orks literally grow. White Dwarf #365’s old “Da Bosses” writeup put it about as bluntly as it gets, that successful Ork bosses actually grow in size and reputation together, the body swelling to match the standing.
There’s a lovely little feedback loop buried in a 2020 White Dwarf, in the Goff clan piece, that spells the machine out. The more an Ork fights, the bigger he gets. The bigger he gets, the more boyz he can push around. The more boyz he pushes around, the more of them decide they fancy a go at running the mob themselves, so they fight him, and if he wins he gets bigger still. Round and round it goes, and he’s bigger every time he comes out on top, until the only ones left who’d chance it are other Warbosses.
So think about what that produces. A warboss is the accumulated result of every fight he’s won and every bit of kit he’s torn off the losers. The power klaw that used to belong to some other boss. The bionik eye a Mek bolted on after the old one got shot out. The trophies, the scars, the sheer mismatched bulk of him. No two warbosses can look the same, because no two of them fought their way up through the same pile of corpses. That’s the fluff. A kit with four bodies, four jaws, and a bag of bits to bolt on is that same idea handed to you as an instruction leaflet.
The clan options make it even better. The horned helm is a Goff thing, headbutting, no-nonsense, the clan that produces more warbosses than any other precisely because they never stop scrapping. The Commissar cap is pure Blood Axes, the Orks who fought the Imperial Guard often enough to start nicking their uniforms and their ideas about discipline, and who get called soft for it by every other clan. When you build this kit you’re picking his clan, his history, and roughly how much he’s willing to admit that “umie” tactics sometimes work.
And the clans are whole personalities you can build toward, colour scheme included. Goffs are black and red and headbutts. Bad Moons are yellow and dripping in teef, teef being literal Ork currency, so a Bad Moon boss is covered in gold bling and the best guns his wealth can buy. Deathskulls paint themselves blue for luck and loot everything that isn’t bolted down, so their boss is a magpie in ten stone of stolen armour. Evil Sunz are red and obsessed with going fast. Snakebites are the traditionalists who reckon guns are for gits. The same sixteen bodies-and-jaws can be sixteen completely different cultural statements once you commit to a colour.
So the boss grows, right
So the way an Ork boss actually works, right, it’s not like he gets promoted. Nobody hands him a warrant. He just wins, and wins, and gets bigger, and one day he’s the biggest thing for a hundred worlds and the spores are going mad and every other Ork in the sector is drifting toward him like filings to a magnet. Then he calls a Waaagh. And if he wins that, he gets bigger again. There’s no ceiling written down anywhere. Ghazghkull is basically what happens when the loop never stops, and I’ve already banged on about him at length elsewhere.
The Warboss kit that leads Codex: Orks
One thing keeps nagging at me about the timing. GW already gave everyone a Warboss. There’s one in the Armageddon launch box, a push-fit monopose thing, perfectly nice, comes with thirty-odd other push-fit Orks and a copy of the rules. Most people who wanted to start Orks this edition have already got him.
And then a few weeks later the Big Summer Preview rolls out the real one. The multipart character kit. The sixteen-combinations, bits-everywhere, spend-an-evening-deciding-on-the-jaw one. That’s the version that goes in the box next to Codex: Orks, and it’s the version that’ll be the face of the faction for however long this edition runs.
The wave around the codex is substantial, by the way. The Warboss, a new Mek with a repair crane bolted to his back, a new multi-option Trukk, and standalone or bundled kits for Weirdboyz, Dakkarigs, Wartrakks, a Bigboss, a Bannernob, and a Painboy with a Grot Orderly. Plus the codex itself with fifteen detachments, a command card pack, and a set of green dice with red pips because of course there is.
I think the ordering tells you how GW sees the model. The push-fit boss is there to get you playing on day one. The multipart kit is for the people who are going to keep the army around for years and want their boss to be properly theirs. You can’t really monopose the thing that’s supposed to embody a species built on every individual clawing its own way to the top. Well, you can, they did, it’s in the starter box. But the proper kit had to be modular or it would’ve been a fib.
I don’t actually know how long it’s been since GW made a fresh generic multipart plastic Warboss. The old one, the classic power-klaw-and-slugga boss that’s been the box-art face of the clan for as long as I’ve been in this hobby, is genuinely ancient. Older than my entire time playing 40K, and I started back in 7th. The generic boss just doesn’t get renewed very often, because GW would rather sell you a named special character with a story attached. A new generic one is a bigger deal than the internet gave it credit for, buried in among all the Trukk and Mek excitement.
The best warboss I ever saw was somebody else’s
Couple of years back, one of the small tournaments I drag myself to once or twice a year, I got absolutely taken apart by turn three. Thousand Sons into a shooty Guard gunline, my Rubrics evaporating, the usual. Kiran, who’d come along to lose at Death Guard in the next bracket over, was no help whatsoever. So I spent the back half of my round not really playing my own game and instead watching the Ork table next to me.
This bloke had kitbashed his warboss out of, near as I could tell, about four different kits. Megaboss-sized body, a looted Commissar cap sitting at a jaunty angle, one arm that was clearly off a Deff Dread, and a squig on a chain, the little lunatic, painted to look like it was mid-bite on a Guardsman’s leg. It was ugly and enormous and it had more character than my entire beautifully-painted, tournament-legal Thousand Sons army. I was, and I’m not proud of this, properly jealous of a man’s converted Ork while my own soldiers were being deleted off the board. Never did find out if he won his round…
That warboss is the thing GW has now put in a box. That’s what the sixteen combinations are for. Some bloke was always going to hack the old kit apart and give his boss a stolen hat and a Dread arm and a biting squig. The new kit just means he doesn’t have to butcher three other boxes to do it, though knowing Ork players he still will.
What it’s actually like to build
Practically speaking, sixteen “combinations” is GW maths and you know it. Four bodies times four jaws is sixteen, sure, but the bits are where the real variety lives, the eyes and the helms and the choppa options and the back banners. You’ll build one and immediately see three other bosses you want to build, which is the exact feeling a good character kit is supposed to give you and the exact feeling that keeps the pile of grey plastic growing.
If you play Orks, you were always getting this model. If you don’t, and I don’t, it’s still the most quietly clever release in the whole Ork wave, because it’s the one that most completely understands the thing it’s depicting. A faction where leadership is just violence that worked, sold to you as a kit where you decide, bit by bit, what shape that violence took on one particular git.
The unify-the-whole-race nightmare, the one-boss-to-rule-them-all scenario the codices keep threatening, starts with exactly one of these. One git who won a few too many fights and got a bit too big. GW just gave you sixteen ways to build him.
