Marching implacably into the toughest fights on the battlefield, the 5th Regiment of Foot Grenadiers round out the initial releases in Wargames Atlantic’s new Age of Reason range. I’ve been really looking forward to getting my hands on this kit since it was first announced, so let’s dive in.
Thanks to Wargames Atlantic for providing this kit for review.
Why Skirmishing Grenadiers?
At first glance, a kit of grenadiers on their own may seem a bit odd, but there’s some logic to it.
Grenadiers were originally shock troops who were trained to throw hand grenades. These soldiers were by necessity some of the tallest and strongest men in the army and were considered an elite fighting force within the army. Evolving military tactics and improved firearms saw a decrease in the use of grenades, but grenadiers units were retained as elite shock troops.
During the American War of Independence, British Grenadiers continued to serve as elite fighters, often positioned to guard the right-hand flank of the regiment’s regulars.
British commanders would sometimes pull their grenadiers and light infantry off of their parent regiments to form special “flank battalions” for special operations that required troops that could move quickly and strike hard, often skirmishing instead of fighting in typical line formation.
Box Contents
You get six identical sprues in the box, each with the following:
- Five different body sculpts, two walking and three standing with their right foot forward.
- Six heads wearing bearskin caps. Four of them are making sort of a stoic expression, the other two are yelling.
- Five backpacks.
- Five arms carrying muskets with bayonets. The poses are all different here – shouldered, firing, various stages of reloading, and advancing.
- Six left arms, with the option of giving the marching pose either an open hand or a fist.
The individual pieces all have lots of nicely defined details. Cleanup is quite simple and most of the poses will work well for either a firing line or a group of skirmishers.
Be very careful not to break any bayonets while clipping and cleaning up the muskets.
Assembly
Something that stands out immediately as you begin to clip pieces off the sprue is how few options come in the kit. You only get five rifle arm options for the five bodies, so you don’t have any flexibility – you will simply end up with six guys in each pose. With a single box, this means you somewhat awkwardly end up with six random marching guys that don’t really fit in well with the rest of the firing/skirmishing guys. This is less problematic if you’re planning on getting more than one box and divide your troops into “marching” and “firing” units.
In a similar vein, there are only four heads with their mouths closed for each sprue of five guys, so at least one out of every five of your soldiers is shouting something. I’ve been mostly using these on the body that’s advancing with his musket in front of him, as they’re yelling as they charge in.
Assembling the miniatures is mostly pretty standard stuff, though I will say that you’ll want to spend a bit of time dry-fitting things to ensure both arms are in the correct position before gluing. I found this to be weirdly challenging on some of the poses, and would really have preferred if there were some guide pegs to help align things.
I found the backpacks went on best if I applied some glue to the top of the peg that fits into the model’s back as that’s where it seems to contact most with the rest of the model. The backpacks don’t block access to anything else so it doesn’t really matter whether you put them on before or after the arms and head.
Comparison with other AWI miniatures
Here’s a side-by-side comparison with the ubiquitous Perry Miniatures plastic Continental Infantry and North Star’s metal Muskets and Tomahawks ranges.
Don’t let their tall bearskin caps fool you: their height scales well with the Perry’s but they have a significantly more heroic stature, with much larger hands, hands, and weapons. Given the similar heights, you can definitely get away with mixing these in the same army, but I’d probably avoid mixing them within the same units.
By comparison, the North Star minis follow a very similar sculpting philosophy. You could probably mix grenadiers from this range together with this kit if you wanted to.
Painting
I’m not an expert on uniforms of the period so most of my painting decisions were informed by the studio’s paintjob.
These are the first AWI British troops I’ve painted, and my greatest surprise was how much time you spend painting white while working on Redcoats. White really dominates the figure with white or off-white socks, pants, waistcoats, shirts, and straps! I got some excellent mileage out of Army Painter’s Holy White Speedpaint, which gives you a nice light grey base. From there I picked out ridges and raised areas with some slightly off-white ivory paint. The effect is decently convincing for the effort.
The rest of the model was done with typical layer/wash/highlight steps, though often enough my “highlight” re-uses base color just to clean up the wash. I used a slightly desaturated vermillion for the jacket, which I think reads well as a red coat that’s been out in the sun for a while.
Let’s talk about jacket facings. Each regiment in the British army has a color that they use on the cuffs and jackets of their uniforms. If I were painting the 5th Regiment of Foot, that would be a dark green. If you’d rather not do green; blue, yellow, and buff are all common facing colors. I’m a huge fan of pairing red with blue so I’ve decided to use blue. I haven’t picked out a specific regiment with blue facings, and I may simply continue to not do that, using them for whichever blue regiment is most convenient at the time.
Try not to lose your mind on the buttons and lace. I’ve only painted it when it’s visible and haven’t worried too much when it’s facing downwards or into the model. Nobody’s going to be able to see it.
The face sculpting is quite good, and I’m really pleased with how they’re looking with some basic paint and washes.
Final Thoughts
Overall I think it’s a great little kit. It would have been nice to have more pose and head options, but what we did get is all solid. It sort of leaves me wanting more. Skirmishing grenadiers on their own are nice, but they’ll really be elevated by a matching command set. As long as I’m being greedy, a British Light Infantry box would be awesome for letting us field flank battalions.
There’s never been a better time to start gaming the American War of Independence, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what Wargames Atlantic releases next in this range.
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