When I retired from government service, I discovered that I needed to find a hobby. Already a "veteran" in gaming WWII, there was a desire to try a new period. I saw an advertisement in THE COURIER concerning Union and Confederate armies by Essex which were in 15mm scale and were available for a reasonable sum from Wargames, Inc. of West Virginia. A quick telephone call to an English sounding gentleman at Wargames and, in a week, I had two nicely boxed instant armies. I was very pleasantly surprised by the figures. They came eight in a pack for the infantry and four in a pack for cavalry. Each box contained 128 infantry, plus command, 20 cavalry, and two cannon with crews. A general painting guide was included for each army. I was quite pleased with both the poses and the variety found in each box. There were two firing and two advancing poses in each box of infantry; three regular units and one zouave unit for each side. The cavalry came in two positions: charging with sabres, and firing carbines or shotguns to the front. I liked the fact that the horses and cavalry came in one piece. The artillerists were adequate, but the artillery turned out to appear a little small for the scale. The quality of the castings was excellent and I could start to paint them almost immediately - there was almost no flashing, even on the stands. The figures appeared to be reasonably durable as I only lost part of one rifle out of all of the 256 infantry figures. As I was quite satisfied with my starter sets, I ordered the supplemental boxes and several more zouave units. Essex has an excellent range of zouaves, and you can recreate almost every Civil War zouave or infantry unit with their line of figures. Their cavalry is also exremely good, with a wide range of figures. The only shortage found was in the artillery, which, as I said, appeared to be a little too small and had only one type of cannon. All of the figures are slightly smaller than Stone Mountain's, Freikorp's, or Minifig's. They do not look bad in their own units, but one cannot mix the individual figures well, in my opinion, with other lines. They seem to fit best with Minifigs, which is where I acquired my artillery. I recommend Essex as having a fairly wide range, excellent quality, and reasonable prices. As I stated before, the technical quality of the infantry and cavalry is worth every penny of their price, which was originally $2.00 per single pack and now is $2.33 a pack. The original armies were $38.00 each and a terrific value. Essex Miniatures can be purchased at many hobby shops or can be ordered from the U.S. distributor, Wargames, Inc. / Box 278 Rt. 40 East Triadelphia, WV 26059. Back to The Zouave Vol II No. 4 Table of Contents Back to The Zouave List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1988 The American Civil War Society This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com