Empress Miniatures Kickstarter

Brace yourselves, I'm going to try to convince everyone reading this that they should immediately back a Kickstarter project...

It's at least theoretically possible that someone remembers that I spoke to one of the guys on the Empress Miniatures stand at Vapnartak earlier this year, and he told me that they were planning to expand their modern combat range to cover a fictional conflict between the US and China.

This is now being run as a project on Kickstarter, called Devil Dogs and Dragons.

So far the models on offer are two flavours of US Marines (in helmets or boonie hats, depending on whether you want them to be dressed for the tropics or not) and the Chinese People's Liberation Army. That's three sets of 20 models each, covering 12 different riflemen poses plus support weapons and command. There's also the standard free model for all backers above £5, and extra freebies at the higher levels.

Ooh, shiny - the title from the Kickstarter page

The stretch goals also look good. The first, Navy SEAL frogmen, has already been reached and the second, PLA special forces, isn't far off. A full Australian set follows on from that.

I've pledged to this, as the models look great, as do the Empress models that I already have. I'm especially keen on having a small unit of Navy SEAL frogmen! Since I already have a few US infantry I've opted for the full PLA set plus a couple of US extras. These will (it's going to happen, it really is) be used for Flashbang (my own rules) plus I'm going to take a look at Force on Force as that seems to be the standard for modern warfare rules now.

USMC Command - a picture from the Kickstarter page

As I've said before, the quality of the Empress Miniatures sculpts is really high, and they take great pains to get the equipment looking accurate and to have very natural poses (apparently each model is based on a photo of a real soldier).

PLA fighting - a picture from the Kickstarter page

So I'd encourage everyone to pledge for this, if only to unlock more stretch goals! Go on, you know you want to...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/535186969/empress-miniatures-devil-dogs-and-dragons-28mm-fig