Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition Review

Last Updated on Februar 19, 2024 by FauxHammer

The Old World of Warhammer Fantasy Battles returns to the sound of thundering hooves and brassy trumpets. Dive back into the not-so-distant past with our Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition Review.

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Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition Review – Summary

Whilst Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition Review is an impressive set that will delight nostalgic fans and lovers of Age of Sigmar’s predecessor, a lot of the beauty of this set is retained only at surface-level. Whilst it’s a decent and solid release, it’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination and has its share of faults, which means it struggles to measure up against 2023’s biggest Warhammer release.

Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition Review – Introduction

‘Member when Warhammer: The Old World was just called plain ol’ regular Warhammer?

It’s been teased for years – literally, years. When I started writing for FauxHammer.com, one of the first things Ross said to me was that he’d heard a rumour there’d be a rebirth of the old-school Warhammer Fantasy Battles range in the near-ish future. That was three-and-a-half years ago.

It’s taken its sweet time getting here (presumably, the guys that work in Games-Workshop’s warehouses couldn’t find where they’d hidden all the old sprue moulds for the Warhammer Fantasy Battles stuff), but now, as the first major release of 2024, Warhammer: The Old World is bursting its way back onto the scene with two brand-new boxed sets: the Tomb Kings of Khemri, and another box dedicated to the Kingdom of Bretonnia – which will be the focus of this review.

To hammer home just how old you’re getting the distinction between this new/old setting and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, what was Warhammer Fantasy Battles has been re-named Warhammer: The Old World (emphasis again on old). For those of you who don’t understand what this is all about, it’s quite simple: the universe in which Warhammer: The Old World is set canonically existed Vor the universe in which Age of Sigmar exists. The World That Was, as it is now called, was obliterated during the Age of Chaos by big-time baddie Archaon the Everchosen, whose determination to be arch-nuisance by enacting the Will of the Chaos Gods hit the reset button on existence. Warhammer: Age of Sigmar is set in the Mortal Realms, the universe that was created out of the ashes of the World That Was by the god-king Sigmar and some of his less diabolically-inclined pals.

There you go, I’ve just saved you a few thousand hours of reading.

A big thanks to the guys at Games-Workshop for furnishing us with this box – we really appreciate it!

Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition Review – Unboxing

As we’ve said in previous reviews, we’re easing off the long-form unboxings – especially with GW products as these are so formulaic these days. However, with a release as big and as important as The Old World, we figured we’d chuck one together for you all so you get a sense of what the box is like inside.

So, here it is. Ladies, gents, and everyone in-between, feast your eyes the Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition box.

The artwork is magnificent, featuring the brand-new Duke on Royal Pegasus leading a charge of suitably fairy-tale knights (and some altogether grimier men-at-arms) towards an unseen foe. Is this not the essence of Warhammer Fantasy distilled?

Cracking the box lid open and you’re met with plastic.

EIN Menge aus Kunststoff.

I wish I could tell you just how many sprues there are in this box, however in my haste to get cutting and sticking, I completely forgot to count them. Take it from me, however: I have never seen so many frames in a Games-Workshop Box.

In true old-school fashion, some components are also packaged in zip-lock bags (which is super useful give the vast number of spares you’ll have at the end of building this enormous army).

Beneath lies your divider – likely damaged given the number of hard, sticky-out bits on some of these Bretonnia sprues. You can see a couple of scratches and perforations on ours in the picture below.

Removing the divider, you have the Warhammer: The Old World Rulebook and the reference sheet shrink-wrapped with it. This book is huge – larger than both the Leviathan und Legions Imperialis books that we’ve see recently.

Removing those, as well as the bit of cardboard packaging keeping it in place, and we have the other bits: the bases for your miniatures, your dice, and your transfer sheet (emphasis on sheet – which some recent Games-Workshop releases have been extremely generous with their transfer sheets, this one is apparently feeling stingy).

