Spotlight On: Cygnar Warjacks From Grind

I got the Warmachine spin-off board game Grind for Christmas and like many another player I’m sure I rubbed my hands together at the thought of all the bonus warjacks I could add to my conventional Warmachine games.

So far I’ve painted up all the Cygnar Jacks but as I quickly realised it isn’t as easy as all that to get bonus Jacks.

The main problem is that the weapon options don’t match the standard Warmachine models. But hey, no problem! I’m not proud and only play among friends and family so no one is going to mind if I use them as counts-as proxies.

(Evil cackle)

You get a mix of light and heavy Warjacks. The poses are difficult to make much of but I did my best. I didn’t glue the arms in. They’re still removable and replaceable as they’re meant to be in Grind. 

I'm going to use the little ones as Chargers and the Heavies as Destroyers. 

Now this is the kernel of my brand new Cygnar force so I had to give some major thought to the colour scheme. I wanted to stick with the classic Cygnar blue but wanted to shy away from bold colours.

In the end I went for this washed out greyish blue hoping for a more gritty realistic look. I chose not to go with gold as a metallic contrast (as I often do) and instead went with Tin Bitz and gloss black.

Now with this many Warjacks and Lieutenant Caine in the post as my Warcaster, I need to start thinking how I’m going to organise my force. It’s very Jack-heavy which is going to cause problems with only one warcaster. I’ve never used a Jack Marshall before but that’s probably a good start. I’d like to take the army down a ranged-heavy theme as much as possible, to contrast to my other forces that contain a lot of melee troops.

I had three quarters of a game with my wife last night (pictures to come) and I must say it was one of the best wargames I’ve played in ages – in a year or more. I love Warmachine for its versatility and complexity.

It’s important to me to have a lot of variety and Warmachine provides that quite nicely.

I’m glad to be collecting Cygnar (in the same way that in Warhammer it’s good to collect Empire). More than any other force they’re the point-of-view good guys. Ultimately the storylines encircle around their success or failure as a people.

Now that I have my growing (sneakily built) force my campaign becomes a closer part of that on-going narrative.