Italeri Nomad Horde

Figure Review

by Jonathan Aird

A really perfect set of figures from Italeri - 15 cavalry figures make up the Nomad Horde set. Of these, 6 are on heavily barded horses and 9 on lighter horses. There are 4 poses of horse - the armoured horses being either at a stand or moving at a trot, whilst the light horses are more animated. As is to be expected there is an officer figure, a standard bearer, and several variants of spear, sword and of course bow armed riders. All the riders, in fact, have been moulded with a bow as part of their equipment. These are beautifully sculpted figures - no beating around the bush here - and make an excellent compliment set to the Teutonic Knights which appeared a few months back.

The only down side to the set is that there are no foot figures at all. However, one can still build a DBA army with just 2 boxes, and the same 2 boxes would give you 1,000 points for Warhammer Ancient Battles (WHAB). Another box would lift the WHAB force to 1,300 points (or, alternatively, allows the option of an all Light Horse DBA army, rather than a mix of light Horse and cavalry). This would leave a few heavy horse figures over, since WHAB requires a ratio of 1:3 Heavy to Light Horse. This can be got around by swapping horses from the Italeri Saracen set - a good idea if a Saracen army is also being built, since the Saracen box of figures doesn't have any armoured horses at all.

Now, 30 figures might sound like quite a small army, but, for example, the basic WHAB 1,000 point Roman force consists of only about 50 figures. The Nomad horde could be beefed up by the addition of some balsa wood constructed war machines, crewed by whatever spare foot figures you can scrape together - perhaps some Celts/Ancient Britons/Robin Hood figures - whatever you've got, suitably trimmed, painted and added to with milliput. At £3 a box these are a real bargain (i.e. a cavalry figure for 20p, compares well to HaT - 12 cavalry for £4.50, or Revell - 12 cavalry for £3.50 - £4), and are not to be missed by anyone gaming Ancients or Medievals in this scale.

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