What a lot of stuff! We’ll have a closer look at it all now…

Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition Review – Contents

There is a gargantuan amount of stuff packed between the walls of the Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition box. Here it all is:

• 1 x 352-page Warhammer: The Old World Rulebook
• 21 six-sided dice
• Templates and measuring sticks
• Reference sheet and transfer sheet
• 76 x Miniatures
  • 1 x Lord of Bretonnia on Royal Pegasus
  • 12 x Bretonnian Knights of the Realm
  • 36 x Bretonnian Men-at-Arms
  • 24 x Peasant Bowmen
  • 3 x Bretonnian Pegasus Knights

Yes, so, the bit you’ll certainly have noticed: 76 miniatures.

You did read that right. That is indeed correct. 76. Seventy-six. A flippin’ lot.

Now, it’s important to remember that the vast majority of the miniatures in the Kingdoms of Bretonnia Edition box are re-issues of some of the older, out-of-production kits that are being brought back for this new-old edition of Warhammer Fantasy. However, nestled in amongst ye olde peasants and knights of the days of yore is a brand-new model: the Lord of Breotnnia on Royal Pegasus. But I digress. The point I’m trying to hammer home here is that there is a lot of plastic in this box – and we’ll have a closer look at it all shortly.

First off, however, there are a few other important bits to get through first. The Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition box is designed to be an unpack-and-play army, ready to go straight onto the field for a suitably epic game of Warhammer Fantasy. In order to do this, however, you’ll need a few playing aids. Luckily for you, the box provideth.

Gaming Components

It wouldn’t be a classic, nostalgia-wrangling Games-Workshop release if it didn’t come with area of effect templates and plastic measuring sticks (better known by their formal moniker of “Whippy Sticks”), would it?

You’d also struggle to play a game of the Old World without a heap of dice, and the box provides those in the form of some very basic standard black-and-white dice.

Practical, sure, but it’s a bit of a lacklustre offering. The Old World is a huge deal, so why is it re-using the same rulers and damage templates that we say in Legions Imperialis und Warhammer: The Horus Heresy – Zeitalter der Dunkelheit before it? This would have been the perfect opportunity for something new and special – heck, perhaps just some blue whippy sticks to match the colour aesthetic running through the rest of the box.

No…?

Regelbuch

A gargantuan, shelf-breaking tome. the Warhammer: The Old World Rulebook is a hefty bit of kit – the kind of book you can thump down on a table with a real sense of gravitas.

Inside, it’s a mix of nostaliga-evoking maps and images of old school-style fantasy battles, the likes of which filled the pages of White Dwarf throughout the Nineties and Noughties. It’ll make Warhammer Fantasy veterans misty-eyed, especially seeing all the fantastical units standing in such neat and tidy quadrilateral units.

Of course, there’s also a nice wedge of pages in the middle of the book featuring some rather lovely army showcases that, if you weren’t already comatose with nostalgia, will certainly push you over the edge. Were there licks of Goblin Green paint about the rims of these model’s square bases, we’d all be in trouble.

But unfortunately, this is about as exciting as this book gets. Throughout, there is a smattering of single- or double-page spreads of some of the most iconic art from the Warhammer Fantasy Battles range (such as the iconic Chaos Warrior art by Adrian Smith, and the childhood-defining Battle for Skull Pass art by David Gallagher), but the vast majority of pages in this book (and bear in mind, there are 352 of ’em) appear as they are in the images below: sepia-hued, stamped with thousands upon thousands of rows of tiny text, broken up with washed-out, black-and-white renditions of some of the line’s most classic art.

It’s not as good as it could be, and it does remind me a little too much of the Legions Imperialis Rulebooks (which I had almost nothing nice to say about). Warhammer Fantasy Battles was defined by its colour: hordes of highlighter green-skinned orcs and goblins, servants of Chaos magnificent before towering infernos, Felix Jager’s blue-and-white-pinstripe pants. Aside from the bright blue cover of this book and perhaps 10% of the pages within, none of that energy, that beauty, that wealth of colour, makes it into this book.

Again, as with the Legions Imperialis Rulebook, it skates too close to being an academic textbook for my liking. Whilst those little nuggets of nostalgia hidden between the yellowed pages of this massive tome do make the heart grow fond, the vast majority of this book reads as a trawl of rules minutiae – pages upon pages of “if this then that” and “when this, so this too”. It’s not fun or gripping reading (well, it’s a rulebook, it’s not supposed to be), but its format does not make the oodles of information contained within easy to digest – and it certainly isn’t beginner friendly.

