Marching onto the battlefields of the American colonies in just the nick of time comes a lovely box set of Minutemen from 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.

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.
• Ten heads. Five with tricorn hats, two with floppy hats, two with floppy hats with one of the sides pinned up, and finally one bare head. Three of the heads are intended to be African, the other seven have a socket on the backs of their heads to accept a teeny-tiny ponytail.
• Five ponytails.
• Seven arms with muskets. The poses are all different here – shouldered, firing, various stages of reloading, and one pose with the weapon held in one hand.
• Nine left arms, including options for pointing and waving arms.

The individual pieces all have lots of nicely-defined details. Cleanup is quite simple and the variety of dynamic poses will be perfect for a poorly disciplined group of militia. Definitely a nice contrast to the Perry Miniatures approach of only two pose options in their AWI plastics.

The heads are extremely well sculpted and have a lot of individual character. I really like the variety of hats without the fuss of needing to glue on individual hats.

The separate pony tails are tiny. Like basically microscopic. There aren’t any extras, so take a lot of care not to lose these as you put your guys together.

Assembly

Overall, I really like the variety of poses in this kit. You can make a very nice looking skirmishing gunline with multiple firing and reloading poses. The marching pose seems a little out of place with the rest. Given that you can only make six of each pose per box, I’d recommend saving your marching arms until you’ve started working on your second box and can make a nice group of twelve guys marching.

Generally they go together quite easily. Most of the poses require both arms to be positioned together, and I found it somewhat awkward getting these fit up. Be sure to dry-fit the arms before assembly and go ahead and try to glue arms that have a single correct position before gluing on the matching arms. On the topic of matching arms, be aware that some arms have ruffly sleeves and some don’t, so make sure both arms you’re working with have the same style sleeves.

I found that I had to use a small amount of greenstuff to fill gaps in the shoulders on a few of the poses, but nothing overly dramatic.

Fixing the Firing Arms

There’s one glaring problem you’ll run into while putting this kit together: the fit of the firing position arms.

The sculptor didn’t undercut the stock on the firing position’s musket, so they don’t really fit against any of the bodies in the kit.

There are five other arm options so you could simply skip having any firing soldiers, but that would force you to use the marching and side-carrying positions for each frame, which may end up looking a little odd.

The fix for the firing pose is reasonably simple: drill two shallow holes side-by-side with a pin vice drill, then use a sharp knife to undercut the musket stock. You can be fairly generous with your cutting here, it will not be visible as long as you don’t break the top surface of the musket.

Be a little patient with the first couple of these and be sure to do a lot of dry-fitting to get a feel for the correct positioning. After the first few, you’ll fall into a rhythm and will be able to quickly sort out a bunch of them without too much trouble.

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.

Height-wise they scale well with the Perrys but 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 these together in the same unit if you wanted to.

Painting

The sculpts have nice sharp details which take paint and washes extremely well. I’m mostly a traditional layer/wash/highlight painter, but I also experimented a bit with using contrast paints for a first coat on these and then following with traditional layering and highlighting. This worked out well on most of the details, but be aware that the coats have relatively broad, flat areas that may look a bit splotchy if painted exclusively with a contrast or speed paint. 

In terms of picking paints for the clothes, you’ve got a lot of freedom here. Minutemen are civilians, and so shouldn’t have any sort of matching uniforms or equipment. Hats and boots should be black or dark brown, but you can really go wild with the rest of the outfits if you like.

A few semi-conflicting guidelines:

• Despite what you may imagine from Hollywood, real history is not drab: civilians in the 18th century were fashion conscious and, depending on how affluent they were, enjoyed wearing a wide variety of different colored clothing.
• Matching the trousers and waistcoat or the waistcoat and coat will keep each model more cohesive and will guard you against trying to use too many colors.
• Avoid bright yellows, which were extremely expensive and would fade too quickly for anything meant to be worn out in the field.
• Green and blue dyes were relatively inexpensive and were durable enough to see use in the field.
• Natural browns and greys would be quite common, especially among troops from poorer backgrounds.
• When in doubt: brown coats were extremely common in the early Revolution, to the point where brown was briefly the official color of the US army. In very early days of the revolution, soldiers who enlisted for a full year were even granted a ‘bounty coat’ made of brown wool.

Diverse Backgrounds in the Militia

There are three heads on each sprue in the kit that are clearly intended to be African, and they are a welcome addition to the kit. Their inclusion in the kit and prominent place in the studio photography and artwork sent me down a research rabbit hole over the role of people of African descent in the American Revolution.

I’m far from an expert, but here are some highlights:

• African Americans consisted of around 20% of the overall population of the American colonies in 1775, with a larger portion of the population in the South. The proportion of African Americans were around 40-60% of the overall population in the Southern colonies. These were mostly enslaved individuals.
• Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation in November 1775, promising freedom to any enslaved person who escaped from their rebellious masters and joined the British Army.
• African Americans served on both sides of the American Revolution, sometimes in segregated units and sometimes in integrated units. It’s estimated that around 20,000 African Americans joined the British and another 9,000 fought on the side of the Continental Army.
• Black and indigenous people were from barred from enlisting in the Continental Army in the early days of the war by George Washington. This was later relaxed to meet recruitment quotas, and throughout the war the army recruited a large number of enslaved people by promising them their freedom.

More than Minutemen

Minutemen didn’t have a particular uniform. They’re simply a group of highly mobile militia that were instructed to be ready at a moment’s notice to respond immediately to military threats. This means that a kit designed to be Minutemen can be used to build a wide variety of militia and other soldiers, provided they wore civilian clothing.

In addition to Minutemen, this box could also be used for:

• Colonial Militia were a fixture of the Continental Army throughout the war and though some were given a uniform by their community or colonial government, many would have fought up in civilian attire.
• The Colonial Army struggled to source and replace uniforms for the majority of the conflict, often leading to soldiers wearing ragged civilian clothing as a campaign wore on. Consider roughing up the edges of the coats and sculpting on a few bandages and you’ll have a quite convincing group of veteran soldiers.
• Loyalist Militia fighting alongside the British against the rebellious Colonial Army would have also worn civilian clothing.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I think it’s an excellent kit. The sculpting is crisp, it’s easy to paint, and it’s got some nice options you can use to make unique poses. There’s not a lot of options out there for American War of Independence plastics, so this one is a no-brainer if you’re looking at fielding a large number of militia in an upcoming battle.  You’ll need to kitbash officers, standard-bearers, and musicians or borrow them from other ranges for now, but hopefully we’ll have some additional options to cover these gaps from Wargames Atlantic in the near future.

It’s an exciting time to game the American Revolution, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what Wargames Atlantic releases next in this range.

If you’d like to pick this kit up, why not use our affiliate link to support Goonhammer while you’re at it?

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