March here has been cold and snowy and so with the upcoming two days of warm(ish) weather I have been madly assembling miniatures so I can prime them and build up my painting queue in case the weather doesn’t hold out.
My last miniature splurge contained a box of the plastic Oathmark Elf miniatures that North Star are producing for the Oathmark game. I took some time last night to assemble the box and here are my thoughts on the figures.
Now normally I would include a picture of the sprues but my photo was horrible and no work I did with Levels or Curves could help. Luckily, North Star have an article about assembling the Elf Infantry that has very good photos of the sprues. If you are interested they also have an article about painting up the Elf miniatures.
The box contains six miniatures sprues and three sprues of ten square 25mm bases. The miniatures have a small integral base that you glue to the square base so it will be easy to use these figures on other bases if you want.
Each sprue contains five bodies and all the parts to produce five archers, swordsmen or spearmen. Unlike some recent plastic releases from some companies, there are enough weapons to kit out all the figures with weapons you want. If you want to use the box to build 30 archers then you can. There are no options to build troops with just a sword or a spear but I suspect that this will be address in the Elf Light Infantry box that is coming out.
There are ten heads on the sprues. Five with helmet and five without. Additionally there are a series of plumes that you can add to the heads to indicate leaders or elite troops. The sprue also contains two parts that you can assemble for a banner bearer. This sets, and I assume the Human, Goblin and Dwarf sets, are meant to build your rank and file units and so there aren’t a lot of options to build ‘characters’. You can build a unit leader for a unit but that is about that.
If you are an older wargamer then these sprues will give you a sense of deja vu. The arms, shields and weapons are all designed to fit on the bodies in whatever pose you want. Meaning that you can mess up. Posing the sword arms can sometimes run into positioning issues with the shields. The bodies follow that old GW style of having armour, some swash of clothing and then a pouch. There are no extraneous details on these minis and since you are painting up blocks of troops you really don’t want them.
The models have a nice amount o detail on them and the mass of chainmail is broken up with a small circular symbol on the chest that you can use to add a splash of colour to the figure. All of the Elf miniatures can have a shield added to them which looks like a cross between a 13th century German shield and a kite shield.
There were minimal mould lines on the figures and they all cleaned up easily with my GW deburring tool. Almost all of the parts were connected to the sprue with easily accessible points. The arms that the shields connect to needed some added work to clean then up as they had a small irregularity on the surface that connected to the torso that was left when you clipped them off.
All of the models went together quite easily and I was able to assemble three units of ten models in an evening. If only they would paint up that quickly. It has been a long time since I had to build models for a rank and file game and it was good to see that these went into units easily. If you’ve ever had to build GW Khemri or Orc models you know what sort of problems you can run into with even small figures.
Thirty models is a good size for a box of this type. Adding one more box gives you quite a few options since you can, for instance, add another unit of ten archers and then expand the spear and sword units to 20 models. One other thing that the box gives you is a pile of additional parts to use to convert other figures. Just like GW used to do!
Every sprue will have five extra heads, and five sets of the other weapons you didn’t use. As well as shields if you built archers from the sprue.
One thing to be aware of is that the box art and the painted example on the back of the box really don’t match up to the quality of the plastics. They look much nicer than in the photo. I originally didn’t purchase these when they were first released because of the sample on the box and it was a pleasant surprise to see how nice they really looked.
These are different minis than the Frostgrave figures that North Star has produced. These are meant to be a more generic ‘mass’ troop and so you don’t have all the weapon options that you’d find in their Cultist of Frostgrave Soldier boxes. That said, they work really well for what they are intended to do which is build up units of models.
I was quite happy with the figures, how well they went together and the quality of the designs.
Pile of dice 
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