The Only Way Is Essex

 I'm really working hard at getting back to long, never ending fantasy games as I head towards my 55th birthday in a couple of months.

Yesterday, my Halflings turned up from Northstar and are now of the 'grand pile' headed soon to my painter as part of a 900 figure extension of my fantasy project, and today I've been over at Essex Miniatures this morning looking at their Elves, Gnomes, Dwarves and Centaurs.

Essex are a Marmite range, but I love them and always have. They are, like Dixon Miniatures, tactile and superbly cast models. 

The thing is, people carp on ad nauseum about Citadel all the time, but I think that in many cases they are only doing that because their only experience was a parochial one when it came to game stores, conventions shows and manufacturers. It's one of those odd things that whilst my parents would 'ground' me for a month for a minor infraction (see my book for more specifics) they wouldn't bat an eyelash at me going on a 200 mile or more round trip to an unfamilar city to get my games fix.

By age fourteen, I had gone all over the country visiting stores, shows and even factories to sate my fix, vastly broadening my knowledge of both the U.K and of the hobby. Back then you wrote away for catalogues or picked them up at shows, and you poured over them like mysterious alchemical texts, looking for the secret combination which could transmute lead into a near orgasm. Even Citadel had some lovely flyers which eventually fell apart from being literally taken everywhere by my young self.

Essex were featured quite a lot in the pages of White Dwarf and were regulars at the major shows back then. I remember seeing some of Joe Dever's Essex stuff and it just ticked every box, because he 'got it' when it came to successfully integrating historical models into fantasy games.

Now, I will admit that Ral Partha produced a lovely armoured centair bu Tom Meier, but the two which Essex made, were (and are) wonderfully understated, with the kind of nobility one imagines of this fantasy staple. 

I'm going to field a dozen of these wonderful models, maybe more, but they are supposedly elusive, so I'm not sure about going over a dozen models.

Gnomes... Very few people field units of Gnomes, and few companies make them, but again Essesx make some lovely little fellows, and I am ordering 60 of them, fielded in 3 units, as a brigade within my Forces Of Good. 

The Essex Elves are not the normal Elf (??!!) but have a quaint look to them. I like it, because Elves have increasingly become pointy-helmeted killing machines and I like the more rural feel of the Essex line. I'm pretty sure I'll see other stuff on the site too, but I really need to try and look at what I already have in the pile before adding to it.

Check Essex out, and you may just get a frison of the excitement we Golden Age Grognards experienced.

TTFN