Steel Fist Samurai

It’s been a while since I’ve painted anything new for this project, and these figures aren’t actually by Steel Fist Miniatures, rather being one of the latest releases by Grey for Now Games for Test of Honour. This project entry is going to be a mini-review of the box.

Staring with box contents – The Takeda’s Court box contains three mounted figures and three on foot, plus the cards to use them in Test of Honour. The six models represent Shingen Takeda, a samurai linebreaker, an Onna-Bugeisha, a samurai champion, a Scholar and a Falconer. The horses are provided as a plastic sprue, one of Wargames Atlantic’s general period offerings, whilst the people are all metal.

Horses first – pretty standard to be honest, right and left halves, with separate head and tail, and a saddle to add once the body is built. Each sprue comes with four heads, so there’s some variety possible if you have a lot of these to build. My only real criticism is the lack of period specific horse furniture and tack, obviously absent from generic horses designed for a range of different eras. I’m aware that the availability of the WA horses sufficiently lowers the cost of production to make cavalry sets viable for Grey for Now, but its still a shame to be missing some of flavour of the period.

The metal models were all very nice sculpts. The faces in particular are very characterful. The armour is not as intricately detailed as that on Steel Fist figures, but there’s still plenty to admire and they are certainly not sparse in detail. I was quite surprised at how snug and close fitting the riders were on their mounts – considering the horses are third party, they are some of the best fitting cavalry I’ve built in a while.

Size-wise, these are 28mm models, a little shy of the size of my Steel Fist figures (see last photo for a comparison).

Overall a very nice set of models that I had a lot of fun painting. The range offered by Grey for Now probably have some of the most cinematic character models for those collecting Samurai, although Steel Fist offer a more detailed model for anyone wanting to capture the intricate armour and clothing.