Wargames Factory Samurai???

[Crazy Harborc]

Since I'm an OLD fart wargamer.....I am used to low numbers of poses being available for units of whatever. Just me, myself and I. Well....me and several other longtime old farts whose armies I see now and then.

[lord marcus]

Anyone know any reviews of these?

[Lord Dan]

This one is decent:

http://www.beastsofwar.com/historica...murai-unboxed/

Then again I'm American, so I trust anyone with an accent.

[lord marcus]

Saw that. It is so unprofessional from a journalistic standpoint i can barely get any useful info. (no research at all. "banner thingies")

[Lord Dan]

Yeah, that was a bit embarrassing. Didn't he have to look up "yari" and mix up bows with katanas, as well?

Regrettably it's all I've got.

[lord marcus]

Its no problem Dan. How've you been btw?

[Lord Dan]

Not bad, man. Tired, as I just moved the family across the country to the middle-of-nowhere, Idaho, to finish up my degree. Classes started today, so...well, just tired. How about you? Haven't seen any work on your historicals in a month or so.

Hey I found another review tucked away on the WGF Facebook page. I haven't had a chance to read through it, though at a glance it looks at least more professional than the other one:

http://www.heresy-online.net/forums/...d.php?t=103313

[lord marcus]

I hear you. second semester of college starts next monday. My historicals have been worked on, just a bunch of stuff going on with the holidays.

[ZeroTwentythree]

I agree, not much of a "review." The BoW videos seem more like hyped up advertisements where everything they talk about is the best-thing-ever, even when they obviously have no idea what they're talking about. Kind of like late night infomercials for gamers, I guess.

[Lord Dan]

Well, the fact that wargames factory advertised it on their site should say something about the reviewer's objectivity.

[imm0rtal reaper]

Lol, you guys have like no attention span :P

http://www.warseer.com/forums/showpo...7&postcount=78

That's my link (on the last page) to the review you just linked Dan @D

[Lord Dan]

Excellent, I'm glad I didn't say anything negative about it. Jokes aside, I read through it and was quite impressed. I liked the breakdown of torso and leg info, though I would have liked the same for weapons. I really like the poses you picked for the assembled models, by the way.

[lord marcus]

I bought a box of the samurai. Got an extra sprue for some reason. I decided to convert my samurai into skellurai, and thought I would show the results.

http://images.dakkadakka.com/gallery...llurai%201.JPG

[Lord Dan]

Neat conversion. Are those mantic skeleton bitz?

EDIT: The extra sprue is a promo WGF was, and apparently still is, doing.

[lord marcus]

Indeed the bits are Mantic skeleton parts.

All good on the extra sprue, although it does wreck having a square or easily calculated number of samurai.

[Codsticker]

They have now released a set of mounted samurai. On a superficial examination, the horses seem better than their previous mounts. I am interested to see if the fit and finish issues still persist with their kits.

[Lord Dan]

Thanks for the link, Codsticker.

Have to admit those look like they're a step back from the infantry versions. The horses are notably better that their previous ones, but still seem to suffer from thin-legged pony syndrome. As for their riders something about their proportions bothers me, though I can't quite put my finger on it.

Overall I think "meh" pretty much sums up my feelings.

[Whitwort Stormbringer]

From that one photo, I'm actually pretty impressed. The horses are definitely better than previous efforts, and the riders look like they're generally good although the arms appear to fit oddly/awkwardly on a few of them, which was true of the infantry as well. Could be that the parts are poorly matched like the infantry, or could just be an assembly error.

[Crazy Harborc]

I like the looks of the latest minies. THAT said, I am not too likely to buy into the Samurai series unless my regular opponents show interest in the series.

Way back when....I had troubles with my first box of WGF Romans. The same with the Celts foot too. I tried white glue and LOTS of practice, moving the parts around searching for "just right" poses. Practice does/did help

[lilljonas]

I jumped on the plastic bandwagon and ordered both of the ashigaru kits. I have only painted up the spearmen this far, and you can find my review here:

http://muraminiatures.com/28mm-revie...-spearmen.html

Overall I think they serve the purpose of bulk troops just fine, and I liked them enough to order the foot and mounted samurai as well. They haven't arrived yet, but I'll write a review of them as well when I've assembled and painted some. Sure, if you look real close they are not as nice as most of the metal ranges I've bought from, but they look good enough at an arm's length.

Case in point. I painted up a unit in four weeks. It's the first box I assembled, and I only gave the miniatures a quick shade and highlight. Zoomed in, this doesn't look all that terrific:



With some varied poses and a uniform painting scheme, the unit itself looks pretty nice, and definitely not something that I'd be ashamed of putting on the table:



For me, the miniatures are decent, but suffer a bit from being hard to assemble. It was obvious that the first couple of ashigaru that I assembled look worse than the last ones, as it takes trial and error to understand the kit. I think that the examples that WF post often suffer from unfortunate assembly. One example of this is the wooden "mannequin look" you get if you glue on the heads as looking straight forward, especially the heads without helmets. Just tilting each head slightly to the left or right helps immensely in getting more natural poses out of these kits. If you have the time and patience to liven some of the poses up with green stuff, they'll get even better. But it does require a little bit of extra effort, compared to some other plastic kits.

I'm not getting the plastics because they are cheaper or better looking, for me it's a matter of logistics. As I carry my metal samurai to the club things always fall off, bend or break, even when using a good transport bag. Samurai miniatures simply have too many sashimono, spears and other cool stuff that easily breaks. The result has been that I stopped gaming with them, because I didn't want to see them break. With plastics, there's less problem with this, and so I'll happily lug around my "workhorse" army based on plastics and the occational metal miniature, while leaving the metal miniatures at home, for small skirmish games or when a top painted army is relevant. If I had a possibility to store my units, all ranked up at the club, then I might think otherwise. But I can't, so plastics seem like a great alternative for me. I'll still keep buying and painting metals, but they'll be safer from wear and tear.

Now I'm waiting for the cavalry boxes to arrive, and I'll be happy to see what I'll be able to do with it. Simply having 24 horses charging along should be impressive in itself!