It's a tossup whether terrain or flags are the final touches to miniature gaming. For all those hours spent painting lead, pewter, or plastic, painting a flag is the last, and often overlooked item on the agenda. You can learn to paint figures to an acceptable level with a few hints and a little practice, but flags? The more complex the flag pattern, the more you need artistic merit to reproduce such flags.

If you have a scanner and graphics program, you can always grab something out of a uniform guide and print it out--assuming you have a color printer. Or use a photocopy machine, play with the reduction settings, and color the patterns by hand. But a far easier way is to buy sheets from a company specializing in printing flags--such as Regimental Colours.

RC is a new company, brought to you by wargamers, that sells printed sheets of color flags. There are approximately nine flags per sheet, with the price a reasonable $5 for 25mm flags and $3.50 for 15mm flags.

RC specializes in Seven Years War (7YW) and the American Revolution (AWI). The sample they sent was for Prussian Dragoon Regiment Nr. 7, 8, 9 from the 7YW. RC graciously gave permission for MagWeb to scan six 25mm flags--the upper tier are the regimental colors and the lower tier are the King's Colors.

Each flag is approximately 2.3 inches wide by 1.1 inches tall (including the fringe) and will wrap around a flagpole quite nicely with a coating of diluted white glue (which will also allow you to bend them into shape as you please). The colors are bright, the detail wonderful, and the name printed underneath each flag can do double duty as a label for your unit.

Although the web browser's limited color palette does not do the flags justice, and the image on screen is smaller (for speed of download) than the sheet sent in for review, take a look for yourself: Regimental Colours 7YW Sample Prussian Cavalry Flags (slow: 92K) .

Contact cmartelle@oasistech.com for more information, as the number of flags offered steadily increases and RC expands into the AWI period. You'll be glad you took the extra time, effort, and money to complete your regiments with RC's spiffy flags.