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sundancer.
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At the start of the year, I backed Avatars of War’s Kickstarter campaign for their plastic stone trolls, and the box arrived today.
OK, that’s not exactly thrilling.
Ah, that’s better. The first thing you notice is that the box is heavy! There are ‘only’ 10 trolls, after all. (Actually 11, as I’ve got a special troll as well – a KS goodie.)
Inside the box there are 4 bags (2x 5 trolls, 1x bases and the 11th troll) and a small leaflet with assembly instructions. It’s important to note, firstly, that these are PVC miniatures, so you need to use superglue (plastic glue won’t work here!), and secondly, because the figures are very large and bulky, you should position them appropriately on the bases if you want to play Rank & File. (I don’t want to, mind you, but it’s a useful tip.)
The contents of one of the two large bags bearing the ‘Avatars of War’ logo:
- 5 different lower bodies
- 5 different upper bodies
- 12 different heads
- 5 different ‘two-handed’ weapon options
- 4 different left hands and 4 different right hands
Six of the heads are in two parts and need to be glued together. It’s a bit fiddly, but if you’re not too clumsy, you’ll manage.
The observant reader will have noticed that there are enough heads for all 10 trolls in one bag, so you don’t need to worry about which head goes on which upper body. To avoid duplicates, however, you do need to check which upper body goes on which lower body, and one weapon option will need to be used twice.
So this is what the first five lads look like.
And now their five brothers are standing behind them. Lost in the crowd, the similar-looking sculptures hardly stand out.
But wasn’t there an eleventh troll as well?
There he is. And he’s actually the reason why I backed the project. The troll who messed up his test and is now ‘looking up’ the rules in the rulebook. (You can’t see it here, but the book actually says ‘Rules’ in big letters, and you can tell the troll is holding the book upside down. I love details like that.
That leaves 14 heads and various weapon options. Let’s see what we can do with them.
Now let’s get to the review of these little big lads. The reason the box is so heavy: the miniatures are made of solid PVC rather than lightweight injection-moulded plastic. The arms, which have to be glued to the torsos, are ‘keyed’. In other words, they don’t have universal joints but only fit in one position. Tongue and groove. Much like the first miniatures from Star Wars: Legion. Weapon mounts, heads and torsos, on the other hand, have a ball joint and can be rotated and posed with reasonable freedom. Although the two-handed weapons cannot be rotated, the six torsos where the arms are aligned in pairs all have the same distance between the arms (3 cm). It therefore doesn’t matter which weapon is attached to which pair of arms.
The detail on these models is superb – there’s a great deal of it, and it’s rendered very sharply. There are a few moulding flash and injection points. The latter are easy to remove and are often in hidden places, but the moulding flash does require a bit of effort. Here too, the leaflet offers some good advice: don’t file them. PVC doesn’t like that. Just scrape them off with a blunt knife or conceal them later with paint and effects.
The trolls come with 40mm bases. There’s a recess in the bases for a small magnet – I’d estimate 5x2mm or 5x1mm.
It took me two hours to assemble the whole regiment. And it was great fun.
Conclusion: if you need ‘a few’ fantasy trolls, you can snap these up without hesitation. You can order them directly from AoW, in which case the box (excluding the book troll!) costs €49.99. However, if you check at your local games shop, you can often find them for less. My dealer is currently taking pre-orders for about €10 less. €4–5 per troll is perfectly justified.
If you have any questions or comments, leave me a comment. And otherwise, have fun with the trolls.
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