As I touched on in a recent blog one of my “to do” projects is a 20mm “Musketeers” game based on the usual tavern brawl. Unfortunately I am of an age that whenever the word Musketeers appears I cannot help but think of the Mickey Mouse Club and Mouseketeer Annette Funicello – ahhhh the heart still skips a beat. She was my first love, and my first bedroom poster girl at the grand old age of six.
Anyway I digress. After writing the blog I decided to “dig out” the figures and have a look at them, and I was really surprised by the quality.
Now I do not want to write a complete review of these as the Plastic Soldier review does a more than adequate job of this:
Musketeers of the King of France
Mounted Musketeers of the King of France
Mounted Guards of Cardinal Richelieu
By the way if you do not have this site on your list favourites already I suggest you do as it is a wonderful source of figure information. I am jealous of the modern 1/72nd gamer when I think of how we had to “butcher” Airfix plasics and put them back together with the head of this a torso of that, and the legs of another, like Dr Frankenstein just to make an Austrian Hussar. I remember using the Ancient British Wounded figure and the US Cavalry to make Ancient British Light Horse. Not today as the range today is just superb.
Red Box now have an excellent range of figures and the historical accuracy and figure quality is now superb. With two boxes of 44 Kings Musketeers and 2 Boxes of 12 Mounted Musketeers this means that I can field 12 more than the one hundred that King Lois XIII could!
The Kings Musketeers:
King Louis the XIII
The Cardinal’s Guard:
It was not unusual for Officials to require bodyguards and Cardinal Richelieu received Royal permission. Whilst there was a strong rivalry often street and tavern altercations between the King’s and the Cardinal’s Guards the animosity often depicted in Hollywood does not appear to have existed.
There are some issues with the tabarded figures as instead of the white cross of the Cardinal they have the emblem of the king. I will just paint this white and ignore the error.
I am sure that these will come up well and I am looking forward to modelling the tavern comnplete with rooms and furniture to game over.
I’ll look forward to seeing your progress on these! 🙂 Your comments about converting Airfix figures ring true with me and I still use some of the Airfix Italians converted with plasticene on their helmets to represent WW2 Dutch East Indies troops (they’ve had their paint tidied up but I didn’t want to part with them)!
Look forward to this as “the Three Musketeers” is something I’ve long fancied doing myself!
Cheers Roger.