Frostgrave Soldiers

North Star did a Nickstarter for Frostgrave, a fantasy skirmish ruleset, and even included a plastic kit of soldiers.

The boxes includes enough parts to build 20 soldiers for your warband, spread across 4 identical sprues of 5 soldiers each. And there are 20 flat renedra bases in there as well, although the rules don't specify the use of a certain type of bases - or bases at all. I went with the flat bases and added a copplestone texture to them, as you can see here: Bases for Frostgrave.

Each sprue covers 5 bodies, 10 heads, and a couple of weapon choices

• 2 pair of arms with bows
• 2 pair of arms with crossbows
• 3 arms with swords
• 1 arm with a club
• 1 arm with an axe
• 1 arm with a dagger
• 1 arm with a latern
• 8 left arms (as used with shields, bags etc.)
• 1 pointing arm

as well as 6 bags/sacks, 2 bundles of rope, a helmet, a torch and 2 shields.

The plastic miniatures from Frostgrave match in size good with Fireforge Games and Gripping Beast, as you can see. The only difference is the way the heads are connected, a round instead of flat glue point.

Starting with the 5 different bodies, you can build a lot of available soldier types from the rule book. The casting is clean and the details are good. Only a few mold lines and good use of the space within the sprue.

Using two more bodies from a second sprue, i was able to build 7 different soldier types just using the weapon parts from one sprue. From the left to the right, a Thief, a Bowman, a Crossbowman, an Infantryman, a Thug, a Men-at-Arms and a Treasure Hunter.

And still after building seven soldiers there are still a lot of bits left, so you can add bags and pouches to them. The whole process goes quite easy and quick, so you get two warbands set up in roughly in an hour.

Assembled and based, the first few soldiers for Frostgrave look like this. The first batch gives you a Bowman, a Crossbowman and a Thug.

The second lot is an Infantryman, a Thief (where the sword was modified into a dagger), a Treasurehunter and a Man-at-Arms.

Conclusion
The box with 20 soldiers is 20 Pounds, which is a fair and reasonable price. At 1 Pound each, the soldiers are more expensive than the Fireforge Man-at-Arms (48 Miniatures for 28 Pound) and the Gripping Beast plastics (44 for 22 Pounds), but still reasonable as we are talkin about a Skirmish system and a Frostgrave warband is never bigger than 10 miniatures. The content is solid, but it could have been improved with a potion or two, treasure / loot or better positioned arms / hands to put the items into. But let's wait for the other boxes and sprues, like the recently announced plastic cultists for Frostgrave, that can be mixed with the current soldiers.

Due to the heroic 28mm scale, the miniatures can be combined with the kits of other manufacturers, but i'll cover that in another article.

Link: North Star Miniatures