Great Escape Games – General Purpose Wagon

One of the items that I brought with me from our 2023 Nottingham tour as the new General Purpose Wagon by Great Escape Games. I picked it up at Northstar, as the complete set and another one with just the plain carriage, as an unhitched wagon.

This is a new hard plastic kit for the Dead Man's Hand range, they introduced a few weeks ago on their social media and as we had a stop planned at Northstar, I just the chance to get my hands on the two.

The General Purpose Wagon is a two sprue kit produced in 28mm scale. The 20 GBP set gives you one of each sprues, the unhitched wagon for 13 GBP covers only the top sprue with the wagon itself. As you can see, it is split, with a larger sprue for the wagon including the wheels. The second sprue covers the horses, the crew and covers.

Details are well made, even the tarp have some structure and are not plain cloth.

The build is pretty straight forward. You assemble the undercarriage, add the wheels, add the sides and have the basic wagon completed inlcuding the seating area. This is for all the sets the same.

The second sprue gives you the option to either add the arches or a full cover, as well as horses and crew. As you have both options included, I could add the arches to the second unhitched wagon and give it a bit of an upgrade.

Not that big of a fan of the horses to be honest, but that is something I can live with or easily replace. The crew consists out of a male and female passenger with two options for the heads each. They are kept in a similar design to the plastic gun fighters by Great Escape Games, so you could easily swap bits and pieces from them (for example an arm or head). As most of my collection is from Artizan Design (with addition by Boot Hill and larger Foundry miniatures) the scale / design should be fine.

And I noticed this already on the promo pictures - the buildings in the background look a lot like injection mould plastic. Not 3d printed, but "properly" casted. I asked about it on Facebook, but didn't get a proper answer, which leads me to believe, that we might see something in the future. And I certainly hope that I'm right.

What is my conclusion on these? I'm quite happy with them, even as they are not really cheap (and certainly more expensive than the 7-8 GBP wagons by Sarissa, but not that much more expensive than the 4Ground ones). The possibilities and plasticity of plastic appealled to me and were the reason, why I got another 3 wagons (a regular one and two unhitched ones) via Miniaturicum - but more on that later. I have a few of the MDF wagons around, but they are more of a stand-in, as the rather box nature and lack of structure is something, that kept me from investing further into them. This is surely something this new plastic kit does better.