Goonhammer Historicals Review: Wargames Atlantic and Piano Wargames French Infantry in Greatcoats

As a known Greatcoat Enjoyer, I jumped at the chance to review this kit! Despite their allegiance to the perfidious upstart "Emperor," these 28mm winter French will make excellent enemies for my winter Russians.

Thanks to Wargames Atlantic for providing this kit for review.

I'll start with the bottom line up front: this is an excellent kit. It scales nicely with the Perry range of winter Napoleonics, the instructions are solid for historicals plastics, the detail level is perfect for a model that you'll likely paint at least a few dozen of, and the non-standard sprues have plenty of variation. I do have a couple of (very, very) minor nits, but they're more things that would be "nice-to-have" than real issues with the sprue. This box is a hearty recommend from me!

The Sprues

Wargames Atlantic and Piano Wargames French Greatcoat Infantry Sprue

This is the basic infantry sprue, which will make up the bulk of your battalion. There are 5 bodies on it, and you get 4 of these in the box. There are also about a million heads, so that you can make your models into Guard, skirmishers, grenadiers, basic line infantry, or even wearing bicornes - a more civilized hat from an earlier age.

A few things worth noting on this one:

Each sprue has 6 musket arms and 4 left arms with epaulettes. Our French correspondent, Lenoon, tells me that this is perfect for doing full Guard bases. There are, however, only two heads per sprue with bearskins.
There are exactly 5 haversacks for the 5 bodies. Make sure and keep these straight, because some of the models have their bayonet sheaths on their packs, and some on the bodies.

Extra gear, odds, and ends to add a little character to your models. If anyone can tell me what the big loop of pom-poms is supposed to be, I'll be a happy reviewer. (Lenoon editor's note: Pretty sure they're onions.)

There are several little bits of stowage on the sprue, which is very nice for adding a little character to your models. There aren't obvious straps or other attachment points on any of the bodies, so feel free to just stick them on at will.
Finally, there are some very impressive mustache options for the heads with Elite Company headgear. This is correct and good.

Wargames Atlantic and Piano Wargames French Command & Skirmisher Sprues

These two sprues of 4 models each are your battalion's skirmishers and command stand - drummer, vexillary, officer, and sapper. In general, these sprues have great character! One thing to note is that all of the bits for the sapper have sculpted details of their distinctive crossed axes. That's helpful, but if you're putting together a larger project, it does limit the amount of variation you can model in.

Construction

I spent a delightful couple of evenings picking over the sprues and choosing my bits. These models all went together very easily, and the sculptors made sure to include parts numbers for the arms modeled at high porte - something that would have been easy to overlook. The packs don't exactly index to the bodies, but with a little bit of pressure, they do "settle" into a place that feels and looks right.

Built Command & Skirmishers

When you're building the skirmishers, you'll think you have more options than you really do. As an inveterate "make My Dudes different" hobbyist, I take no pleasure in reporting that the box art really does show the best poses for the arms from that sprue. These sculpts are slightly more dynamic than the rest of the models in the box, and the arms match up to the poses very well. The second-right model, above, was my attempt to break the mold, and he looks just a little awkward with both right limbs forward. I was able to get a slightly different pose on the farthest right model in the picture by stealing a pointing arm from an officer and the loosely-held musket, but if I had built the entire box, that would have simply pushed the problem to a different model. Build the skirmishers slowly, and match up the arms to the box art. The epaulettes and tabs are always intended to go up, which will help orient the arms if you're unsure.

As I was building the line infantry, I found myself wishing that there were one or two heads with uncovered shakos on the sprue. All of the heads in this kit have an upturned collar, which I think would pair very nicely with an uncovered shako. I didn't have any French heads lying around my bits box, so I pulled a Russian plastic head out to see how easy to convert this kit would be. It turns out, not very! The neck connection point on these bodies is quite wide - even the heads with the collar show some gaps, though they're small enough that they can pass as folds in the fabric. However, the Perry Russian head that I stuck on is significantly smaller at the neck, and it does look a little pinheaded - second from the left in the image below. It would probably be easy for someone more skilled with Green Stuff than I to turn out a good collar/gap fill job, but it's covered shakos for me, I'm afraid!