Reference Sheets

Of course, having a rulebook equitable in weight to Sigmar’s mighty hammer Ghal Maraz doesn’t necessarily make for the most comprehensive tabletop resource. A book the size of the Warhammer: The Old World Rulebook doesn’t find an easy home on many tables mid-battle, and having to leaf through it to remind yourself of that one particular rule every time it slips your mind doesn’t make for the most coherent and immersive playing experience.

Happily, then, the Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdoms of Bretonnia Edition box comes with this handy rules reference sheet.

This folded A3 pamphlet is a much more handy and succinct reminder of the key concepts needed to play a game of Warhammer: The Old World than the Rulebook tome. It is not, however, going to teach you the rules.

The information here is presented in a clear, easy-to-read and understandable manner. You will need a reasonable understanding of the rules in order to make sense of it – so just remember that you won’t be able to teach yourself how to play Warhammer Fantasy Battles from this four-page fold-out.

Information is clearly presented, and there are a few sketch-like images on the inner and rear pages to keep your visual interest piqued and to otherwise break up the lines, bullet-points, and tables of information.

A very handy, useful resource that a lot of players will find extremely useful.

Miniaturen

So, here we are – the real meat of this set.

As we mentioned earlier, there are a staggering 76 miniatures in this massive set – 75 classic models from the old days of Warhammer Fantasy Battles, and one brand-new figure, released (so far) exclusively with this set.

Wait no longer – let’s have a closer look at them.

Bretonnian Knights

The iconic Bretonnian Knights make a triumphant return in this box – and you get 12 of them too!

I would imagine that I am one of thousands of people who has images of these magnificent models burned into their brain – whether in the form of some gorgeous Fantasy Battles-era artwork, or fully painted, charging across a green felt battlefield towards their foe, photographed and emblazoned upon the the pages of an issue of White Dwarf magazine.

Whilst they do show their age – there are, for example, only two poses for the horse’s bodies, though they have different head options – they are absolute classics, and they’re extremely easy to assemble. There are various weapon, helmet, head, and accessory options for these models that ensure, whilst they ultimately all have similar scaffolding, all of them will look at least a little different.

Bretonnian Pegasus Knights

Much like the Bretonnian Knights before them, the 3 Pegasus Knights are another legendary unit from the Old World. Whilst these miniatures do show their age in places – there’s a distinct okayish-ness to the cloth elements of the barding on the mounts and the flowing cloth parts of the rider’s armour – these magnificent miniatures do still look great, even today.

They are very similar to the Bretonnian Knights in many ways: each horse is posed the same, with two options for heads so you can ensure there’s a little difference, but differentiation can be added with the riders themselves: there are different helmet and pauldron options available top help you make these guys stand out from each other. Their kit isn’t as varied as the Bretonnian Knights, but these guys still look great once together.

Peasant Bowmen

It’s hard to not use the word “iconic” again and again when describing these miniatures, but unfortunately there’s no better way to describe the 24 Peasant Bowmen in this box. Look at them.

Rank upon rank of ugly, weary, wounded and battered men, gurning down the sights of their bows. They are the antithesis of the gaudy knights in this set, and look absolutely magnificent for it.

These models are made up of three components: their bodies, a head, and whatever extra you may/may not wish to stick on them/their base. There is also an option to build a slightly different Peasant Bowman, as well as a Villein to lead your crew. Both are made of four components, so they’re not exactly difficult either.

As with the other models before them, as fun as they are, they do in places show their age: those heroic scale elements – larger heads and hands – are all the more prominent on these miniatures, especially with the overexaggerated features of some of the faces.

Men-at-Arms

With a jaw-dropping 36 of them in the box, it’s a good job the Bretonnian Men-at-Arms are so easy to build.

With a bunch of extras available – Yeomen, Grail Monks, and Musicians – there’s a smattering more diversity in this kit than with archers, but there is a great deal of similarity between the two kits.

