“I thought this would be sacrilege!” said Andy Callan. He was referring to the fact we were about to play a wargame using unpainted figures, and feature them in the pages of Wargames Illustrated. He had a fair point because I can’t remember the last time we did such a thing but needs must and the figures actually looked pretty cool in their resplendent red and blue plastic. The figures in question were from Warlord Games’ Black Powder Epic Waterloo range, the entire contents of the British (red) and French (blue) Starter Sets. We had press-ganged ‘friends of the magazine’ Andy and Steve Wood (of Arcane Scenery fame) into playing their first game of the pithily titled Black Powder Epic Battles: The Waterloo Campaign. As veteran Black Powder players, I was interested to learn what they thought of playing BP at ‘Epic’ scale. Time being of the essence - we wanted to get their findings into the February magazine (which incidentally comes with a cover-mount infantry frame!) - we couldn’t get the hundreds of figures painted up for the cameras, so we went with the naked plastic. Their first reaction to seeing the ranks of red and blue plastic figures was a misty-eyed trip down Memory Lane for both Andy and Steve “Oh, this reminds me of when I first started playing with Airfix,” they both cried, followed by phrases like “they look great!” and “you don’t really need to paint them up, do you?”. I’m sure part of this reaction is born from the fact that at around 13.5mm high and on strip bases, ‘Epic’ figures have a touch of gaming pieces/tokens about them, rather than being individual characterful minis. 28mm figures, even in bright coloured plastic, might not get the same positive reaction. During the game a fun time was had by all and you can read all about it in Wi410. It would probably take some psychoanalysis to discover if more fun would have been had with painted figures, probably not, but there is of course fun to be had in the painting of the figures too. The whole reaction to seeing and playing with unpainted plastic figures, the follow up photography, and featuring them online and in the magazine has been really interesting. Don’t worry, this isn’t a ‘new normal’ - these might be the last unpainted figures you see in Wargames Illustrated for the next five years (excluding Observation Post) - but it's nice to get away with something a bit different every so often!