Wargames Atlantic and Piano Wargames Line Infantry & Young Guard. Credit: marquis_of_peaches

I'll close with two minor nitpicks on construction: first, the pair of high porte arms I used with epaulettes didn't quite line up - there was a very small gap at the connection points. I tried them on a couple different torsos, but couldn't get it to go away. It was easy enough to gap fill with plastic glue, and it's unnoticeable in the final model, but it is there. Second, several of the muskets have a sprue gate in between the lock and the cheek riser. This is a tight fit for clippers, and has to be cleaned up very carefully.

The tricky sprue gate in question. 5/15 muskets on the infantry sprue have this connection.

Painting

Painting these guys was a blast! As I've mentioned, this box strikes a perfect level of detail, with enough stuff to make them interesting and worth painting, but not so many greeblies that I felt bogged down. The greatcoat allows you to break out your whole collection of browns and greys and more or less slop contrast paints and washes out willy-nilly. You could paint the greatcoats the exact same across all of your models, but they would turn into a muddy blob on the tabletop. You also have to be careful that your models don't turn into muddy blobs - there's a lot of brown on these guys!

Four very cold French line infantry, multibased in the snow. Credit: marquis_of_peaches

I more or less followed this painting guide for these, with a couple exceptions. I used Citadel Dawnstone as my base for the greatcoats, followed by one of my many brown contrast paints at random. Luckily, the greatcoat covers up most of the colors that make the soldiers of the various Napoleonic nations distinct, so the painting guide becomes generic. The only places left for national colors are the pompoms on the various headgear, the cords on the sword hilts, and the epaulettes. Because I refused to learn the nitty-gritty of the Upstart Empereur's regulations, I went with red across the board for these, plus yellow epaulette boards for the grenadiers. Feel free to tell me what colors that they should be in the comments.

The shako covers were made of canvas, so they got my normal khaki recipe: Flayed One Flesh, followed by a wash of Reikland Fleshshade. A few of the straps are sculpted as rope, so they got Flayed One Flesh before the Nuln Oil wash of the straps. Generally, the goal is to mix cool and warm browns and whites to create a visually interesting color scheme with not very many textures. These would be very easy to bang out batches of 3-6 in a couple hours in an evening, once you've got your recipe down.

Scale

This box scales very nicely with the other Napoleonics I have, both plastics and metals:

From the left: Wargames Atlanic, Wargames Atlantic with Perry head, Perry, North Star Muskets & Tomahawks, North Star Silver Bayonet, Wargames Atlantic

The heights are pretty consistent across the board. The facial features on the Wargames Atlantic models are clearly newer, with more realistic proportions and lifelike expressions. However, they do scale surprisingly well, and if you really wanted to mix and match bits across manufacturers, it would only take some light sculpting.

Facial features comparison. From the left: Wargames Atlantic, Wargames Atlantic torso with Perry head, Perry

Final Thoughts

If you're at all interested in a project of winterized Frenchmen*, this is 100% the kit to buy. The long march from Moscow takes up an inordinate amount of the zeitgeist around Napoleon's battles, and this is a great kit to fill out the long, terrible march home. The models are excellent, and other than some very minor nitpicks and wishlist items, go together like a breeze. They paint up quickly, and afford you a canvas to go hog-wild with detail if you really want to - seriously, check out the box art! Some of those guys are wearing pinstriped pants under their greatcoats! If I ever decide to put together a proper OpFor for my winter Russians, I'll be buying more of these boxes.

*Lenoon editors note: The French also wore greatcoats in the spring, summer and autumn.

If you want to pick up these excellent Frenchmen, why not support Goonhammer while you're at it using our Wargames Atlantic affiliate link here!

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Tags: historicals | napoleonics | wargames atlantic