White Dwarf 395 & Wargames Illustrated 301

A week late but here we go and after the excitement of last months new styles and giant isssues this month was never going to come off great in comparison, still it's not all bad......

White Dwarf comes with two inserts this month, this first is a gift guide and went straight in the bin, the second however is more useful and is a small booklet with the rules for the new warriors of chaos units.  I'm a big fan of WD introducing new units and having them as seperate booklets is great too as I can just slip it into the army book and not worry about carrying the WD about as well.

The main mag is a bit smaller than last month at 136 pages, the first 50 or so of which is the new realeases section! Just a tad excessive and disapointing.  The format is the same as last month and there are no suprise articles, jervis johnson, jeremy vetcock and john blanche all return, there are some nice gamers models in the form of an empire army and some 40K conversions and of course a battle report showing off the new chaos models.  The good 'this month in' section returns at the back of the mag.  Overall it's all ok, but feels a bit 'light' still and unimaginative and I really think the new releases section needs cutting down.

Talking of new releases I do like the new plastic chaos models and hope to get some of the hellstriders in the not to distant future.  Can't say I feel the same about the new finecast scyla anfingrimm, to me he just looks too much like a skylander!

This months theme isn't much of one really, it's the battle of the bulge for flames of war and there are two articles, one scenario / battle report and one on making appropriate terrain.  Not particulary inspring stuff to me I'm afraid, but there's some good stuff elsewhere in the mag.  The standout article for me is 'savage wars of peace - part 1' the start of a series about adding some victorian stereotype heroes and antiheroes to colonial wargames and developing them, some real potential here.  Another article which will be useful to many is an army list for the Byzantine faction in Saga (a game I'm managing to resist playing for now) with the battle board for them printed on the back of the magazine.  Other articles that I liked included one on some fantastic dioramas of the peninsular war and a look at a battle between the incas and the spainish, which was a bit of a different era to get a look in.  Overall a perfectly good if not spectacular issuse.