Minor nations of World War 2 have some of the most interesting stories, uniforms, and equipment. Have you been wanting to paint and assemble that army of [non-specific minor nations], but cannot for the life of you figure out where to find miniatures for it? Fret not, for today I will give you the rundown of exactly how to find the minis you need…. For the Kingdom of Romania!
We’re going to start with the more well-known stuff, physical models first, then moving onto the more obscure manufacturers and STLs. While looking at the models on sale by each of these companies I will also take a look at how well their range of miniatures is suited to building a full army out of.
Great Escape Games
The company with the biggest collection of miniatures is Great Escape Games, generally if you’re into minor nations like the Kingdom of Bulgaria or Greece, they got you covered with often both winter and summer gear as full ranges. However some of their ranges are showing their age with sketchy casts and messy faces sadly not too uncommon.
Great Escape Games (from here-on GEG) offers three ranges of Romanian miniatures (arguably only two): Romanians in winter gear, Romanians in summer gear and Romanian cavalry (in summer and winter gear).
Romanian Cavalry
The most straight forward range out of the three; there are four sets of three cavalry each, two of which are the command sections coming with officers, LMG gunners and their loaders in both winter and summer gear. The other two sets feature three soldiers with carbines, again available in both winter and summer uniforms.
I am only including these in their own sections since they are listed separately on the GEG website. These are obviously not enough on their own when building an army; These work much better when integrated with the summer and winter ranges mentioned below.
Winter Gear
The winter range of Romanians features models in long coats and wearing either the M38 steel helmet (spotting a King Carol emblem) or the non-specific fur hats common in the Balkans during winter time. The selection on offer is one of the largest you will find, entailing the following:
- Two differently sculpted infantry sections (1 NCO, 1 LMG gunner, 8 Riflemen)
- One 4-man command squad
- One 2-man Sniper Team
- One 2-man Anti-Tank rifle team
- One 3-man MMG team
- One 3-man medium mortar team
- One 4-man tank hunters team
- One 2-man flamethrower team
- One 3-man gun crew to man the various guns
- One Romanian 76mm AT Gun M1936
- One Romanian 75mm Resita AT Gun M1943
- One Romanian PaK38
- One Romanian PaK97/38
- One Romanian Bohler 47mm AT Gun
- One set of 4 Romanian casualties in winter gear
- One 3-man forward observer team
- One Tunul de camp 75mm Mod. 1897 + one carriage for the shells
- One Romanian TACAM R-2 Tank Destroyer
- One Romanian TACAM T-60
This list of options has almost everything you need for assembling your Romanian force, the only omission here are some model with Panzerfäuste as the tank hunters only sport AT-grenades and plate mines. You could however easily fix this by acquiring some spare plastic Panzerfäuste and gluing them onto the webbing of riflemen. One of the more surprising inclusions are those of the two Romanian TACAM tanks. While you could certainly kitbash these two yourselves(as the TACAM were just zis-3s AT guns mounted onto either a Panzer 35(t) or a T-60) it is nice to have a dedicated kit that already has some modelled in modifications you would see on the actual tanks.
Another great feature of GEG are the platoon box sets as well as their various discount army offers including specific forces for Iron Cross and Rules of Engagement.
Summer Gear
The summer range of Romanians is almost exactly the same selection of units as the winter range with the added set of four late war tank hunters carrying Panzerfausts and Panzerschrecks. They wear shorter summer tunics with bedrolls wrapped around their chest and either M38 steel helmets or caps.
Since the options on sale are the same all army deals that you get for the winter range can be found for summer gear too.
If you were to want to assemble an army for the Kingdom of Romania and you are fine with the older sculpts then GEG has about everything you could ever need, not only do they offer everything from your basic riflemen to the more obscure special AT guns and even unique tanks, but they even offer four differently posed full squads of infantry which will allow you to field a lot more without repetitious poses. They also offer tank commanders and separate gun crews which allows you to include vehicles and cannons from other nations(such as Germany, Slovakia and the Soviets) into your army with thematic upgrades. They also produce two sets of wounded which is nice for those that like such sculpts.
Empress Miniatures
Empress Miniatures acquired TSUBA miniatures some years ago and have since carried their small range of Romanian miniatures. A few months ago they had a surprise release of a handful of unreleased TSUBA Romanians. Their current offering comprises:
- Two sets of 4 Riflemen
- One set of 4 SMGs
- One set of 4 Officers
- One MMG team
- One Medium Mortar team
- One set of 2 LMGs and 2 loaders
- One set of 2 2-man tank hunters, 1 sniper team and 1 flamethrower team
- One set of 3 gun crew
- One set of 4 Cavalry in summer gear
- One set of 4 Cavalry in winter gear
While this is a big step down from GEG in terms of number of things on offer (to be fair it is hard to beat GEG), Empress trumps with newer and higher quality sculpts. While GEG has a decent attention to detail, things such as the faces and King Carol emblems on the helmets are somewhat muddy; The Empress sculpts however have much sharper details in comparison.
Given all these facts we can confidently say that Empress Miniatures’ Romanians are great for small skirmish scale armies, but can become very repetitive in larger infantry heavy armies and lack some of the heavier equipment.
Pendraken Miniatures
Pendraken Miniatures is the first of two companies producing smaller than 28mm scale stuff, specifically 10mm scale.
