About two years ago I bought into the Baker Company Winter War Kickstarter. The figures are now on their Web page for purchase: http://bakercompany.co.uk/13-ww2-finnish-army. I committed to running a Winter War scenario with Combat Patrol(TM): World War II at Cold Wars. There is nothing like committing to run a convention game to provide motivation to get some figures painted. Before the holidays, all I had done was to file, base, and prime the figures. Over the holidays I tried to knock them out in groups of 15 or so, almost 100 Finns. I finished the last sixteen this weekend, six cavalry figures and 10 bicyclists.
The figures seem well sculpted, but the casting is pretty poor. The mold lines are very pronounced, and the metal is very hard, so cleaning the figures caused my fingers to be sore for days. On most the faces were very mushy and ill defined. As I said, though, the sculpting seems good. I heard there was an issue with Baker Company fulfilling the orders for a while after the Kickstarter and that he had to use a third party to do the casting. Perhaps more recently molded figures are better. I can’t say.
There are a huge variety of poses. In addition to standard riflemen, leaders, and submachine gunners, there are a host of crewmen, supply types, skiers, bicyclists, cavalry, gunners, crewmen, etc. Very few are in the same pose, so they variety is good, and the figures are excellently suited for skirmish gaming.
There were enough riflemen and submachine gunners to make a reinforced platoon. In the picture above, you can see a squad (section) of infantry.
I tried something new with the basing. After I completed the figures, I textured the bases with Citadel Armageddon Dunes textured paint. I completely covered all the bases with this paint. By the time I finished the 100th or so figure, the first base was dry. I used the burnt-looking grass tufts (pictured above), placing one on most of the bases and several on the larger bases for the guns. After the tufts I spread some of the Valhallan Blizzard textured paint on the bases, but only partially covering them. I am pretty happy with the results, which you can see in the pictures. I like the look of mud showing through the clumpy snow.
Lesson learned: I made a mistake of gluing the skis to the bases when I was basing and priming the figures. This made it very difficult to apply the snow texture after the figures were painted.
