In an attempt to find a good alternative Human Trooper for my Kingdom of Men army, I came across this company called Fireforge Games. They are in the process of creating a Historical Miniatures game called Deus Vult, and in that process, they are making some very nice plastic Miniatures. My goal was to make a Shield Wall unit, which according to the Kings of War book is described as follows
“These warriors are quipped with chain mail or leather armour and carry a sword or axe and a wide shield that they can lock together and adopt a defensive formation”
The unit size is either 20 or 40 so I was looking for a significant amount of figures. I currently use my Bretonnian army as the backbone of my Kingdom of Men army, but with so many infantry options I wasn’t about to shell out a bunch more money for Men at Arms from GW. This box of Foot Sergeants has 8 figures per sprue for a total of 48 miniatures. They have options for swords, maces, axes, spears and crossbows. They seem to allow you all sorts of options, which is super nice. My one complaint is that you can’t make all 48 into any one of the options I listed. If you were hoping to do this, this could be a big draw back.
As with most miniatures, there are mold lines present, but none of them are thick/large and none of them were interfering with major details on any of the miniatures. Cleaning up the miniatures and building them was pretty straight forward and I didn’t run into any issues, they went together rather easily. One thing I did notice is that the details on some of the leather armor are really thin and I’m thinking that after priming they might not be visible given how small the pitting details are.
As I mentioned earlier, Fireforge Games is building a Historical Miniatures game, and I’m more of a fantasy gamer so basing standards are very different between these two genre’s of games. They offer a wide variety of bases that hold just a single miniature on a 20mm base up to 6 miniatures on a 60 x 40mm base. While this doesn’t meet my needs and I’ll be basing them all individually on 20mm bases, this is still nice to see just because they are cheap, doesn’t mean things get left out of the package.
When stacked up against the 90’s era Citadel Men at Arms, these are near identical in height, but the current GW Heroic 28mm scale is larger than Fireforge’s. It’s no surprise that while all of the pictured miniatures are sold as 28mm miniatures, each modeler and manufacturer of miniatures seem to handle “scale” differently. The other dimensions aren’t so close, Fireforge Foot Sergeants are on the thinner side of things, while GW’s are bulkier. This is not uncommon when it comes to scale between GW and pretty much any other company and is both a Pro and Con for me. In all fairness, had I been buying non-GW miniatures over the years, this wouldn’t come up.
Pros
- Cost $.875 per miniature
- Tons of options in one box
- Bases are included at this price level
- Bitz!
- Scale is OK
Cons
- Detail seems shallow on some of the bodies
- Not enough bits to do all 48 miniatures with a single weapon type (ex. all spears or all crossbows)
- Scale is OK