Thank you to Wargames Atlantic for providing this kit for review.
Hot on the heels of their Samurai and Ashigaru releases, Wargames Atlantic has added a third box to their 10mm Grand Battle Scale Samurai line with the new Samurai Army Command box. Meant to give you plenty of options to add character for your army, I’ll be taking a look at the models and how well they work both as an integral part of your Samurai force and as a source for unique things like objective markers and dioramas.
Box Contents
The Army Command box comes with two copies of a single sprue. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but the sprue is jam-packed with stuff, giving you enough models to spread across multiple armies if you need to, or give nearly every samurai stand in your army some kind of banner bearer if you feel like it. Taken from the WGA website’s product listing, the box contains:
- 2 Taiko Drums and 4 Drummers
- 4 Foot and 2 Mounted Messengers
- 12 Jinmaku sections with 4 additional posts
- 2 Standing, 4 Seated, and 2 Mounted Daimyos or Generals
- 4 Foot and 4 Mounted Signalers
- 12 Large Banners
- 2 Uma-jirushi Standard Bearers
- 8 3-man Hata-jirushi Command Stands
- 8 2-man Hata-jirushi Command Stands
- 8 1-man Hata-jirushi Bearers
There’s enough stuff here to really go nuts customizing your army to your liking, especially if you enjoy mixing some cavalry pieces that are standing still or moving slowly with your foot soldiers. The 12 banners are totally free-standing, letting you put them on any base you’d like, or use them to customize some terrain if you’d like to. The Jinmaku sections are large, so 12 is enough to make a very large structure, or multiple smaller ones. For my camp diorama I glued two 60mm wide bases together, and 6 sections (4 wide with one on each edge) made a tent that filled up the 120mm width pretty well.
The variety among models is pretty nice for the most part, giving you choices between command stands that are armed and stands that have instruments and other support equipment instead. The only misstep that I found is with the signalers; there’s no real variety there, the only difference between each mounted and on-foot version is that one of their helmets has short horns and one of their helmets has long horns. It’s barely noticeable when you’re picking them up and looking closely at them, much less from table distance. This is more of a nitpick than an actual issue, but I wish there was a mounted General/Daimyo that had a horse running at full tilt. They’re all standing pretty still, which makes it hard to embrace the lead-from-the-front fantasy that I like to have with a lot of my command stands in other games.
Modeling and Painting
The models are all fantastically detailed and fairly sturdy. The models are sculpted with care so that you can put on a basecoat and let a wash run into all the ridges of the armor and pick out the details that way, or you can get a brush into all the different nooks and crannies of the model if you’d like to spend time giving them a very high quality paint job. The models don’t run together very much, which is always a danger when they’re sculpted in strips instead of as individual bodies. The limbs are well defined for the most part, with only a few (the horn-blower on the command stands, some of the mounted figures) where arms or legs are difficult to define apart from their bodies or equipment. It’s nothing that will be noticeable on the table, but it does make you have to paint those models slightly differently as you give them definition with your paint job.
There’s still a good bit of flash in-between the models of the command stands, but I’ve come to see that as a bit of a(n unintended?) positive as I’ve worked with the WGA kits. The picture above is a comparison of the same group of models, one with the flash carefully drilled out where I was able to get a hand drill in and one where the flash is just painted black.The drilled out models look pretty nice up close, but once you’re at arm’s length, much less table distance, the work to remove the flash stops being noticeable while the black lining of the painted flash is always helpful for defining the individuals on the stand. Personally, I would only put in the effort to remove the flash again if I was making a diorama or army, and I expected to take a lot of up-close, detailed photos.
I had a good time painting the models for review. The details are there if you want them, but the scale allows you to ignore them if you don’t have the time or skill to pick them out as well as you’d like and still get a good result. I went very simple with my paint job, basecoating the armor in a bright color (Pro Acryl Blue, Yellow Ochre, or Red Oxide), filling in the rest of the details with grey, black or white as appropriate, and then using a brown wash before going back to pick out some highlights. This gave me a result I’m pretty happy with and didn’t take too long.
Perhaps the highest praise I can give to this kit is that it encouraged me to try new techniques and push myself out of my comfort zone, even if I ended up painting over a lot of it to stick with the simple techniques I’m comfortable with. The banners and jinmaku panels are perfect canvases for freehand, as they’re well defined, flat surfaces to play with. I struggled to get something nice on the jinmaku panels before deciding to leave them white, but if you’re at all inclined to try your hand at more decorative painting they’ll serve you very well. The models encourage you to use 28mm techniques at a 10mm scale by giving you all of the definition in the sculpting you could ask for. One of my favorite parts of painting this kit was defining a receding hairline on the Daimyo holding his helmet, and someone with a steady hand and a magnifying headset could do a really incredible job with that model.
Final Thoughts
This is a great kit to purchase if you want to give your existing WGA Samurai army some character. I wouldn’t recommend it on its own unless you wanted to make a camp diorama that doesn’t need any regular soldiers around, but it would do well for that as you could just put in some generals and drummers and call it a day. If you do purchase it for an army, I would recommend either planning ahead and leaving some space on infantry bases to add banners, as with the mix included in the command box you have options to fill pretty much any size space you’d reasonably have left, or just keep some figures from the Samurai box in reserve in order to build out some command stands later.
This kit leaves me very hopeful for the other forthcoming kits in the Grand Battle Scale line, and if they’re made with the same care that the Samurai Army Command box was, Wargames Atlantic will be a major contender in small-scale models.
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