Wandering into a land of fantasy this set offers a horde of the ever-annoying Goblins. Dangerous more in their numbers than due to any singular battle-prowess the always present Goblins will happily flesh out the armies of bad guys in just about any fantasy world. Fully fitting the Hobbesian description of life outside civil society as "poor, nasty, brutish and short" these ugly little fellows follow the traditional model for goblins; slightly smaller than men their bodies twisted and deformed, their weapons crude and their faces ugly. These are simply excellent figures and anyone in need of a horde of truly unpleasant fellows to inflict upon an adventuring party need look no further.
This set come with six identical sprues, each with five bodies and a surfeit of weapons, arms and heads to assemble on to them. The selection of weapons includes bows, swords, maces, spears and a few odd daggers. There aren't enough to equip the entire force as all archers or spearmen but one can scarcely expect standardization is a force as chaotic as Goblins. The firgures are cats in a hard gray plastic that is flash-free and exhibits very few traces of mold line, The detail is crisp and comprehensive. One neat feature is that each sprue contains a saddle and set of legs to allow a Goblin to ride one of the Giant Spiders previously released by Wargames Atlantic. I can't say they are realistically proportioned, but I will say they are convincingly proportioned and very actively posed. The weapons selection is vast and the choice of nearly twenty heads to add to the five bodies on each sprue means that you will never have to have look-alike troopers in your Goblin band.
At least with the archers, in the context of a fantasy wargame, the shortfall in bows can be made up for in musicians (the horn) and banner bearers (a spare spear, since those models weren't using their sprue's allotment of spears for anything else).
ReplyDeleteA spear unit, however, needs all the spears it can get. So you'll get, at best, 24 spear-carriers (though, again, musicians can free up a couple, depending on if it's a ten or twenty "man" unit). While some WA kits can skirt around having insufficient copies of a weapon per sprue to outfit the whole box (or at least whole units of 10), this kit falls short of bridging the gap.
As for the matter of extra weapons, I can think of some ways to get use from them. A set of head and bow arms under a "bush" of spanish moss, or sticking up out of a barrel, could help pad out an army with sneaky archers. And, in rank-and-flank games, there's always the possibility of creative Unit Fillers. Like a bunch of goblin arms sticking out from under a huge rock, as if members of the unit were crushed by a siege engine.