Warriors of Minas Tirith: Day One

The hype over War of the Ring (thanks Gary), combined with the guys at World's End Radio giving the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game a good deal of coverage on their show, has me seriously looking at GW's Lord of the Rings miniatures. I still managed to hold the line until the latest issue of White Dwarf and the Warriors of the Dead release. I'm looking at those miniatures going "that's a white base coat with a green wash... they make Necrons look like a hard army to paint!"

Not having any of the rules or army lists, I had to do a bit of research using Army Builder, White Dwarf, and the internet to find out that while I can field Warriors of the Dead as a LotRSBG skirmish force by themselves, I'd probably need to field them with forces of Gondor for WotR. That got me looking at the Warriors of Minas Tirith miniatures that look like they're not much harder to paint than the Warriors of the Dead.

With my resolve crumbling I stopped at the FLGS while running some other errands to see if they had a copy of the LotRSBG rules. They didn't, but they did have boxed sets of most of the plastic miniatures, including a couple boxes of Warriors of Minas Tirith. Still, I managed to resist... for about four more hours when I finally broke down and called the store to see if they were still open. I then drove back and picked up a box along with a pack of company bases for WotR.

Once I got home I broke out the two sprues that come in the box, and assembled all 24 miniatures before going to bed. Unlike most Warhammer plastic miniatuers, most of the Warriors of Minas Tirith minis are one piece. All you have to do is trim them from the sprue, clean them up a little, and glue them to the base. A third of them have their spear arm as a separate piece, but that's it. So, in just a couple of hours I had eight swordsmen, eight bowmen and eight spearmen ready to be primed.

I didn't think to take pictures of the assembly process, but will try to take some of the other steps as this project continues.