Really, folks, I tried. It wasn’t for me, I said, fooling no one. It’s too gross, I said, not seeing past the butchered bits on some of the minis. It’s just another game, I said…
Then I looked at who had made Trench Crusade, and it’s literally a who’s who of designers that built my favorite game of all time, yes, the glorious brains that made Mordheim had assembled again, like the Avengers but probably more middle-aged and myopic. I thumbed through the rules, and the mechanics of the game system rolled over my eyes and directly into my brain.
This is the first time in nearly a decade that the rules to a game system have stuck with me just from reading the book. I know there’s some fine-tuning I’ll need to do, but the system is ridiculously simple and elegant at the same time.
I was still safe, though. I’m trying to stay away from resin minis because we just don’t know the long term health risks, and my doctors have encouraged me to just maybe not mess with something potentially toxic. Sadly for my wallet, that all changed when I stopped by my FLGS last week.
Glorious, beautiful, and down right dynamic plastic Trench Crusade figs were sitting there, playing a high-stakes game of chicken with my wallet. My wallet lost. I won.
Everything I love about plastic miniatures is front and center with the troops choices. You can put the weapons and heads you want on the bodies you want. Even the elites and command have a number of options, so you can just make what you want.
And as opposed to the modern GW system of “this is your dude, you get EXACTLY this and can’t change the weapons!”, you can put together pretty much whatever you want within certain limits. The Old World and Necromunda seem to be the only games that let you shop for gear, and that’s one of the reasons why I seem to like those two games… I want to shop, dammit!
This is the first time since Wild West Exodus that I bought some boxes of minis, went home, put them together, and just painted everything in a few days. It was amazing. I had the best time, and now I have 90% of a finished warband.
It’s also the first time ever that I’ve painted the entirety of a plastic range of miniatures, but that’s just because these just launched and there aren’t that many out yet.
Archon Studios did an amazing job with these minis, and the command and elite models are as good as anything I’ve picked up from GW.
My leader, the Hauptman I’ve name Karolina Katzenbach, has a tank-splitter sword and machine gun. She looks like she laughs in the face of danger!
The Feldkaplan (Field Chaplan) has wooden wings and a huge breaker sword, and literal Holy Hand Grenades. The fact that this warband is from New Antioch is not lost on me, either.
Sniper Priests blind themselves and let The Almighty aim their guns for them. They look so freaking cool.
Strosstruppen (shock troopers) come with a variety of weapons, my favorite is the guy with the sword and shield. I painted a praying skeleton with halo on the shield, just for fun.
And the yeoman are just basic cannon fodder, but the unit musician has a glockenspiel, so I imagine he’s got to be the first to die. Just thinking about someone clunking away on one of those while you’re trying to fight makes me laugh a bit…
Overall, great models, great game, and only as gross as you want it to be. And best of all, I’ve actually managed to talk a friend into coming up for air from 40k to check out the game, so I’ll make sure to let you all know how it goes!
Grimmleigh's Lab 