Army Boxes: SS K.G. Peiper & US Cavalry Group

Hey guys!  This is the first in a series of posts detailing these new Army boxes from Battlefront.  Because we strive to make sure anything we review is fully painted, and these boxes come stuffed to the gills with models, I've decided to have this quick overview of both boxes.  Meanwhile I've sent the various bits and pieces to several reviewers so we can hear lots of opinions.  Obviously those reviews will be a little further down the road as they need to get them painted before we feature them here!

So without further ado, let's take a look at the US Cav box set!

If taken all as Veterans, the Cav box set comes out to around 1480.  You can of course take them as trained (or only the M36s as trained) but I figured I'd show you the max "bang for you buck" points wise.

This is an excellent starter set for someone looking to run the cav for sure.  There's no extras included that you might not want to run, and so it's an excellent return for the price.  On the other hand, it's not quite an optimal army if only for the fact that it's only 3 platoons.  You'll want to add something else to the army to finalize it.  Still, if you're building a Light Tank company from Devil's Charge it's hard to beat this as a core.

The basic cost of the box is $200(US) which is roughly the sum of all of the 19 vehicles included if purchased individually.  Fortunately, there are quite a few extra goodies to sweeten the deal which essentially come at no additional cost:

The Peiper box also weighs in at $200US, and also comes filled to the brim.

The Peiper box comes with a fairly substantial army straight out of Devil's Charge.  1675 points by my count.

The army gives a cool cross-section of options available to the Germans, though it might not be an optimal build.  Especially for those just starting their collections, I think this box is a great intro to German armor with a few Panthers, a King Tiger, and some Panzer IVs.  I'm not sure about the choice to include 4 Ostwinds- I rarely see people bring quite so much AA to a game.  I would've loved to see 2 Ostwinds and some Skorzeny Commandos or something instead, but your mileage may vary.  This is perhaps the more "complete" box, again, if only because it has an optimal number of platoons (Flames of War of course heavily favors using an even number of platoons).

 In addition to the 15 vehicles, you get a set of SS Dice, a set of SS Tokens, and 2 resin objectives (not pictured below- sorry!)

Both boxes are certainly good deals- you essentially get all of the "extras" at no cost- dice, decals, tokens, and objectives.  But they aren't quite as "friendly" as something like the Open Fire set since both of them represent fairly specific lists.  So if you're building one of these 2 armies from Devil's Charge they're no brainers.  Otherwise, they're still definitely worth considering.  As I mentioned earlier we'll be taking closer looks at all of the components in the next few weeks as we furiously paint them up!

All miniatures provided courtesy of Battlefront Miniatures