Great Escape Games – Dead Man’s Hand Mounted Gunfighters review
Adding to the well-established and popular Dead Man’s Hand range, Great Escape Games’ latest figures in the series: Mounted Gunfighters are great bang for your buck. Read our review.
Great Escape Games (GEG) have made some positive forays into plastic production over the last few years, releasing two variety-packed gunfighter sets and some great terrain options, along with a wagon. In the process, they have widened the accessibility of their Dead Man’s Hand ruleset, and provided affordable options to those wanting to explore the Old West in a broader context. One thing that was missing, however, was the all-important and iconic ‘car of the Old West’, better known as the horse. With the release of their new set of Mounted Gunfighters, that gap in the range has been filled. Let’s take a closer look at how the new frames go together.
Opening the box reveals three of them – bases, riders, and horses – and you get two of each, to make ten figures in total. That makes these an incredible value set at £2.50 for each mounted figure. That’s not just rootin’ – it’s also tootin’!
Peering at the plastic
While they aren’t the most exciting of the trio, we’ll get the base discussion out of the way first. These are neat, slim, oval designs that will stop your figures falling over. They provide simple form and function, which is fancy enough for our needs!
Let’s gallop to the frame of riders next; it’s notable that they are listed as ‘Mounted Gunfighters I’, suggesting that, while this set is all male, there could be a double-X-chromosome option to come. The style of the figures, and the layout of parts on the frame, will be familiar to anyone who has built the male Gunfighters on foot. As with the ten-figure plastic Gunfighters set, the frame for the riders is packed with parts.
Riders are split at the waist, and the legs are spread to straddle their mounts, with stirrups around their boots. If you’re a Dead Man’s Hand fan who is already invested in the plastics, you’ll notice that a fair few parts here are familiar. Is this a cynical, cost-cutting exercise, wherein reusing existing bits reduces sculpting time? No, this is because the same character from your gang will need to be represented on foot and mounted (below). The crossover of bits means that your riders can dismount during gaming and continue looking like the same character, although you can still vary up their poses a good amount.
While the matching head and body styles is necessary, and there’s nice variety with cowboy, bandit, Civil War, more civilian, and weirdo styles included, we would have loved it if GEG had crammed in a hatless head. There’s an unworn Stetson on the frame, which is a nice little bonus, but one that makes us hungry for a bare head to go with it. That would have been a well-considered touch that allowed for dynamic builds where the hat is coming off mid-gallop or as the rider is shot in the saddle. Such things may be the picky details you only spot as someone who reviews new plastic figures month in, month out, while being a rather obsessive kitbasher, but it does feel like a slight missed opportunity. Not quite so picky, and a less forgivable feature is that some of the same fit problems from the on-foot frame remain. Some arms sit poorly on most bodies and that’s really something that should have been fixed.
Above: Repeated from the Gunfighters on foot frame, this part barely fits on the torsos, and if there are coat-edges flaring out, you can forget about it. It’s perhaps a forgivable sign of Great Escape Games’ relative newness to plastic production that this hasn’t been fixed.
Under the Microscope
The hobby has been blessed by some great and dynamic plastic horses of late (Wargames Atlantic’s light horse are a standout), and we’re happy to report that the frame of horses included in this set can stand head-to-head with them. Well, maybe not quite head-to-head, as it looks like these mounts are styled to match the American Quarter Horse, favoured by cowboys, and a couple of hands shorter than some others!
The explosive pace of this breed is well represented through some dynamic poses, and the built look is great, especially when the riders are in place. The different halves fit together specifically, and are marked on the frame accordingly.
New duplicate heads from the two frames in this box could be used in conjunction the foot frame, to create new ‘twins’. E.g. on the mounted frames you have two ‘kepi heads’ – so you could create a figure on foot wearing a kepi, and one mounted.
The frame includes water bottles, canteens, bedrolls, blankets, and saddlebags, so your Gunfighters are well set for a long ride. These extras will add character and narrative elements to your builds, and the quality of the horses makes for a wonderful group of mounted figures.
Above: This menacingly-odd bandit has his worldly possessions slung over his horse’s saddle behind him.
Getting a big gold star for GEG, though, is the number of arm options, which boasts impressive variety and versatility. The same weapon loadouts are present here as in the Gunfighters on foot, but arms gripping at the reins, carrying bags, and roping from the saddle are included, too. This makes for some fantastic-looking builds, and to say this set is everything you could wish for from a cowboy in the saddle is… well, it’s wrong, because we know that wargamers are perpetually and insatiably greedy for more, but it’s certainly a great offering! There’s nothing stopping you from putting some of these arms, such as the one swinging a lasso, onto a figure on foot either, making for even more variety.
Production quality is great, and these are hard-plastic casts at their finest, with well-represented details, sharp edges, and very little clean-up needed. There have been some weird scaling issues on a few parts in previous GEG sets (huge Sherriff’s badges and a scarily massive cat), but here everything seems right.
Overall, this is a brilliant set, and, while we’re impressed by its quality and variety, it is its value that really can’t be overstated. There’s never been an easier way to build a posse of riders with this amount of variety for such a great price.
