Today we’re looking at the third box in Wargames Atlantic’s The Age of Chivalry line, the Foot Serjeants!
Thank you to Wargames Atlantic for providing this box for review.
Occupying a space between the heavily armed and armored knight and the barely-armed peasant levy, the serjeant of the medieval period was largely a person who served their lord in the same capacity as a knight, but lacked the status and holdings of that more important class. They were often small landholders, obligated to provide some amount of men and their own military service, but on a smaller scale than a knight would provide.
In game terms, serjeants tend to fill the role of the “average joe,” the common version of the professional soldier when compared to the elite troop the knight often represents. The Foot Serjeants kit embraces that flexibility, allowing you to build troops that cover several different roles, from defensive walls of spears covering crossbowmen to sword and shield-armed shock troops.
What’s in the Box?
The foot serjeants kit allows you to build 24 models, split between men with quilted armor and men with cloth and mail armor. The kit comes with several different weapon options for you to outfit the troops with, consisting of: 12 crossbows, 12 two-handed spears, 10 one-handed spears, 6 halberds, 24 swords, and 24 shields (12 large, 12 small).
This works out pretty well for the most part, but you’ll need to do some planning to get the most out of the sprues. Each sprue comes with 4 bodies that have the shield arm molded in, and four that don’t. While this allows you to get a lot more poses out of your shield-carrying infantry, it limits your options as far as using two-handed weapons goes.
You have 16 torsos to use that can carry the two-handed weapons, so the crossbows, spears and halberds will be shared between them. This isn’t a problem if you can use units with mixed weapons or can use plenty of shield carrying infantry, but if you want 24 crossbowmen or spearmen without shields you’ll either need to buy two boxes or look for a more dedicated kit..
There are a ton of different heads, giving you options for several different types of armored helmets, some mailed hoods, and a few unarmored heads to round things out. There are a ton of really good facial hair options, which always makes me happy. The legs are posed a bit statically, but given all of the different options for weapons and just how different going with the quilted armor or the mail armor makes the models look, you’d have to build multiple boxes before you really started to notice things getting repetitive.
Assembling Your Forces
All of the models are either five or six main pieces, depending on whether the shield arm is molded onto the torso, and they go together very cleanly. I always get nervous when I see a two handed weapon that needs to be lined up with both a tiny, handless arm and the torso, but by making sure to pair the arms with the same letters (for example, A1 with A2), I didn’t have a single alignment issue.
There were no real mold lines to speak of, with every piece cleaning up very easily. I do wish there were a few less gates to sand down on the legs, but that’s an extremely nit-picky criticism to have. The only thing you have to pay attention to is making sure you pair arms to torso by paying attention to the type of armor the torso is wearing. I almost messed up and put mail sleeves on a quilted armor torso, which might not be the end of the world but it’d look a bit silly.
I tested the compatibility of the serjeants kit with Wargames Atlantic’s Foot Knights kit by using a body from the knights kit (pictured above, in green), and a pair of arms from the spear sprue that comes in the serjeants kit. Everything fit together perfectly, but I think you’ll want to stick to using the arms with the mail sleeves to keep everything looking consistent. Between this experiment and the spear sprue being in both the serjeants box and the Peasant Levy box, all three of those kits should be broadly compatible, limited only by which arms look good with which torsos.
The Wargames Atlantic serjeants are noticeably smaller than the Victrix models I have, to the point that I’d be hesitant to combine them in an army. They look good next to the Wargames Atlantic Werewolves kit I reviewed in the past, and should look good with any more “realistic” scale 28mm monsters. If you wanted to buy these to use as a town militia for a D&D game or something like that, they’d work well.
Painting
The kit paints up very well. The cloth textures are sharp, giving nice guides for highlights and bits for contrast paint to flow into. The mail and quilted armor textures are great as well, with no soft detail that you have to try to add in yourself with shading. Some of the faces are a bit soft, but they’re really hard to see under helmets and hoods for the most part.
Painters of any skill level should be able to make these look good with a bit of effort. There are no real pitfalls to watch out for, the poses are open enough that there are no real hard spots to paint, even with the two-handed weapon poses. You can leave the shields off to make painting the shield arm easier, but I don’t really think it’s necessary to get a good result. They should be quick to get to the table for your gaming sessions.
Final Thoughts
Wargames Atlantic has put together another good kit for their The Age of Chivalry line. The variety of weapon options makes the serjeants kit super flexible, to the point where I could easily make a Saga Crusades force using only it and whatever options on the market there are on the market for mounted soldiers. I don’t think the model size difference would be as noticeable if you used mounted Victrix figures, since then they wouldn’t be mixed as closely together.
The builds are easy, the models are sturdy (I’m clumsy enough to have spiked the spearman into the ground a couple of times while I was building and painting it so the lack of damage is both welcome and a bit surprising). I would feel good about giving these to modelers and painters of any skill level.
The cross-kit compatibility of the whole TAoC line is the biggest selling point to me. Between the three kits (so far) that are out, you can customize your infantry to look anywhere on the spectrum from elite warriors to guys who jumped out of bed and grabbed a sickle to defend the homelands. It lets you do some great storytelling through your modeling choices, which is always the thing I want most when putting together historical kits. Highly recommended.
If you’d like to pick up this kit and help out Goonhammer in the process, go ahead and use our handy affiliate link to muster an army of your own!
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