The Men-at-Arms are simple to build again, consisting of four components (a shield arm, a weapon arm, a head, a body, and whatever extras you may wish to equip them with), but if you’re a real sucker for detail, you’ll want to leave the shields unattached so you can paint the backs of them and ensure you do all the gambesons/surcoats/other unspecified chest armour worn by these miniatures.

Much like the Peasant Bowmen, they are ugly little brutes – grim and grizzled faces rendered in that classic, cartoonish fashion: underbites, heavy brows, sunken eyes and too-few teeth. Again that word comes up: “iconic”. These miserable little blighters are as fundamental to the Old World setting as the words “Old” and “World” are. Like a lot of the models in the set, they a bit dated – but delightfully so. The seriousness and grim realism of some of the more recent Warhammer lines takes a little bit of a back seat to allow for the more cartoonish aspects of miniatures sculpting to come out – and these models overflow with character for it.

Bretonnian Lord on Royal Pegasus

This has to be one of the most beautiful miniatures I have ever seen.

And yet getting it to this state was a start-to-finish nightmare.

Just how complicated the Bretonnian Lord on Royal Pegasus is to build is best demonstrated by the build guide itself. All the instructions you need to build everything else on this list – that’s the Knights, the Pegasus Knights, the Bowmen, the Men-at-Arms and all their respective variants – are contained across 4 pages. The build guide for the Lord (which has options for building either a Duke or a Baron) is spread across 5. The instructions for this one model take up more than half of the build guide.

And going from sticking together soldiers made up of 3 or 4 components to this overcomplicated nightmare of a figure is like being woken up in the morning by having a bucket of ice water thrown over you. People talk about scale creep in Warhammer, but this box shows that complication creep is also very, very much a thing.

But, as we said, once he’s assembled the Lord on Royal Pegasus is a simply spectacular miniature. It is easily one of the most beautiful miniatures currently available, and is absolutely glorious to behold.

Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition Review – Price and Availability

Lassen Sie uns einfach den Gips abreißen.

It’s £155.

As there often is with these boxes, you’ll be getting a better deal buying all this stuff as part of this box than you will buying everything separately. Still, considering the sheer volume of miniatures in this box, it’s likely a very good deal – but it doesn’t lessen the fact that this is viel of cash to drop in one go.

If you’re tempted, you will just need to weight up A) how much the Old World means to you, B) whether or not you actually want everything in this box, C) if you feel the discount offered in this box (which will usually be between 30%-40% off buying all the models individually if recent years have taught us anything) is still worth the £155 this is going for, and finally D) if you’re on the fence about some of the contents, whether or not you’d be better off crossing your fingers and hoping that the kits in this box are released separately at a later date so you can pick up the few you actually want (we think we’ll see these kits released as their own standalones at a later date – we hope so, at least).

Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition Review – Final Thoughts

The Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition box is one of the most difficult products we’ve had to review for quite some time. The reason for this is simple: it’s polarising.

The last tricky box we had to grapple with was Legions Imperialis, a box filled with ugly miniatures, a hideous rulebook, and some dull-as-ditchwater reference guides, that was dragged up by its proverbial bootstraps at the last moment by some truly wonderful tiny tanks. Heartbreakingly, the Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition box skates dangerously close to this sort of territory. Which feels odd to say, as a lot of this review has been positive.

The twenty-first century is a truly miserable place. The news is always bad, everything’s super expensive, and we’re all ludicrously time poor. It’s no wonder, then, that we all seek to return to simpler times – those august days of our youths where we were blissfully unaware of what inflation was, of the wars tearing apart parts of the world, and of the severity of things like pandemics. The Old World seeks to be a literal portal to such a time: its rulebook is filled with those iconic battleboard-and-army shots of units of warriors in neat little rectangles charging across green-felt fields, and the plastic in the box buchstäblich offers people the opportunity to reconnect with miniatures they may have played with and painted as kids, that they may have since lost, sold, or otherwise got rid of.

