Goonhammer Historicals: Bad Squiddo Shieldmaiden Review and Saga Warband

First off, a big thank you to Annie of Bad Squiddo Games for supplying these minis free of charge to review! The selection of minis on offer there are far beyond the shieldmaidens I’m reviewing today and worth looking at. 

We are still knee-deep in Saga Summer here at Goonhammer and if you missed my last (and first) Historicals post, I’m very new to historical wargaming having started with a Saga Viking Warband. Today I’m bringing you another Viking warband, but this time entirely female! This is my Shieldmaiden warband and I’m pretty excited to get them on the table.

The Minis

Hand-sculpted metal miniatures like these have a real old-school charm to them. As far as “building” these goes, most are just single piece aside from the shield which gets glued on the front! I used to despise putting together any amount of parts with metal minis, even just sticking to bases, but have since learned about glue applicator spray, which makes it so much easier. There is one warrior with axe that has a separate arm and Freyja (the one with the cats) has a separate arm holding her spear. Nice and simple! It’s been a long time since I’ve worked on metal human minis like this (it’s been a lot of dwarfs and Burrows & Badgers!) and they look great across the board. The only thing that I found a little odd is some of the faces under helmets felt a little flat, as in two-dimensional almost, but that might come from necessity of the sculpt for the sake of casting the minis. You’ll notice similar needs in the general poses of the minis, the berzerker on the far right being maybe the most obvious in pose. One thing that I didn’t really think would show through until I got to the end of the process but really love about these models is that the shields have the wood grain sculpted in.

Overall I really enjoy these sculpts. Bad Squiddo’s own statement on their range of minis is “…female miniatures out that can be summed up as – dressed as the miniature may choose to dress herself.” That shows really well across the range. For scale they fit in seamlessly with the other 28mm Viking minis I have between Victrix and Gripping Beast.

Painting

My favourite part of (mostly) single piece metal minis is just how well they take modern contrast-style paints. The details are deeper and never too flat lending themselves very well to a quick and easy paint job. I painted these the exact same way that I painted my Victrix vikings:

1. Spray dark brown (Hyrax from Colourforge)
2. Heavy drybrush with Corax White
3. Guilliman Flesh for skin
4. Baal Red, Talassar Blue, Aeldari Emerald, Dark Angels Green, Celestium Blue, and Imperial Fist for cloth colours
5. Snakebite Leather for…leathers
6. Gore Grunta Fur and Cygor Brown for the furs
7. Ushabti Bone and Morghast Bone followed by Seraphim Sepia for blonde hair
8. Wyldwood for wood (weapon hafts only really)
9. Iron Hands Silver for the silvers
10. Skullcrusher Brass for golds (rare, mostly just on Freyja)
11. All over Nuln Oil shade
12. Touch up skin with Kislev Flesh
13. Painted-on matt varnish, mostly to take the shine off the shield transfers

Basing is then just done with MIG Mud texture paint shaded over with Agrax Earthshade and a variety of Gamers Grass tufts glued on top, rims painted in Rhinox Hide.

I lied, slightly, because these did need one extra step over my previous Viking warband: touching up the skin with a highlight. That’s just down to the lack of long beards showing much more of their faces. Without that they looked far too pale and shadowy. In the end, with that simple process, these took me about 14 hours total to paint ignoring some drying time.

I also can’t freehand to save my own life; thankfully my life hasn’t rested on having those skills (yet) so the shields are all transfers from Little Big Men Studios. These were all the smallest size of those shield transfers which I had leftover from my last warband thankfully! To use them the shields had to be painted white before applying. These are thicker transfers than waterslide ones which I think most wargamers will be accustomed to. I was surprised and very happy to see that after the transfers were applied and dried all of that shield detail of wood grain shows through them to give a really great natural effect. Now I wish that all my viking shields had that sort of detail to them!

Building the Warband

This is really better off built as a 5 point warband with an additional point leftover to fill as you choose. The kits that I’m working with include four models per unit:

• Freyja (and her cats)
• Jada the Subtle 
• Jarl Lagertha
• The Seer
• Hearthguard with axes 
• Hearthguard with swords
• Warriors with swords 
• Warriors with axes
• Berzerkers

Freyja and her cats on one base is an obvious Warlord choice, and then Jada or Lagertha work extremely well for a Champion, costing you a whole point. The Seer is another obvious one here and is where your choice comes into play, because taking both a Seer and Champion to make this a 6 point list is probably not a great idea with how elite we’re going. You absolutely could; I’m just not sure how well it’ll work out for you!

The two sets of warriors join together for one point and the two lots of hearthguard and berzerkers run just as they are: a point each. I’d really recommend picking up another point of hearthguard via the Fanatics set for a really elite list or some sets of spear-wielding warriors/hearthguard to run as either warriors (ignoring that they have spears for game) or as javelin-wielding levies however for the latter you’ll end up with a few duplicate minis to have the whole twelve.

Realistically, in my games I’m likely to simply mix these minis in amongst my other Viking models to have a nice mix of male and female minis across the warband but it’s extremely cool to be able to run an all-female warband if/when I want to!

Saga also has a mercenary unit simply called “Shieldmaidens” which I often use because I just think they’re great on the table. For this you need a clear leader called a Valkyrie, a banner bearer, and then six warriors. To make this up with the Bad Squiddo range I’d use both sets of Hearthguard (axes and swords) above, adding in the banner bearer mini, and then Lagertha, Brunhilde, or Skálmöld as the Valkyrie unit leader.

Last Thoughts

Now I’m sure if you’ve clicked through those links one thing you’ll notice is that this is not the cheapest way to build a Viking warband. Four minis runs you £14 and characters run about £5-8 each. Of course if you’re reading this you probably aren’t looking for the cheapest warband, but instead wondering how usable this range is and if it might suit your personal wargaming needs. The minis fit in extremely well next to other ranges, to me look better than the metal offerings from Gripping Beast (especially the faces!) and serve their purpose of being great female miniatures.

If you’re trying to decide which range of minis to use as Shieldmaidens either as a full warband or mixed in with your existing collection I’ll easily recommend these every time.

Shieldmaiden Seer credit: Bair

Bad Squiddo Lagertha credit: Bair

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