Joy, oh Joy! The ether has been alive with chatter of the announcement of this new range for a couple of weeks now – and they really do look like some lovely figures with nice clean casts and great sculpting. I have been wanting to get into Maori Wars in 28mm for sometime – but to be honest there just hasn’t been the figures available to inspire me, only Eureka having anything reasonable – except they are later period (2nd & 3rd Maori Wars) and while their British chaps look quite nice their Maori just don’t get me excited (perhaps they are not animated enough). However now that Empress have released their range everything has changed, as it were, and now there seems little reason not to do some Maori Wars gaming (and hopefully the Empress and Eureka guys will be a close match size wise to allow use of both)?
The range has been commissioned by a third party individual, and sculpted by Paul Hicks, the press release stating that the initial range “will be around 40 figures and covering British infantry and militia, civilians, and a naval rocket unit fighting against the tongue poking, heavily tattooed, Maoris”. The chap who commissioned them also posted his intent behind the project on the Maori Wars Yahoo! Group:
The project is 1st New Zealand War in general. There are actually quite a number of encounters that can replayed as scenarios: Kororareka, Boulcott’s Farm, the small bush skirmishes of the Wellington and Whanganui campaign, the large skirmish in St. John’s Wood. I think that you can even break down the pa battles of the Flagstaff War into smaller playable actions or even mini campaigns (capturing a hill to set up a gun battery, sortie of the garrison against that gun battery, etc).
The range will concentrate on the 1840s. The tales of Hone Heke and Tamati Waka Nene have captured my imagination much more than the more bitter fighting of the 1860s.
(You can read the balance of his comments at Roly Herman’s “Dressing The Lines” blog).
Some of the figures look just outstanding – they have some wonderful facial expression and character and there is a lot of life in the poses:
There’s even a Naval Rocket Detachment! So right now it’s just a case of resisting the urge to rush out and buy a heap of these chaps RIGHT NOW – but I think that’s already lost and it’s just a case of when! I’m already thinking about how many to get!
Bjoern notes that his painted examples illustrated at the top of this post include the 96th and 99th Foot – regiments who both actually used older flintlock rather than percussion muskets in New Zealand in the 1840’s – and the Empress range to date actually only includes Percussion Musket armed Regular Infantry, but hopefully there will be more to come later including some Flintlock chaps eventually? We can only hope! 🙂
Wargame Rules
This is now the quandary – I had always intended to do something using TSATF (The Sword And The Flame) with appropriate modifications, and scaled down to smaller organisations (perhaps 8-Fig Imperial units and 10-Fig Maori groups) – but I have recently purchased Sharp Practice and Terrible Sharp Sword for Napoleonic & ACW skirmish gaming, and it’s been suggested these would be ideal rules for the 1st Maori War era given the smallish size of many of the actions and the skirmish nature of the fighting. And reading the former I’m starting to think that sounds a damn good idea…
I am so looking forward to this range. It will be so nice to be able to work on a project with a local backgound. It’ll also make a really interesting chnage from my other current painting projects.
Yes – me too Roly – it’s damn inspiring and they really look such lovely figures too! And you’ve got me really thinking about Sharp Practice – as mentioned I’ve bought this recently and hoping to do a couple of small Napoleonic Games in the near future to have a dabble and see what they are like. Certainly on reading the ‘big men’ thing sounds quite cool… 🙂
P.S. And you get to live in an area not that far from where a lot of the action was (in both directions)!