If you use miniatures in your tabletop games, it's easy to get spoiled when you start buying Citadel miniatures. Games Workshop miniatures tend to be high-quality, highly detailed, and super imaginative. In fact, if anything, Games Workshop is too imaginative. Really. Some of their sculpts are bizarre, but that's because they're mostly made specifically for either Warhammer 40,000 or Warhammer Age of Sigmar, and those are shockingly unique sci fi and fantasy universes, respectively. However, there are miniatures with the Citadel range that happen to be "normal" enough to nicely fit in to other games. The Citadel miniatures I've gotten a lot more play out of than I'd ever expected are the Traitor Guardsmen of Blackstone Fortress, and here's why.
1. Numbers
There are 14 of these little guys in the Blackstone Fortress game box, 2 each of 7 distinct sculpts. I admit I was a little disheartened at first when I saw that, and for the whole time I was building and painting them. I felt like I'd been cheated. I bought a box for LOTS of NZ Dollars (everything in New Zealand costs a lot, even after currency conversion, because everything has to be shipped here and everything is far away), and I'd been promised 60 miniatures, but 14 of them were these boring humans! And then I had to build, undercoat, and then paint each one. That's 14 and 14 and then 14 AGAIN. That's, like 42 works, and at the time that seemed like a lot of work.
Then I looked at them, all painted and ready for the table, and I realised I had two teams of 7 soldiers with a variety of weapon types:
- Pistols
- Rifles
- Flamers
- Grenades
- Clubs
- Chain swords
- Sword
This is a kill team, or a unit in a slapdash combat patrol, or a gang of raiders for my Fallout board game, or my entire team for Space Station Zero or Reign in Hell, all the baddies I need for Raid, and so on. PLUS, there's the game I got them in.
2. Looks
The traitor guardsmen sculpts are, as usual for Citadel, sharp and detailed and meticulous and imaginative. There's a guy with a shovel strapped to his back. The one with the flamer has a spare fuel tank on his belt. The guy with a pistol and a chain sword has a grenade on his belt. Some of them wear furs, others chains, some have heraldry of sorts (well, they have some rags they drape over their armour). They're not just rank and file filler units. They look and feel like important figures on the battlefield. Heck, they sure have more personality than most uniform space marines.
3. Poses
Every single sculpt has a unique pose. And they're all action-oriented.
The grenade is being thrown. You can see the pin in the guy's free hand, that's how urgent it is.
The rifle's being carefully aimed.
The pistol guy is one just one foot because he's running so quickly toward his enemy.
The exception, I guess, is the one with the chain sword and pistol. He's just standing around, chain sword presented proudly before him and pistol raised so it can let off some heat. But he's also the most decorated of sculpt. He's got a trophy rack of spikes and skulls, and his cloak blows in the wind. Sure, he's not being dynamic in his pose, but everything around him certainly is.
4. Schemes
Because there are two of each model, I chose to paint two separate companies: the traitors and the raiders. (I didn't mean for it to rhyme.)
I painted the traitors Space Grey (Vallejo Xpress Color) with black helmets and armour, to suggest that they were in uniform. I used a unique colour for each of their cloaks, as if they'd added a cloak as a way to express their individuality.
For the raiders, I used earth tones like Wasteland Brown and Plague Green (Vallejo Xpress Color). This way, they're believable as a camouflaged unit of the guardsmen, or as wasteland raiders who scrounged together everything they have from junk.
5. Conversions
It turns out that these guys are really easy to customise. In fact, it's almost hard to not customise them. They beg for it. They have so many spikes that you can clip one off one guy and glue it onto another one, and suddenly you have two "new" sculpts. Because Blackstone Fortress has a few leftover bits, I was able to add a few chains and even a custom flail. I cut off one of the clubs, too, and replaced it with a spike, so now one model wields a ranged SMG and a melee dagger.
Unexpected treat
I had to build and paint them before I saw the value, but these Traitor Guardsmen miniatures are some of my favourite. It's weirdly not on an emotional level. If you asked me what my favourite miniatures were, I probably wouldn't think of them first. But if I could only take one case of miniatures to a desert island, these would be among them. They look good, and they're broadly useful.
I guess it's easy to forget that miniatures are, beyond the artistry it takes to create them, just meeples. They're tokens for a board game. And like those generic colourful glass beads I use in practically every game I ever play, the best miniature is sometimes the one that can be anything and everything.
Traitor guardsmen photo by Seth Kenlon.