With Pillage hitting the tables, Victrix have been gearing up their support – not just in publishing the rules, but in packaging up their kits as starter warbands (lots of them, in fact) and now to match Pillage’s heavy terrain requirements, branching out into their first scenic range – the Dark Ages and Medieval Market Stall. I’ve spent far too long researching what Dark Ages markets looked like, so now it’s time for a review!
Thanks to Victrix for sending the Marketplace over for review.
Market scatter scenics aren’t all that rare. There’s sprue-plastic options, cheap toy plastic, resin, metal, even – god forbid – siocast versions of the market and accoutrements out there for you should you wish for them. This is a crowded market, but it’s one with a few key issues. One other kit aside, your options for market scatter tend to be very chunky, quite expensive metal and resin kits that are usually just a little out of scale with your miniatures, card and MDF options that work well enough, or, for those of us with a lot of patience, scratch built homemade versions. They all look at least good, but nothing out there looks absolutely fantastic.
Until – you guessed it – now. This is a wonderful kit filled with character, options, fine scaling, textures and attention to detail. On aesthetics alone it is by far the best option out there. There’s some qualifying notes to that, but we’ll get to them later – let’s talk about beehives and tables first.
What You Get
This is a four sprue bag – two market sprues, and one each of the accompanying sacks and barrels. Focusing on the market for now, each sprue has one market stall, four tables (2 large and 2 medium), 2 stools, 1 basket for chickens (and 1 chicken), 1 cooking pot and tripod for it, 1 beehive, 1 furnace and a smogasboard of food platters, plates, cups, jugs and pots. It’s a dense and well laid out sprue, with a giant array of items even without counting the barrels and sacks.
Victrix have been pushing the boundaries with detail recently and – incredibly – much of this set is yet another step up. For a kit that’s mainly “stuff to put on bases or scatter about the board”, the attention to detail in the sculpting is phenomenal. Textures are crisp and clear even when tiny – the beehive and poultry basket have wonderful wickerwork textures on pieces no more than 5mm tall – and wood grain, all important in a set like this, is well defined down to the knots and coarseness, easily distinguishing between wood that sees heavy tool use and wood for benches. While there are a few annoying mould lines on jugs and cups, where it matters this is an exceptionally clean set. I could honestly talk about the table top sculpting for a while – there’s knots and burrs and chops into it, ludicrous detail for market scatter.
The variety of items on offer here is great, allowing you to make a few different things out of the sprue each time. The market stalls are likely the big draw, and inevitably push you towards making a scene out of them, and with two sprues in the bag you could specialise them – recreate your fantasies of an Indomitable Village in Gaul by turning one into a fishmonger, for example – as much as you’d like. I’ve turned one of mine into a kind of general store using food, barrels and sacks, while the other makes use of the poultry baskets to represent a dedicated chicken market stall. With about 60 chickens on my Egypt board, I definitely needed somewhere to sell them on.
The other focal points are the furnace and cooking fire. Both are sculpted well, with the furnaces being delightfully chunky and archaeologically accurate. The cooking fire, with suspended pot, is a lovely piece that I am sure will make for the centre of many a diorama.
Diorama is probably quite an important word here as the quality of everything in the bag is above and beyond “oh it’s just plastics for terrain”. While it makes for great terrain, this set is really getting into the dollhouse level of quality and finish. This occurred to me as I was making one of the stools – where the legs attach with raised pins into the seat. The effect is to make it assemble in plastic in the same way it would in wood, an unnecessary and very much appreciated level of verisimilitude that I remember from my Grandmother’s painstaking approach to her dollhouse furniture. For vignettes, little scenes, dioramas, painting competition entries – this is the stuff you get.
