The Cossack Tabor Rolls Up

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Tabor Commander

Finally finished the first four bases of Cossack Tabor: the war wagons that can serve either as fortifications or as a moving fort.

These figures are the first of the By Fire & Sword miniatures: a Polish figure manufacturer specialising in 17th Century eastern European wars. Friend Bevan is collecting Poles, so I went for the Zaporozhian Cossacks.

I thought these were going to be a bit like the Cossacks you see in Taras Bulba (i.e. masses of light cavalry) but actually these particular Cossacks had rubbish cavalry (substituting Tartars when they needed horse) and were specialists in infantry fighting from behind lines of war wagons. Ah well, you live and learn!

What with lockdown, lorry drivers, Brexit and an imminent second edition, By Fire & Sword miniatures are quite hard to get hold of in the UK. I started my collection by cleaning out the Entoyment Hobby & Wargames Centre online store. Entoyment are an excellent supplier who not only offered a slight discount but also posted my figures to me the very next day after I’d ordered them. Highly, highly recommended.

I don’t usually bother with an unboxing photo, but the By Fire & Sword packaging for their Cossack Tabor box set is absolutely lovely. Here’s a little gallery of the original outside packaging, the inside box, and what the box looks like when you open it. Lovely: really got me enthused to get painting.

The Build

The wagons come in several bits: the wagon body, an under-wagon frame that holds the wheels and provides the tongue/shaft, the horses (about half with saddle and rider, half with just a yoke), a few small cannon to mount at the corner of a wagon, and the wagon crew.

Putting the wagons together is fairly easy, although I did find that I had to drill out every wheel’s socket with a pin drill before being able to fix them. A pain, and certainly much more difficult than most wagon wheel attaching.

I chose not to attach the crews onto the wagons before painting, although I did attach all the riders to their mounts.

The Paint

Painting was fairly easy: I used GW Contrast Paints as usual but restricted myself to dark reds, dark greens and two 0r three blues for the Cossack crews.

This is how they turned out:

Overall I’m very happy with these, and looking forward to getting them onto the tabletop. I’ll be using them with an adaption of For King & Parliament, using a single base as the Tabor as a Fortification, and double bases as the Tabor as moving, deep war-wagons

Next up are the Registered Cossack infantry…