I’ve had bits and pieces of a 15mm Polish/Lithuanian army for For King & Parliament - Eastern Front for ages so, as I still can’t decide on my next Ancients army whether 15mm or 28mm, I thought that it was probably time to turn what I did have into a force that can take to the tabletop.

The key to a Polish/Lithuanian period of the time is, of course, the winged hussars. I did try the By Fire & Sword figures, sending them straight to friend Rob who had offered to paint them for me, but the quality on the new boxes of cavalry was not good, mainly because of the decision to use plastic horses with metal figures. As Rob said:

The riders are ok, some of the hands will need filing for lances to fit but par for the course and not great faces but workable. Standard BF&S figures as I recall them being like from the original edition.

The wings (a pair for each rider) are separate, very flat, and no instructions on how to attach them so I'll need to work that out. Not a problem once I have a look, just a bit of time & patience. Designed to attach to the saddle I think.

The horses though... are awful.

You've got one which has snapped off its integral base at the hooves, another with no tail, and several with mould flash around the head and mane. It's not the clean, light grey plastic like that of the Ottomans either, it's some rough brittle dark grey stuff, with terrible definition on the detail. Worst horses I have seen in ages, hands down.

Attached some pics of the horses; the issues mostly fairly obvious between damaged manes, missing bits, etc. Those I haven't photographed by no means great either - rough, poor casts, but at least 10 out of the 18, as pictured, have clear defects. The most ridiculous looking one is the one where the mane and half the neck is missing!

To give them their due, the By Fire & Sword people were happy to replace the value of the figures with a different box set, so I bought a whole load of Azabs for the Ottomans and started looking elsewhere for Winged Hussars. BTW the Azabs were nice and painted up well.

I eventually decided upon Khurasan Miniatures as the source of my winged hussars: you can see their 17th Century range here. With all the tax and postage issues, buying from Khurasan is a bit more of a pain than buying from a UK manufacturer, but Jon does his very best to make the process as painless as possible, and delivery is pretty quick considering too.

Rob declared that he was happy with these hussars, and painted them up. I think we can all agree that he has done a very nice job indeed.

Note that one base has got a couple of non-Khurasan hussars that I had lying around from when I had previously bought a unit of hussars from Instant Armies (recommended as a source of painted figures: always look out for them at shows).

So that’s the hussars done (although I shall probably collect a sixth unit in due course, just to make things symmetrical!) on to doing the infantry…