Markets for Pillaging
Having said that, this is very much a set designed with a game in mind: Pillage. Pillage has fairly intense terrain requirements, and this goes beyond buildings and roads into things like “sources of fire” and “loot you can take with you easily”. The Market stall set provides everything you’d need to outfit a pillage board. The furnaces and cooking fires will let your models pick up burning brands in order to set buildings aflame, the beehives are a surprisingly terrifying threat, and the baskets of food, barrels and sacks can all be kept movable as loot markers. It really works for Pillage, and the 12 Barrels and 26 Sacks in the bag can very very easily provide you with all the loot markers you could ever need. Looting a monastery and coming away with a gold cross is all well and good, but coming away with a big barrel of trappist ale? Much better.
Though this bag is made with Pillage in mind, and the European Dark Ages/Medieval in aesthetic, it works for a vast geographical and chronological range. There’s nothing stopping you from using these all the way to the modern day – there’s a farmers market near me that uses metal versions of the same market tents – wherever you’d like to in the world. They scale extremely well, much better than most scenic ranges do, with 28mm infantry, so the sky is the limit here – Saga, Pillage, WW2, Burrows and Badgers, it’s all going to work really well. Everything I’ve put together is destined for my Egypt board, but while the set does look very Europe 500-1200, nothing absolutely nails it to the area or period and I expect these to crop up in a HUGE range of projects.
Sacks
The sack sprue is also available separately (a 52 sack bag!) and is a strong contender for “this should be an essential historicals purchase”. Sacks are sacks, wherever and whenever they are, and a coat of paint is all that distinguishes these between sacks looted by vikings and black bin liners littering an ultramodern battlefield. The detail and quality is insanely high given that these are just sacks, and the sprue is split roughly 50/50 between freestanding and stacked sacks so you can make very natural looking piles as well as serried ranks of sacks. I think I’ve said “sacks” too much here, so hopefully you get the idea. It’s a good sprue!
Barrels
The Barrel sprue is also pretty great, but here it comes with an ever so slight caveat that if you’re a real rivet counter you’ll notice these are wood-hooped rather than metal hooped, so have a slightly more limited range of use (well, about 2000BC until the 18th century) Regardless, these are some extremely lovely barrels, with realistic proportions, well detailed staves and fine hoops. Barrels were used across Europe (and beyond) for thousands of years as the single way to store and transport goods, so picking up one of these bags – 54 barrels in the barrels only bag! – should probably be another historicals essential. You’re always going to find a use for a nicely scaled barrel.
Cost
While this is an absolutely lovely kit, it is undoubtedly quite a pricey one by Victrix standards. At £32 (please calculate your local currency, I am writing this while entertaining a two year old) for two market sprues, one barrel and one sack sprue, it’s a less appealing value proposition than many other Victrix kits where 30-something will get you a lot more plastic. The quality is very high, and the sprues undoubtedly packed, but it is still a fair chunk when you consider you probably want two sets for a Pillage board. While they are extremely nice, when I’m on the Victrix site with 30 quid burning a hole in my pocket, I’m probably going to end up buying more Napoleonics rather than an albeit very good market stall set.
Looking around the industry though, it seems like the fairly agreed upon price point for a set like this. Two market stalls, bags, barrels and tables, seems to cost you about 30 whoever you go to and whatever material you’re working with, so this could well be just an industry standard!
Overall
While I’ve talked about quality and sprue and all that stuff, I wanted to save my favourite bit about this set until the end and that was the incredible joy I found in building it. It really encouraged me to think about market scatter – what does this one sell? What do the guys tending the furnaces eat? How do I use sacks to represent cushions instead of chairs? It was a really joyful process and I could imagine my villagers carefully tending stalls and packing them away at sundown. It’s a lovely set to indulge in your narrative and storytelling tendencies, and with the quality matching model standards, it doesn’t feel like your painstakingly painted men and women are wandering around a blocky low-poly version of the world. Working out how to paint bread rolls so they look like dates, or what colour the cheese was going to be was a truly enjoyable and lovely experience, turning scenery making into very easy fun.
That seems very weird to say about a marketplace kit, but pick it up and you’ll see what I mean. When you’re deciding if this market sells fish, pottery, bread or meats you’ll stop and think “damn, lenoon was right”. Go try it out!
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