I never had any interest in Tyranids, but recently I found a few spare sprues on Trademe (a local auction site) and it so happened that I needed some threatening aliens for a campaign I was about to run. Of course I had other options, but the price was good, there were a lot of them, and a good variety of them (a big ol' winged prime, plus 10 termagaunts, a ripper swarm, and 11 barbgaunts). I decided to give them a go. I figured at worst, I'd get use from them during the campaign, and afterwards I would add them to my existing Genestealer Cults army.
Tyranids are big insectoid aliens for Warhammer 40,000, presumably inspired in part by the Xenomorph from Alien and the bugs in Starship Troopers. They're sculpted to be unpleasant or even repulsive, menacing, and definitely aggressive. If you look at them from an arm's length away as they swarm onto a tabletop battlefield, it looks like an infestation of vermin. You obviously want your army to kill all of them, so why would you ever consider collecting them? Nobody's more surprised than me about it, but I've found 5 good reasons.
I know that things get cute when you shrink them. I don't know why we humans do it, but we fawn over dolls and dioramas and anything that's normally big rendered in miniature form. I'm not entirely immune from that myself, but I do take some exception to it. Yes, I play with tiny toy soldiers and adventurers and monsters, but in my head they're HUGE. When I'm moving a troll through a dungeon, I don't see a 4 cm non-posable plastic model moving along a corridor of MDF walls. I see a huge troll lumbering past darkened stone toward brave adventurers fully prepared to kill it with fire. I hear the footsteps and the breathing. I feel the tension. Zoom out from that cinematic, and yes it's just some guy playing with plastic figurines, but that's not how it feels and I'm not generally thinking about how adorable it is that the troll is only 4 cm tall.
However, I confess that I cannot use this defense with Tyranids. I think Tyranids look generic and repulsive from afar, but they're surprisingly cute up close. There's a hilarious disparity between what they are and what they clearly think they are. Yes, they're abhorrent killer insects, but they're also gleefully malicious. After I'd assembled my first Termagaunt and looked at him in the face, I couldn't be mad at the little guy. He looks so happy and so angry all at once, and on top of that he's an alien bug. I'm not even sure what he's angry about. Presumably he has basically everything he needs in life. He's got a home (in fact he's probably just taken over your planet), he's been fed (he just ate your family), he's got lots of friends. What do Tyranids need that they haven't got?
The sculpts of Tyranid models are more distinctive than I'd realised, too. I've looked at other monsters, both for wargaming and roleplaying, and I've seen some really generic sculpts. Wargames Atlantic is a great resource for miniatures, but their giant bug aliens and giant spiders are exactly what's on the tin. Comparatively, to call Tyranids (as I have) insectoid aliens is to do them a serious disservice. Tyranids are distinctive. They have character. Tyranids are your school mates and coworkers and family and friends, but rendered as crab aliens. What's more charming than that?
Another phenomenon of cuteness, for us humans, is the idea of a non-human adopting, in a silly way, some human habit. Put a hat on a cat, or a sweater on a dog, and it's adorable. Put a ray gun in the hands of a Tyranid, and it's irresistable.
I guess I hadn't really thought about it, but Tyranids canonically use weapons. They're supposed to be terrifying monsters, and many of them have huge teeth and long sharp claws. But for some reason, they also carry around guns. In the lore, the guns are biological technology, so basically a Tyranid is like a wasp that can shoot stingers at you from range.
But build a Termagaunt or a Tyranid warrior or a Hive Guard, and look at it square in the face, and I promise you won't be able to resist asking it what it thinks it's doing with its cute little ray gun. Surely it would be much more reasonable for it to just bite its prey's head off. But I guess that wouldn't be anywhere near as cute. What's next, a Tyranid wearing a tie or a hat?
After you've built a few dozen Tyranid models, you'll get around to painting them. Good news! They're super easy to paint. Slap a pale colour all over the model, then paint the hard shell parts some darker colour, and you're basically done. They must be some of the easiest models to paint, ever.
The eternal conundrum of miniature wargaming is that miniatures look better when they're highly detailed, but the more details a model gets, the harder it is to paint. I found this out first hand when I naively chose the Adeptus Mechanicus as my main army. As cyborgs, every Adeptus Mechanicus model features wires and tubes and cables and light panels. As cultists, most Adeptus Mechanicus model also wear religious iconography and robes and ornate weaponry. And in addition to that, there's all the usual military gear, like belts and straps and backpacks and pouches. It can be a lot to paint.
Tyranids don't wear clothes. They carry around a single weapon or, in a few cases, no weapon. They have bones and chitin, and a little flesh. You can paint a dozen a day.
Being fairly simple in design, Tyranids are a literal blank canvas for experimenting with paint. There's enough variety to the sculpt that you're not actually painting just a boring flat surface, but the sections of a Tyranid's body are clearly defined and easy to access. You're either painting the body or the carapace. It's a little like a space marine, with its big body of presumably one colour, and its big chunky pauldrons of a secondary colour, but with even less to think about.
If you've got an idea for a combination of 2 colours, a Tyranid is a great model to test it on.
There aren't really any simple armies in Warhammer 40,000, and that's by design. Warhammer 40,000 is meant to evoke the variety of the whole galaxy. Every model type has distinctive weapons and abilities, special rules, and access to army detachments and stratagems. As armies go, however, Tyranids get pretty close to what 40k might define as simple.
There are arguably too many model types. Surely an infantry model, an elite model, and an HQ model would be enough. Failing that, though, you get the feel for Tyranids pretty quickly once you start playing. Of course every model type has some distinctive abilities, but if you consider that a bonus and just play based on Strength, Toughness, and weapon, then you don't have much to remember. It's usually a hoard army even in small detachments, and when it's not then it's a small army of a few big creatures. You've either got a few rules to remember for lots of the same models, or you've got a few rules to remember for a few big models.
Tyranids are angry and mean, but nobody's told them they're only 28mm tall. You don't have to be afraid of them, and in fact there are lots of reasons to love them. They've got way more personality than you'd expect, they're easy to paint, and relatively easy to play. After buying a few, I knew they'd make great enemies for my upcoming campaign. What I didn't expect was to fall in love with them and adopt them as pets, but that's basically what's happened.
Header image copyright by Games Workshop, and used with implied permission as promotional material.