Saturday, November 18, 2017

The GBP Dark Age Cavalry are here!

I returned from a hospital appointment this morning to find that Mick the Postie had left a box from Gripping Beast.  So here are my first impressions of the plastic Dark Age Cavalry from Gripping Beast.

The box contains four identical sprues, each with parts to make three riders and horses. This means that, with the riders consisting of a main piece (torso, legs, upper arms and lower left arm) to which we add a choice of lower right arms and heads, the choice of rider poses will be somewhat limited.  Slightly disappointing, that.


The riders wear over-tunics with short baggy sleeves beneath which is a tight-sleeved undergarment. This gives them a vaguely Norman look although a quick look through Barker's Armies and Enemies of Ancient Rome and Heath's Armies of the Dark Ages 600-1066 reveals no illustrations that match this look.


We get a choice of four right arms with spears and two with swords.  Hands holding axes can be substituted and one of more spearheads could be replaced with a Draco head.  I replaced the spears of my Late Roman Infantry with wire ones.  It was a bit of a faff; I may stick with the moulded-on plastic ones this time.

There are enough shields to give the resulting unit all oval or all round shields or of course you could mix them up.  A quick check shows that the oval shields are identical to those in the Late Roman Infantry set.

Eight heads per sprue are nice and characterful, though I note that Dan Mersey has questioned one of the helmet designs.  Personally I think I'll mix in some heads from the Roman set as I plan to use these guys for the Arthurian period.

Oh and finally, the box contains twelve 50mm square bases.  I'll not be using them. 




2 comments:

The Kiwi said...

Awesome! Looking forward to getting this set. Some light-medium cavalry will be perfect in my Anglo-Saxon Army.
Cheers

Counterpane said...

Hi Kiwi!

By way of an update, I started building some of the horses yesterday. They don't fit together a well as the Perry plastic horses do.

Also, it turn out that the horse halves are not fully interchangeable. Two of the tails are on the right hand half and one of them's on the left! To some extent this is sensible as the odd-one-out is in a rather more static pose. I am going to look into a bit of surgery to give me more variety of pose.