There's a fresh wave of green-skinned warbands crashing through the hobby right now, which means a great many of us are staring at our existing orc collections and wondering whether the models we liked perfectly well last month have somehow become old overnight. This is a hobby where one new photograph can give several hundred dollars of painted plastic an inferiority complex before breakfast.
I've been at this long enough to know that a new kit is rarely the end of the project. Once the first five models are built exactly as the instructions suggest, the sixth model is usually where the old need to make something different crawls out of the basement again.
That's where conversion bits still earn their keep.
Even the most generous kit never has enough options for every idea. One person wants a mob made from armored scrap collectors, another wants mechanical lunatics with too many blades, and somebody else has decided every model needs a pirate hat. That sounds unnecessary until you see ten of them together and suddenly it's the only correct decision anyone has made since 1994.
The practical answer is not always another complete miniature. A head, an arm or a weapon is usually enough to change the entire direction of a model, and it's a lot cheaper than buying a second box because one blade looked better in the photo. A set like the Space Orcs Machetes or Space Orcs Cleavers can run across a whole mob while still leaving room for different bodies and poses, so the force looks connected without looking like it was issued uniforms by an especially organized warehouse manager.
Mechanical parts get more useful as the bigger orc models arrive, because oversized bodies make older weapons look a little less threatening. The Space Orcs Robo Lads Melee Blade Arms are for models that are supposed to look as if somebody replaced an ordinary arm with machinery and kept adding blades well past the point where a responsible adult would have stopped.
Responsible adults are not really the target audience for that idea.
What matters is deciding what the unit is supposed to be before you print a random pile of parts. It's easy to download twenty files, print them all, and discover the models have no common visual language beyond being green and armed. That's traditional, but it's not always enough to make the finished army feel like it belongs together.
Choose one repeated element first. A style of blade, a mechanical limb, a helmet shape or a shared set of clan symbols like our Metal Lads, Trench Lads or Yellow Lads markings. Repeat it across several models, then let everything else get messy around it. Orcs are supposed to look ramshackle, but good ramshackle design is still design, much like the garage bands we listened to in the eighties were still practicing even when they worked very hard to look like they weren't.
Running them in One Page Rules? Our bits slot straight into Grimdark Future Orc Marauders lists, and the Space Orcs Battle Tokens for One Page Rules keep the table tidy. Want a beast pack? The Attack Beast range, from the Zappy Thundermaw to the Rage Shokkstar, brings the noise.
The Space Orcs conversion bits collection is built for exactly this kind of project: weapons, character parts and upgrades you can mix into an existing force without rebuilding the whole army.
New releases make a lot of noise for a few weeks. The models remain after the noise settles. Players will still want their army to look like their army, and a few carefully chosen bits are often what turns a new box into something that feels personal instead of merely new.
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