Steel Fist Samurai

A bit of hobby butterflying has led me back to this project. It has been a while since I last added any Samurai, but I just finished up a pair of cavalry from Steel Fist.

I based their armour around the cover image from a book I recently read, Hōjō by Stephen Turnbull. Like all the Helion & Press books I have read, a very good book that goes deeper than Osprey books, but remains accessible and avoids becoming too academic.

I’m always a fan of using a good reference image to inspire a colour scheme, even if details like armour and arms aren’t quite an exact match.

I haven’t really engaged with TerrainFest 2024, but quite a token effort I got a small set of resin scatter terrain by Oshiro Model Terrain painted up – a set of large goods barrels. I have another couple of resin buildings to paint from Oshiro’s recent Kickstarter as well, but I’m not sure whether I’ll get around to them before TerrainFest finishes. Even if I did, it’s hardly worth making a whole new project for a handful of quickly painted scatter and a pair of buildings – much better to keep them here in this project!

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.

This has been a bit of a slow burn collection, painting up a few models between work on other projects. Everything is from the Steel Fist range, bar the unarmoured samurai at the front left (being the model that comes with the Test of Honour core rules).

I need to sit down with some rules (Clash of Katanas for example) to draw up some lists to constructively work out what else to add. More cavalry is definitely something I want, plus some command figures.

…this time with armed with yari. The sashimono are blank again, as I still haven’t decided what clan to align my forces with.

I quite like these more static, at rest poses as they make a nice back rank or sentry models.

These are also my last unpainted models, so I will have a little pause to work out how I want to expand my collection.

Continuing to bulk up my numbers of ashigaru with another four armed with teppo.

A few more samurai, a pair with yumi and a pair with a teppo. These make quite nice leader models for the ashigaru troops.

With delivery of the Clash of Katanas KS due shortly, I thought I should expand my collection a bit more, particularly with respects to ashigaru.

The Steel Fist range come with separate heads, so although there’s only four bodies for the archers, you can still create a bit if variation by mixing the heads around.