Acceptable in the ’80s: Marauder Miniatures Chaos Thug Regiment

by | Dec 1, 2014

The ad as it originally appeared in WD 130
Hello all. This post is the first I have shared since I started messing around with the look of the blog. Its remained pretty much the same for nearly three years now and I felt like fiddling around with the background and banner a little. Its early days, and I may well scrap it altogether and do something entirely different. The great old school Games Workshop coverage will continue though, don't you worry, and the many thousands of your who visit the site each day will still get to enjoy the same old stuff. 

Why mess with a successful formula?

Issue 130 of White Dwarf didn't just contain the marvellous Chivalry rules or the launch of Mighty Empires (more on that soon) it also contained the now regular release from Marauder Miniatures. This time it was the turn of the Marauder Chaos Thug regiment, and judging by how many of these I have seen for sale online over the years, they must have really sold well. That, or everyone is trying desperately to get rid of them!

But are the models any good? We have seen through past editions of this series that for every classic Marauder Miniature that we examine there are one or two real duds. In my opinion, the Chaos Thugs that we are looking at today reside somewhere in the middle of those two categories. 

They are neither hit nor miss. 

If truth be told I always hated the Marauder interpretation of the range, much preferring the look and variation of the Citadel range. Its hard to compare a mere six models with the breadth of the fevered imaginings of the Citadel design team in the latter half of the 1980s but in hindsight its clear that the Morrisons haven't attempted to. Instead, they have taken a different approach, redesigning the thug regiment as a missile unit armed with fearsome bows and ever more fearsome hairstyles. 

A much better copy sac of the range.
The standard bearer model is probably the best of the bunch and that hand painted banner is lovely. The champion and leaser models suffer a bit with 'silly pose syndrome' and the musician looks like he has got lost from filming of Robin Hood Men in Tights. I don't think the colour scheme does the miniatures justice either. Too busy. Only have two variants for the trooper models also doesn't help and I cannot imagine painting a twenty man unit of those would be much fun.

Still, they provide chaos players with an opportunity to field some missile troops in the armies, and if you have ever field a Khorne force you will know how useful such things are!

All in all. Not classics, but far from crap either!