The old Weirdboy was a direct-order metal kit that got re-cast in finecast and then mostly forgotten. I owned one for years without ever putting it on a table. He had this hunched pose, eyes half-closed, mouth open in what was either a scream or a yawn, and a little copper stave that looked like someone had bent a length of scrap pipe around his fist. The sculpt was from 2008 and it showed. You could still find him in the direct-order corner of the GW site, orphaned, surviving four editions of Ork codex by pure inertia.
That’s the mini the new Ork Weirdboy is replacing.
Games Workshop dropped the reveal on Warhammer Community this Monday, and it’s been the standout of the 11th Edition Armageddon previews so far. Eyes bulging, cables snaking out of a headpiece, one hand on a skull-topped staff crackling with green energy. It’s the Weirdboy caught in the exact instant before his head either unleashes a psychic blast or just detonates from the pressure. Eighteen years after the last one. About time.
Orks are the only faction whose psychic power is a crowd
Every other psyker in 40K draws power from the Warp directly. Human psykers open themselves to the Immaterium and try not to get eaten by daemons. Aeldari Farseers navigate the skein of fate. Tyranid zoanthropes channel the Hive Mind. Even Tau Ethereals, if you believe the more out-there theories, are drawing on something outside themselves.
Weirdboyz don’t. Or, well, they sort of do, but the channel runs the other way. The power comes from the Orks around them. Every Ork is a low-level psychic transmitter, broadcasting Waaagh! energy without knowing it. The more Orks gathered in one place, the more excited they are, the stronger that field gets. A Weirdboy is the poor bastard whose brain happens to be wired to absorb it. He’s a lightning rod standing in the middle of a storm his own side is making.
That’s why they live in raised huts on copper stilts, wear jangly bells and ridiculous hats so other Orks can hear them coming and get out of the way, and carry copper staves to ground the charge like earthing a wire. When a Weirdboy can’t discharge the energy fast enough, his head explodes. Also the heads of anyone standing too close. The other Orks think this is funny.
I want to sit with that for a second. The strength of an Ork psyker is directly proportional to how hyped up his own side is. A Weirdboy near a full-strength Waaagh! is a demigod. A Weirdboy surrounded by three tired Grots is basically a wizard with a slight headache. It’s a psychic system that only works when the crowd is working. If you’ve dug into the Ghazghkull lore and the idea that Ork belief literally shapes reality, Weirdboyz are the test case. They’re the physical proof that the Waaagh! is a real field you can measure.
The other consequence of this is Minderz. Every Weirdboy has a small retinue of larger, dumber, better-armed Orks whose job is essentially to drag him toward the enemy when required. The Weirdboy doesn’t want to go. The Weirdboy knows what’s about to happen to him. The Minderz don’t care. They hold him in the general direction of some Imperial Guardsmen, wait for the sparks to start in his eyes, yank the copper stave away from him at the critical moment, and stand back. This is genuinely how the faction operates, and it’s in the codex, not a meme. It’s closer to how you’d use a fire hose than a soldier. The old 2008 model had zero accessories that hinted at any of this. The new one has cables and a rig. Still no Minderz in the kit, as far as I can tell, which is a small shame.
What 2008 got wrong, and what the new kit gets right
The original Weirdboy (actually metal first, then finecast, there was never a mainline plastic version, which is maybe the weirdest part of the whole situation) was posed in what looked like mild indigestion. Hunched. Eyes half-lidded. A little glow effect on the staff that you had to really commit to in the painting stage to make read. A man mid-yawn, basically.
I remember buying one as a teenager from a Games Workshop store, must have been around 2010, when I had no money and Orks were the cheap-ish faction. Stripped him twice. The first time because my zenithal went wrong and he came out looking like a lime. The second time because I tried to do OSL on the eyes and ended up with two white dots in an otherwise grey model. He lived in a bits box for the better part of a decade after that. I think I eventually used the copper stave on a Kommando conversion and gave up on the body.
The new model solves the core problem: the old one didn’t communicate what Weirdboyz actually do. This one does. The pose is pre-detonation. Shoulders up, neck craning, staff elevated, eyes bugged out. The cables running into his skull plug him visibly into the backpack contraption, which is exactly the kind of half-functional Mek-built hazard these characters are supposed to be fitted with. The staff itself is skull-topped, a cheeky mirror of the Space Marine Librarian force stave, because of course it is. Everything about the sculpt tells you this character is seconds away from either wiping out a squad or cooking his own brain.
The Armageddon angle
The Weirdboy is the first named character reveal from the 11th Edition Armageddon launch box, and the placement matters a bit. Every faction launch box tells you what GW thinks the faction’s identity is going to be for the next few years. The fact that the Orks’ character slot went to the Weirdboy, rather than another Warboss or a new Big Mek variant, is a quiet signal that Ork psychic shenanigans are going to get more attention in 11th Edition than they usually do.
Wargamer floated the obvious question already: does this Weirdboy keep Da Jump? That’s the teleport power that’s defined Ork movement tricks for the last two editions. The Weirdboy closes his eyes, there’s a flash of green light, and a squad of Boyz appears in your opponent’s deployment zone screaming. Losing it would fundamentally change how the faction plays. Keeping it means Weirdboyz stay mandatory, which is probably what GW wants. I’d put money on them keeping it, though the cinematic trailer’s Psychic Vomit attack suggests at least one new power is coming in alongside.
The bit where I doubt myself
I’ll be honest — when I saw the trailer weeks ago and the chained-up Weirdboy appeared, vomiting green fire onto a Space Marine, my first reaction was that this was going to be more of the old “Orks are goofy” treatment. GW has spent about fifteen years gradually pushing the greenskins toward Looney Tunes, and a psychic vomit attack felt like it was going to be played for laughs. The Weirdboy would show up, do something silly, and the actual Ork threat would be the new walker in the cinematic instead.
I think I was wrong. Or half wrong. The model itself reads deadly serious. The pose is closer to what Nurgle plague psykers or Tzeentch sorcerers get sculpted as than to any previous Ork psyker. The humour lives in the lore blurb, not in the sculpt. GW seems to have figured out that Weirdboyz are funniest when you play the horror straight and let the setting do the comedy.
But also maybe I’m reading too much into one model. The thing about Orks is they’re going to crack jokes about exploding heads no matter how scary the sculpt looks. That’s the faction.
A quick note on Warpheadz
The really old Weirdboyz (the ones who survive long enough to master their powers, which is almost none of them) are called Warpheadz. Warphead lore is some of the strangest material in the Ork codices. These are Orks who’ve done the 40K equivalent of a PhD in psychic shenanigans. They can tear holes in the Warp. They can teleport whole mobs across star systems. One of them, Greeneyes, is theorised in older material to be building toward generating enough psychic output to rival the Astronomican. Another, Gur’kall, wanders between Ork settlements gathering psychic followers in what honestly sounds like a cult.
I don’t know if the new Weirdboy kit will come with a Warphead option. It probably should. The “mastered my power, now I’m doing something genuinely terrifying” variant of this model is the one that would actually scare me across the table.
So yeah
Weirdboy. Eighteen years on. New plastic. Looks great. Probably still explodes. The Orks around him will laugh when his head goes.
I don’t know what his points cost is going to be. I don’t know if Da Jump survives. I don’t actually know if anyone should be excited about a psyker rework in the faction that’s most famous for not caring about psychic powers. But I’m buying one when the Armageddon box drops in June, and I’ll probably paint him bright purple because Evil Sunz are overdone.
Orks were my first army in 3rd edition, and the old Weirdboy never made it onto my table once. This one probably will.