But the Warhammer: The Old World – Kingdom of Bretonnia Edition box is really not that impressive a release if you think about it – and you can only do this if you peel back the veneer of nostalgia, which, I admit, is extraordinarily difficult to do (as I was building these models I was thinking about how much I’d love to have another chance to re-paint the Battle for Skull Pass set I adored as a kid). Tear away that warm feeling of long summer afternoons and school holidays, and what you’ve actually got is a load of old models Games-Workshop seem to have spent literal years digging through a warehouse looking for the moulds for, an impressive-on-the-outside-but-vapid-within rulebook, and one new model that is an absolute sod to build.

See, were this Legions Imperialis, we could leave it at that. I could give this a low star rating and we could all move on. Unfortunately, this box is a lot more complicated than that.

Because the models in here sind great – there are some absolute classics in the Kingdom of Bretonnia box. The gorgeous Pegasus Knights, those Peasant Archers and Men-at-Arms, the grim, knackered faces which for decades defined Games-Workshop’s ever-darkening descent into the grimness of its settings. And those Knights. Those iconic, beautiful, unmatchable Bretonnian Knights. Sure, sculpting has moved on leaps and bounds since all this stuff was first released a billion years ago or whatever, but there is a serious charm to the comparative simplicity of a lot of these miniatures. Furthermore, as the Duke on Royal Pegasus proves with his appallingly complicated build, more detailed isn’t always better.

As I’ve said already at one point in this review, “iconic” is a word not to say a thousand times over here – but I have to say it again: the miniatures in this set sind iconic. They are as synonymous with the much-loved Warhammer Fantasy word as Grombrindal, Gotrek, Emperor Karl Franz, gaudily-coloured shops with “Games-Workshop” written in yellow and red font upon their eaves. This box ist Warhammer Fantasy incarnate.

So, you see the conundrum we’re in? Everything, be it good or bad, has a “but” attached. The selection and quality of the models are awesome – but they were released decades ago, then taken away, and are now to be sold at a massive mark-up (sure, it may be in line with inflation or whatever, but nobody wants to be reminded of how wretchedly expensive literally everything is these days). The Duke on Royal Pegasus is phenomenal, a stunning testament to the marvels of modern model sculpting – but building it is an experience I’m not in any haste to repeat. There are absolutely mountains of miniatures in the box, too – but there’s no hiding from the fact they sind old and don’t look quite as good as most miniatures of the last decade. The rulebook looks great at first glance and has a few enticing sections of classic miniature photography an old school artwork – but the vast majority of it is a turgid trawl of tiny text and oversaturated rules minutiae. It’s the nightmarish Legions Imperialis rulebook again, but this time in fantasy form. The whippy sticks and templates are-… No, I don’t have a but for these. I’m fed up of seeing them slung in with every nostalgia-evoking release. Make some new ones. Spoil us. Heck, folks’ll be paying enough for it.

There is a lot of skin-deepness with this box. Beautiful on the surface, but peer a little closer and things begin to become unstuck at the edges. It’s tough, because there’s a lot to love here, and I can’t deny the nostalgia hooks are in my heart, dragging me to my painting table to put some red-and-blue check surcoats on my Bretonnian Knights, but I könnten be a little more content with this release.

Yet I can’t deny, seeing this army of classic fantasy-style knights and soldiers arrayed on my desk in their little cubic and rectangular formations makes my heart very, very happy.

Overall Rating: 3.5/5

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(Affiliate links will result in compensation to the site on qualifying purchases)

Wenn du FauxHammer.com unterstützen möchtest, klicke auf diesen Link und bestelle deine Hobbyartikel bei Element Games für Großbritannien und Europa. Verwende den Code “FAUX2768” an der Kasse, für doppelte Belohnungspunkte.

Unsere Partner / Hobby Stores

• VEREINIGTES KÖNIGREICH: Element Spiele, The Outpost, Wayland Games, Mighty Lancer, Goblin Gaming, Forbidden Planet, Model Scenery Supplies, Ebay, Amazon
• USA / Kanada: MTechCave, GameKastle, eBay (USA), eBay (CA), Amazon
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• Europa: eBay (DE), eBay (FR), eBay (ES), eBay (IT), Amazon
• Australien: Ebay, Amazon
• Global: RedGrass Games, Warcolours

• 3D-Drucker: Phrozen 3D, Elegoo, Anycubic

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