Unlike other companies, Pendraken sells their minis as sets of 10 of the same sculpt. Given the amount of minis needed for small scale games it makes sense, but it makes it somewhat annoying to list them all. I will summarise the sculpts as seems sensible:
- Seven Different sculpts of riflemen with varying gear(winter coats, Panzerfaust and snow shoes)
- One Sculpt with LMG
- One Sculpt with SMG
- Two Officer sculpts
- Three High ranking officer sculpts
- One Cavalry Sculpt
- One Medium mortar team sculpt
- One Light mortar team sculpt
- One MMG team sculpt
- One 75mm infantry gun sculpt
- One 150mm infantry gun sculpt
- One FLE 105 field gun sculpt
- One Russian 76,5 field gun sculpt with Romanian crew
- One 37mm AT gun sculpt
- One 50mm AT gun sculpt
- One 75mm AT gun sculpt
Given the small scale, repetition of sculpts hardly seems like an issue. What is missing are the tanks; While you could always press gang some Panzer 35(t) and other German armour, the lack of say the TACAM tanks is palpable.
Frontline Miniatures
Frontline Miniatures is the second small scale company, producing 15mm scale miniatures for their game Flames of War. Since these miniatures are produced with a specific game in mind, their offering is a bit bigger since it needs to fulfill the requirements for a game.
- One R-2 tank
- One TACAM T-60 tank hunter
- One TACAM R-2 tank destroyer
- One Rifle platoon
- Two Officers
- One Panzerschreck team
- Two Flamethrower teams
- One Medium mortar team
- Seven SMG teams
- One Rifle team
- One MMG platoon
- One Light and medium mortar platoon
- One Cavalry platoon
- One Artillery platoon
- One AT gun platoon
- One TAC 47mm Schneider gun team
- One TAC 43 Resita 75mm gun team
The selection is similar in scale to what we had on offer from GEG, offering almost all of the unique gear in use by the Kingdom of Romania. The glaring issues is the rifle platoon as the distribution of miniatures in it do not lend to more rifle heavy armies.
If you were thinking of assembling a 15mm Romanian army, this would not be a bad place to source minis from
Crusader Miniatures
Crusader, always being an eclectic bunch, also have a small range of Romanians, however out of all the physical offers their selection is the smallest as they only offer:
- One 4-man officer packs
- Two 4-man rifle packs
- One 3-man MMG
- One 3-man medium mortar
- One 4-man LMG pack
As the smallest set of minis on offer, these are not suitable for full armies, but workable for smaller platoon level games like Chain of Command. These are also in my personal opinion sadly the worst miniatures in terms of quality. The minis can often come with quite gnarly mould slips and the details are very simple. My worst experience has been with some of the faces being very shapeless. I would not recommend these as your first choice, unless you do not care too much about the quality or are a diehard Crusader Miniatures fan.
STLs
Unlike a lot of other nations, Romania gets very little in terms of 3D-printable support, mainly the odds vehicles and small selection of infantry sculpts; Nonethless it would not be a complete article if I did not mention these.
Mil. Mod. Solutions
Mil makes a lot of STLs for WW2 era (and later) vehicles, one of which is a Senileta Malaxa Tipul UE, which is a Romanian modification of the French Renault UE Chenillette a light tracked armoured carrier and a first on this list of models.
Mil generally seems to make a lot of technically accurate STLs from what I can see, so I would imagine this is a very accurate model of the real life vehicle. Since it is only one vehicle you would mainly use this to add to any of the other ranges for a full army, but it does offer a nice exclusive transport option.
Red Dawn 3D Miniatures
Red Dawn offers a small selection of STLs that offer the very basics such as riflemen(one with AT grenade), two officers, one MMG team, one flamethrower, a cavalry section and an AT gun. They are sadly very limited offering only a single pose for the riflemen and any other type of unit except for the officer. There is also the matter of quality; Without trying to sound mean or demeaning I have to say the quality of these is not the greatest. It is very clear, looking at the newer STLs from this sculptor, that these were some of the earliest STLs made and therefore they leave a little to be desired.
Nonetheless, if you are not at all in the mood to deal with metal miniatures and do not mind the quality or repetition of poses, then Red Dawn is a pretty useful source
RMDesign_2023
The only other STL maker with some infantry is RMDesign. Their offer includes a medium mortar team, a flamethrower, two sniper teams, four infantry sculpts in winter uniform and, unusually, a set of four mountain corps sculpts. The Romanian mountain corps have not yet received any sculpts, so this is a surprise to be sure.
Despite the novelty of the mountain corps, there are still only a tiny amount of different sculpts, so if you wanted to use these STLs on their own, you would end up with a lot of repeated poses (I mean a lot). There is also again the issue with the quality of the sculpts. Unlike Red Dawn, they seem much too finely detailed in some places, which looks off at the scale they are meant to be printed at. But despite the issues, if you are just looking for some single miniatures or do not at all mind the repetition, then these are very useful.
Kitbashing
One other solution would be kitbashing. A while back Warlord Games ran two articles on their community page about kitbashing their plastic sets to build Romanian infantry of many different branches. The most glaring issue there is the lack of the distinct Romanian helmet among Warlord’s plastic kits, but that can be easily solved with one bit of 3d printing…
Freakazoitt
Freeakazoitt has a set of 28mm scale helmets for WW2, among them is a M38 Romanian Steel Helmet. If you print a handful of these and make some modifications to the plastic Warlord helmets, you can make some amazing kitbashes following their articles and putting a little tweak to them with these 3D printed helmets.
This approach is also the most beginner friendly and in some way the cheapest one, since plastic models on average are much cheaper and the 3D printing will cost you pennies per helmet (even if you pay for printing).
That about finished the models I could find; while some were easier to find than others, overall the Romanians are in a pretty good place in terms of miniature support. We have the gigantic metal ranges of GEG and the more subdued of Empress, Battlefront and Crusader. There is a small range of STLs (with one work horse STL); And there is quite a big range of models to make from kitbashing and combining with the aforementioned STL helmet. I hope this article, messy as it is will give you some idea of what is out there and where to look if you want to start assembling an army of WW2 Romanians.
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