Who doesn’t love some scifi infantry weapons teams? There’s little more evocative of the grim dark horrors of the far future than two normal humans manning a fixed gun while a 40 foot tall behemoth of flesh, steel, or warp energy barrels towards them, and if there is, it’s an officer desparately trying to hold the line before the wave breaks. Up to fulfil both images in impressively French style comes the Wargames Atlantic Les Grognards Command and Heavy Weapons box.
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I’m a big fan of Les Grognards, and covered the original infantry box in a 2022 Review. Since then I’ve built a fair few and recommended them as a great source for a Heresy Militia army, but the project stalled through a want to have a truly unified army. As a result, I think returning to the Death Fields range to flesh out the excellent infantry kits is a great move from Wargames Atlantic, giving more complete ranges where previously kitbashing out from the Grognard kit was your only option. The Heavy Weapon and Command box for Les Grognards is the first of these expansion kits, promising to neatly cover crew served infantry support weapons and command options all on one sprue. There’s a lot to like about this kit but before diving into the positives and negatives, let’s have a look at what you get.
The Command/Heavy Weapon box comprises three identical sprues, each with two heavy weapons and a variety of crew and command options. It’s possibly a bit of a strange choice to have the command and crewed weapons on the same frame, but it works. Neither section is an afterthought and both are well served with a variety of options that slot neatly into a variety of games and armies. They work incredibly well as options for 40k’s Astra Militarum and 30k Militia or Solar Auxilia particularly. 6 weapons and 12 infantry, all multi-pose in hard plastic, for £25 (or local currency equivalent). What’s not to like?
Heavy Weapons
The star of the show is undoubtedly the range of heavy weapons you’re getting here. The box is billed as having enough bits to build 6 weapons teams (weapon and two crew each), with options for four heavy weapons – high caliber (autocannon style), laser cannon, mortar and a multi-small-caliber barrel weapon, on wheel and tripod carriages. The carriages and weapons are well done; simple to construct, robust and varied, with optional gun shields. Crew interact realistically with pointing, loading and aiming options and they paint up well. Each sprue gives you two carriages and one of each heavy weapon style, and with three sprues in the box you’re able to make two sets of three weapons (filling out an Imperial Guard heavy support squad) one of each with two duplicates or anywhere in between. That’s a great amount of weapons teams at a real steal of a price, letting you pick up a heavy weapon squad and add teams into a platoon of standard infantry out of a single box.
For those of you that are scale and compatibility conscious, the above examples are based on the old-GW-style 60mm bases, rather than the new 50mm. They’ll fit fine on a 50mm, but be careful with the tripod positioning if you’re going in that direction. They, like the Cadian squads currently crammed onto tiny little bases, look better on 60s anyway!
As each weapon is fixed to the carriage via a simple hole and peg you can pose weapons easily and no options are limited to either the wheeled or tripod arrangement. You could also quite easily magnetise the weapons in – particularly between autocannon and lascannon – as long as you’re careful with positioning the crew trigger arms. The mortar is pretty standalone, and you could easily squeeze another three heavy weapons out of the box with a little plasticard to form a stabilising base, or even via using the gunshield on sprue. You’ll need additional crew, but that’s what more Grognard infantry boxes are for!
Bottom: GW Multilaser for scale
Crew options are well thought through with kneeling, standing and sitting options, all well sculpted in the greatcoat and cuirass style of the Grognards. Each weapon has loader and gunner arm options, either holding triggers or, for the mortar, a firing button, and loader arms holding each of the ammunition types are either easily convertible or fully sculpted.
The lascannon, autocannon and mortar style weapons are all fairly conventional, mounting a heavy weapon on a tripod or wheeled carriage, giving us both types of “classic” Imperial Guard heavy weapons mounts. What I like about Wargames Atlantic kits though is that they’ll sometimes just branch off and do something weird, and that’s very much what we have with the fourth weapon option – the ball-turret.
This was a little bit of a tricky build (see the instructions section below), but it’s a fun one with a simply but effectively modelled dashboard, a cool round turret and deeply recessed weapon attachments. You could fit any human scale weapons in there with a big of trimming – quad-plasma, anyone? I’ve not made up this turret for a weapons team – but for a future, very large, project where a crewed ball turret will make for a very nice detail.
