I Used To Dabble......

In 28mm WWII stuff. By "dabble", I mean I toyed with the idea of using this size of figure to wargame the period, to the extent that I bought a fair few figures and painted them up.





I had no real idea of where this was going to go, and that is usually a bad sign for me. It tends to mean my little heart is NOT really into something, and this was no exception.





A number of things eventually put me off, but the main one was the near total lack of any support vehicles in the correct scale, and the price of the few that did exist. I was also put off by the huge size of table required if anything other than "Warhammer 40K"-style skirmish games were to be played.

Even so, I spent a fair amount of cash and time painting up various units from the period. But eventually I tired of it and sold them on, leaving only a few photos to remind me.

Best Laid Plans

I fully intended to bash out a few dozen home-cast figures today but, as so often happens, the plans went a little awry. And in the end I got nothing done at all, save a few more bits of junk removed from the loft. That diverted my mind, as I now have to think long and hard about which bits of terrain I shall take with me when I move, and which I shall sell on. Do I need two dozen large TSS terrain boards?

And my twice weekly browse of various sites has now put a lot of temptation my way, too. 28mm hard plastic figures were sure to be a wonderful invention, or so I hoped. In the run-up to the first few releases, I anticipated being enamoured of the Perry ACW, but felt sadly let down when I saw them; far too many fiddly little bits, many of them moulded separately for no good reason at all. Too much like hard work.

Their Napoleonics, and the Victrix ones, also seem to feature lots of little parts. For me, the MAIN virtue of hard plastic figure should be that they wouldn't require a lot of preparation work. I had high hopes that the Perry and Victrix Naps might provide a good excuse for me to use them for my fictitious armies, and enable me to leave out all the extra effort involved in home-casting.

But after looking at what was on offer, I turned my back on 28mm hard plastics, and resigned myself to the stench of hot lead.

Until today, when I saw the HaT 28mm hard plastic Napoleonics figures.

Now these are more like it. They are simple moulds, in good poses, and with at most a couple of extra pieces (ie, backpacks) which one can glue on or not, as the fancy takes one. THESE are what I had hoped for when 28mm hard plastics were first announced.

Much depends on cost, of course, but it seems around £12 a box is on the cards. And at a later date they also intend to do Seven Years War stuff, with masters for Prussian Artillery already pictured on their site.

I am also intrigued by the way they have marketed them, with separate boxes for Marching, Action and Command poses. I am one of those old-fashioned people who HATE action poses in Horse and Musket games, and so this means that I don't have to waste around 30% of the figures in every box I buy.

Clever HaT..!!

So what to do?