This review is a little off topic, but I’ll post anyway as it vaguely relates to war gaming, particularly if you’ve ever tried Brikwars!

I’ve been aware of Brickarms for a while now. They’re a US company that manufacture third party weapons for Lego Minifigs. I hadn’t ordered from them until recently as they don’t ship outside the US. However a Makeblog post rekinkled my interest and it seems they have an Australian reseller which I missed before.

I couldn’t resist picking up the World at War pack to add to my Lego Indiana Jones figures. At $20aud for a small pack of plastic pieces they’re not cheap, but after spending a couple of hours playing with them last night with my five year old son I figure it’s probably money well spent. Here’s a quick review of the Brickarms pack.

The pieces arrived in a small baggie and include the set of weapons you see above. I’ve photographed them next to several bonafide Lego pieces for scale. The Lego pieces are the standard shovel, the grey plastic revolver and the Star Wars blaster rifle to the far left. Overall the quality of the Brickarms pieces is excellent. They’re cast in the same hard ABS plastic that Lego is made from. This means they have the same weight and general feel to them as Lego pieces, down to the finish too. It also means they should have the same excellent long life as normal Lego pieces.

The sculpting on the weapons is superb and despite the fact some liberties have been taken to make them work with Minifigs, most of them should be instantly recognisable to any WWII buff. It was the M1 Garand and Panzerfaust in particular that compelled me to buy this pack. In fact many of the weapons are more finely detailed than their Lego equivalents which is obvious from the above photo when you compare the grey Lego revolver to the various German and American automatic pistols. A particular high point for me was the fact the Lewis gun has been sculpted with a clip at the bottom which will fit a standard Lego lever holder. That means you can easily mount the weapon on a Lego vehicle for AA protection.

In terms of casting they’re also very good, although unlike Lego pieces you may have to do a little clean up with an Xacto blade to remove rough scraps of plastic where the pieces have been detatched from their sprues. The weapons can be used without clean up, but the anally retentive modeller in me had to spend five minutes just tidying them up so they’re perfect. That’s really the only comment I have about the casting. Like Lego pieces they do have fine, almost unnoticable mold lines and pin ejection marks, but you can mix them with Lego pieces without any visible difference, which is a sign of quality casting.

Here’s another scale shot of Lego Indy and Henry Jones Snr ready for action. You can see the weapons look great on the figures and as I mentioned my young son has already had fun with them, conducting terrible warfare across our kitchen table as all manner of hell was unleashed. The more politically correct amoungst you (I doubt many of my visitors are but who knows) may mutter something about glorifying war etc, however as many Lego ranges already come with weapons (Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Star Wars, Lego Agents etc) I’m going to happily ignore you.

To close, Brickarms weapons are excellent and although a little pricey compared to normal Lego are well worth it, particularly if you’re already a Lego fan and want a little more variety in your Minifig armory.

A gaming friend of mine recently picked up a copy of Warhammer Historical: Legends of the Old West, which is a Wild West skirmish wargame. Reading the rules it’s sort of a franken-game, combining the best features of Mordheim, Necromunda and the GW Lord of the Rings systems. Unfortunately it still retains the awful ‘I go, you go’ scheme that GW games can’t seem to escape from, but fortunately it has staggered rounds which offsets that somewhat.

As I’ve often admired Black Scorpion’s range of Tombstone range figures, I thought this would be an ideal time to pick some up. However I didn’t just want cowboys, but rather some figures that might mix into my Pulp collection as well. Black Scorpion have two groups of female figures that seemed like a good compromise, Tombstone 5 and Tombstone 6, most of which would work in a Pulp setting too. I ordered them from the Black Scorpion site a couple of weeks ago and they’ve just arrived, so here’s a quick review and comparison against a couple of other independent figure manufacturers.

Casting

On unpacking it’s clear the figures are well cast. There’s almost no flash (one figure of ten had some flash under an arm), and only visible mold lines on a couple of figures that had to be filed down. The mold lines are also well placed, with no lines crossing faces or other important details. One minor annoyance is the fact that I had to straighten the barrels on every figure holding a gun out of the box. I suspect this is because rough handling by international post, as the figures have travelled from the UK to New Zealand. As you can see from the photo the figures use a slotta base system and have molded on tabs. I’ll probably be cutting a few of these off so I can base some figures on wooden planks.

Sculpting

The figures are well sculpted with a nice variety of clothing and hair styles. For female 28mm figures they have fairly realistic proportions with only a single figure displaying an enormous chest and cleavage – I guess there had to be one! They’re generally statically posed, with only four of the ten figures actively aiming or drawing their weapons, but it’s a nice mix of poses I think. The static figures are presenting their arms in a gun-safe but threatening manner.

They also have a nice mix of firearms, with two shotguns (either of which could be filed down to make them sawn-off), two recognisable Winchester repeaters, four armed with a variety of single and dual revolvers and two unarmed ’showgirl’ figures (maybe they have derringers). This mix of weapons makes them ideal for putting together a couple of Legends of the Old West posses.

In terms of detail the figures are passable. Period costume of the Old West was pretty simple and this is reflected on the miniatures, with decoration consisting of tassled fringes and the odd bow. In terms of detail I’d say the Black Scorpion figures are comparable to the Copplestone Casting ranges, but not as detailed or crisp as the Artizan Designs collection.

The wide mix of clothing, hats and hairstyles will keep the figures interesting to paint though. I particularly like the figure that looks like a gentle homemaker, in a full dress and leg’o'mutton jacket, clutching a sun umbrella in one hand and a Winchester repeating rifle in the other…!

Scale

Black Scorpion state their figures are ‘32mm’ scale, which equates to the so called ‘Heroic 28mm’ that Games Workshop use. Here’s a photo comparing several of the Black Scorpion figures to an WWII Artizan Designs 28mm German and a Copplestone Castings female archaeologist. I’ve chosen the tallest of the Black Scorpion ladies for comparison and as you can see there is a noticeable scale difference. However as it’s not often you see figures lined up like this on the tabletop I can’t see any problem mixing and matching these slightly larger figures with the rest of my Pulp collection.

Cost

At GBP7.50 for each group of five figures, plus 15% for shipping internationally they’re a pretty good deal and I’m perfectly happy to recommend them to anybody after some 28-32mm Western miniatures. I ordered directly off their site and had no problem getting the items shipped international air to a New Zealand PO Box.

Black Scorpion also have several other interesting looking ranges, in particular their Pirates, Fantasy Pirates and Iraqii Militia all look good to me.