American Civil War wargaming

One of the first complete collection of wargame armies I owned was an American Civil War one. It was made up of Airfix figures, and they were almost painted. (Almost, because they were mainly left in their original mounded colour, and had their muskets, faces, and hands painted. The exception was the artillery, which were moulded in a brown plastic, and which got a basic overall coat of blue or grey paint.)

I had many enjoyable battles with these figures, including a refight of Donald Featherstone’s action around Plattville, but when I began buying metal figures, my ACW collection went into storage ... and eventually got ‘lost’. (I think that my mother may have given it away to a neighbour’s child after I had left home.)

I resurrected my interest in the ACW in the early 1970s, and I painted quite a few of the then-new 25mm Minifig figures as Union soldiers ... but I never painted any Confederates, and these figures were passed on to another wargamer only relatively recently. I had another attempt in the mid 1980s, this time using Minifig 15mm figures ... but the project was never completed and most of the figures were permanently loaned to another wargamer.

Recently, I decided that I would try again, but as I did not want to go through the trials and tribulations of painting a whole load of figures, I began to look around for some table-ready figures. I trawled through eBay, but found that any figures that might do were either already based and would need rebasing or were not very well painted, even by my standards. Essex Miniatures sell complete ready-painted ACW armies, and they were one option I considered. I also looked at buying some of Peter Dennis’s Paperboy figures because they were cheap and required only a small amount of work on my part to get them ready for use on my tabletop.

At this point, I was introduced to WoFun figures. (WoFun is an abbreviation of ‘World of Fun’, and it is a Romanian company that prints Peter Dennis’s figures on plexiglass.) I considered that they might be a simple and fast way to acquire an ACW collection, and about a month before I went into hospital, I ordered a complete collection of 18mm ACW figures from them. They arrived whilst I was in hospital, and my wife unpacked them for me to look at a couple of days after I got home. They looked even better than I had expected, and once I am a bit more mobile (hopefully sometime over the next few days) I intend to get the figures out of their box and based. Once I have, I’ll write a review of them.