Command
The Command pieces take up around 1/3rd of the sprue, so there’s a solid range of options there that cover all the necessary (and some not necessary but nice to have) bases.
Command components include:
Standard/Eagle
Bicorne heads
Medpacks
Comms equipment
Pointing fingers, power fists, swords being brandished in officer-like fashion
Arms you can pose behind backs for all your napoleonic posing needs
Sidearms and officer style weapons
Additional special weapons
Bemedalled bodies
As each box contains three identical sprues, you’re set for a huge amount of command bits, letting you quickly and simply make multiple Imperial Guard style command squads out of a single box. The real benefit here comes with the cross compatibility with the original Grognard box. All arm and neck joints are universal between the sets, meaning that even if you use all the bodies in the heavy weapons box for crewing weapons (and fair enough), your command squad pieces can go on the Grognard bodies – so I’d recommend picking up a box of them at the same time!
That cross-compatability feels like it should be a given, but as other manufacturers go further and further down the “leg A can only go with body B because leg A also has the face attached to it via a big stick” road, it’s nice to see. It opens up a wider range of options for the original Grognard kit too – particularly in adding additional weapons for Sergeants and other leader models and kneeling legs for aiming/sniping models. I’ve used the kneeling legs (and Necromunda heads) to fill out a counts-as-ratling-snipers unit as you can see below.
They scale well with both GW Cadians and other comparable 28mm infantry ranges (I’ve got some Anvil Industries bits on order for further conversions) and, of course, the entire Death Fields range from Wargames Atlantic, so your options are massive. Picking up the kit to provide extra heavy weapons for another army altogether is a good option, as is using the command bits to add some Gallic flair to infantry and platoon command. I’ve stuck some command bits onto a Leman Russ commander to tie in my armour to the Grognards, and there’s more than enough pieces here to kitbash an entire GW platoon to semi-coherency with the much more stylish Grognards.
A really nice inclusion for kitbashing is the range of female heads – in each of the hat options present in the Grognards range (bearskin, kepi, adrian helmet and – added by this box – Bicorne). Having the option to do fully gender-mixed Imperial Guard is something that is only currently present in two ranges – Les Grognards and GW’s Cadians. While it would have been nice to have these in the original Grognards box, the fact that they’re baked into this second and vitally important kit, is a great step and one I hope to see in other Wargames Atlantic ranges in the future.
Instructions
It’s not a perfect kit, and I’d say there’s two main issues with it. The first is a minor one – here’s some areas where the detail is a little softer and more ambiguous than I’d like – particularly around the turnbacks of the greatcoats. The heavy weapons are a little rounded, particularly the mortar, where really crisp edges would have brought out the mechanical feel more. Overall sculpting quality is good, as it always is, and this only applies to large components. Where detail is absolutely needed – in weapons, faces and arms – it’s certainly there.
The other is instructions. Wargames Atlantic kits famously come without instructions or bases and that’s usually completely fine. With an infantry kit there’s little room for ambiguity – an arm is an arm and all that. When it comes to the weapons though it became a bit more of an issue. The tripod carriage really needs to be the right way around, and I had to look for pictures of assembled models to see this (I should have been able to tell from where the crew sits, so perhaps that one is on me). The small-caliber AA style gun was a bit of a puzzle too, and even just a single printed sheet with “how to build the tricky bits” would have been good. As it is, I made one and thought that was probably enough moving to the other weapons options instead, for all that I like a ball-turret mounted set of bofors!
Allez!
The Original Grognard kit was a good, solid choice for Imperial Guard, Militia and other scifi infantry, but it had definite limits in what it could do and portray. The Heavy Weapon/Command kit fills out the range into something a lot more viable for a full army or allied detatchment, which is a massive plus. It turns the Grognards from a “good for a load of cheap infantry and bits to bash into GW kits” into a solid recommend in and of itself. For converters, kitbashers, people who want Bicornes on their officers and with the added, and frankly unbelievable, benefit that with a little bit of creativity you can get 9 heavy weapons out of each box it’s a great kit to pick up even if you’re just wanting the weapons and carriages – a fantastic budget option there too. Given that it’s compatible with just about any 28mm-ish scale human-ish infantry you care to name the only reason not to get one would be not liking Greatcoats, Bearskins and Adrian Helmets, which I honestly can’t imagine anyone admitting to!
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