If you’re in need of some heavy hitters for your Barons’ War force or medieval army, Wargames Atlantic has your back with a pair of mounted units. Whether you want fully armored knights bearing down on your foes with their mighty steeds or more nimble and lightly armed serjeants flanking formations and chasing down stragglers, all of your needs will be met somewhere in these two kits.
Thank you to Wargames Atlantic for providing these kits for review.
Box Contents
Both boxes are going to get you twelve mounted fighters, with the big differences coming in aesthetics and equipment.
The Mounted Knights are heavily armored, with chainmail fully covering every limb. They’re all wearing tabards with straps across their chests, and there are no options for bare or sleeved limbs. You get a pretty great selection of heads, including a couple of different types of helmets, some heads with exposed faces and, my favorite, four heads with different animal heads mounted on top. In my knightly universe they’re fake animal heads, although I’m sure history would disagree, and I put them on my jousting knights because it’s the high point of medieval drip.
You get a broad variety of weapons, with enough in the box to arm every model with a sword, a spear, or a jousting lance. There are a smattering of other things like a mace and an ax, but for the most part everyone’s sticking with the basic weapons. There are two different sizes of shields, with enough to go for a uniform look or to mix-and-match, whichever you want. I’m a bit disappointed that there are no weaponless arms or options for any sort of command, but hopefully Wargames Atlantic will release some sort of command set at a later date.
I want to call out the inclusion of the jousting lances as a really cool choice by WGA. I’ve not seen them in any other plastic kits on the market, and it opens up a whole new avenue of play. Between the lances and the fancy animal helmets, I was instantly smitten and knew I wanted to save four of my knights to use as jousters. It’s especially nice since I’ll only really need eight knights for Saga unless I’m doing something gimmicky, so the extra four being fancy jousting knights that I can just go nuts painting in fantastical colors really made the kit sing for me.
The Mounted Serjeants are less fancy, but still a lot of fun. The horses are smaller and aren’t barded, giving them a lean, fast look. The serjeants are all wearing chainmail coifs, but of the three models per sprue, two are wearing tabards with chainmail sleeves and one is wearing padded armor. I love the way the padded armor looks, and it’s super easy to wash and highlight with all the grooves. There are a lot of different heads with a ton of combinations of different helmets, chainmail, and bare faces. You get 15 different heads on the sprue so there’s sure to be something that fits the image you have of your army.
You get a pretty similar breakdown of weapons as the knights, with most of the weapons being a sword or spear, with a few other options thrown in. Because of the two different body types, some weapons end up being exclusive to one or the other. The padded sleeve arms have an axe, while the chainmail arms get a couple of pretty nasty looking picks. In what I can only imagine was an oversight, there are no sword arms with the padded sleeves, but you could put the chainmail arms on the body and just pretend it’s a padded doublet over a chainmail coif and short sleeves. There’s the same lack of command options, but some of the spear arms are positioned in such a way that it would be pretty easy to turn the model into a flag bearer with a bit of work.
Modelling and Painting
Assembly is pretty straightforward, with only a few spots where the lack of instructions gave me pause. On the horses, the heads and their reins are two pieces that are meant to go together, so you need to make sure to pay attention to the numbers on the sprue and match them up. Head 1 goes with reins 1, and so on. The soldiers are totally standard for historical kits, just flat arm and head connections that allow you to get a nice range of poses. The one tip I have is that you should try to put the soldier on the horse when you’re posing and gluing the shield arm. I didn’t bother to do that and as a result, some of the shields on my models are held a bit awkwardly to avoid butting into the horse.
Painting is straightforward as well, if a bit time consuming. Just as a practicality I had to paint everything in three different sub-assemblies: horse, rider, and shield. There are no details in annoying places, everything is easy to get a brush on. The sculpts have some nice details, especially on the faces of both the horses and the riders, giving you a lot of nice surfaces to work with and make highlighting easy. The only part of the model I have any complaints with would be the riders’ feet, the straps, boots and pants all run into each other and aren’t crisply separated by the sculpt, making it a bit hard to really see what you’re doing. Luckily it’s just feet so nobody’s really going to be paying attention. It’s also pretty hard to get basing material under some poses of the barded horses, so I’d recommend painting the integral base a dark color so that you can’t really tell there’s nothing under there if you miss a spot or the basing paste shrinks unexpectedly.
Lenoon editors note: You see the reins on the middle horse below? That’s my favourite bit of the Knight kit – lovely, separate, robust and realistic reins. Hard to get right.
Size Comparisons
With multiple plastic kits on the market covering the exact same period with the exact same aesthetics, a pretty common question I see is what looks good next to what, and how can you mix and match different kits with each other. The answer here is pretty straightforward: Victrix’s knights are significantly larger than the Wargames Atlantic models. The only other manufacturer the team had at hand was Footsore, who have done some metal knights and serjeants, and those models are just about the same size as Wargames Atlantic’s offerings, and would look totally fine mixed and matched in the same force (Lenoon Editor’s note: the WA plastics are definitely designed to mix in perfectly with Footsore Metals).
The Victrix models aren’t just taller than the Wargames Atlantic models, it’s hard to say they’re even the same scale. The heads pictured above are the funniest comparison, but it follows through with every bit of the model. It’s like someone just scaled up the models about 50% but still wanted to call them 28mm. Here’s a gallery of comparison images so you can look at some more of Lenoon’s lovely crusader force.
Lenoon Editor’s note: We have had a question about this, so for the avoidance of doubt I got my callipers out and here’s the foot-to-eye sizes for a couple of relevant comparisons:
Wargames Atlantic Knights (Mounted) – 25mm
Footsore Metal Knights (Mounted) – 27mm
Wargames Atlantic Foot Knights – 26mm
Footsore Metal Foot Knights – 26mm
Victrix Mounted Knights – 28mm
Victrix Foot Knights – 28mm
Turns out they are all 28mm scale, give or take! The WA Knights are slighter, with smaller helms and slightly longer arms, while the Victrix ones have longer legs and larger weapons.
Overall
These are good models that get better the more invested you are in the Wargames Atlantic Barons’ War line. The compatibility between kits in the line is very high, giving you the ability to mix and match between the mounted and on-foot versions of each kit as much as you want, and even to mix in parts from the Peasant Levy box if you’re going for a more ragtag look or want some mounted archers. Either one of these kits would be a great second purchase after your Barons’ War starter set, and a single box will give you more than enough to work with and have enough left over to play a different game like Saga.
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