Steel Fist Samurai

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.

Four yari armed samurai. I struggled a bit doing justice on the intricate lacing on the armour plates, but to be honest, they look okay for a tabletop.

The sashimonos currently lack any mons, as I’m yet to decide which clan these samurai belong to.

This pair of horse archers were another of the recent additions to the Steel Fist range. Native Japanese horses were small and sturdy, related to the hardy ponies that the Mongols used. They also rarely had any facial markings, so I had to resist any flourishes like stars or stripes that I like to add to give horses more individual character.

The horse’s saddle and headgear have sets of cloth straps (sangai) that were typically a single colour such as red, yellow, blue or purple, so a good opportunity to add some bright colours. The reins (tazuna) were a piece of cloth, often a single colour, but blue and white striped versions also common.

A great place to get some inspiration of Samurai cavalry is to look up images for Sōma Nomaoi, which is a festival held in Fukushima with lots of people dressed as Samurai and holding races and other competitions.

These Sohei (Buddhist warrior monks) are relatively recent additions to the Steel Fist range of miniatures. Again, some very characterful models that were good fun to paint, even though the colour scheme involves a combination of  yellow, orange, white and black – colours that I often struggle to paint well, now all together on the same models!

Been a little while since I updated this project, and although I haven’t painted up any more samurai, I have been working on getting some suitable terrain together.

The buildings are resin models by Oshiro Model Terrain, whilst everything else has been scratch built to keep costs down

A second samurai carrying a nodachi, a long handled sword with a blade that could be up to 5 foot long. The armour of this samurai is bit plainer than the last one, but has the tall helm seen on another model that mimics the popular court hats of the time (an eboshi kabuto).

Another more unusual weapon on this model, this time a nagamaki, a long handled sword.

Inspiration from woodblock prints again. A triangular pattern on the armour plates is relatively frequently seen in prints, so I had an attempt at replicating it, along with the common green and orange/red colours.

Despite the project name, this model is by Footsore Miniatures, and comes in the Test of Honour core game set. I love the pose of this model, although he doesn’t really mix with the heavily armoured samurai.

More batch painted ashigaru, armed with yari (spears). Again, keeping the armour and weapons relatively plain as per the other ashigaru.

Another set of ashigaru painted as a batch, this time armed with yumi (bows). I repeated the more plain armour colours as used on the last ashigaru, but couldn’t help myself from picking out the odd detail.

One of the joys of Steel Fist range is the slightly more unusual sculpts, with armour styles and weaponry not commonly seen in other miniature ranges. This model is a good example, wearing fur covered armour, and a stylised helmet (kawari kabuto), and wields a huge two-handed iron club (kanemuchi). He’s also got a lovely beard, characteristic of the Aniu people of northern Japan.

I really like the pose of this model, katana raised high to strike. The samurai has fairly tall kabuto that mimics the style of hats worn at court, although there are more extreme examples within range produced by Steel Fist. Colours for this one were inspired by the woodblock print used as the image for this project’s header.

Next model was another samurai, this time armed with a yari. I picked out another colour scheme from a woodblock print, this time with mainly purple armour, but with plenty of other colour details.

I’m quite enjoying the approach of finding a colour pattern from a woodblock print, as it ends up with some very impactful results. However, if I was trying to put together a reasonably sized army, I’d have to reign in on it a lot.

This was also a milestone model for me, marking 200 painted models in 2020. I don’t really do speed painting, so I’m pretty chuffed with turning around that many models, and with a few weeks left to go for the year yet.

I did these four ashigaru armed with teppo as a batch. Although there is still some variation in styles of armour, they are not as individual as the samurai. Despite there not really being anything like a uniform for ashigaru, I figured that having similar equipment was not too unrealistic, and just varied the clothing underneath to keep a sense of a non-uniformed unit.

To get some inspiration for different colour schemes and patterns, I have been looking at various woodblock prints of samurai. Some of the detailing is beyond my skills, but there are a great source to get some ideas of broad colour schemes for individual samurai. For my next model, I used the image below as a starting point.