Riskovia!

Ah, Riskovia - land of cheap and cheerful soldiers ...

As I posted here last week, when we played our debut game of Maurice, one of our armies was made up of figures from a Risk set, stuck to bases with Blu Tak. This wasn't intended to be anything permanent. For a start we quite like our Risk set as it is and it's a bit expensive to create an army from it really (have you seen how much a copy of Risk costs brand new these days?)

However the other day I was at a local street fair and a stall was selling knock-off copies of Risk for well under the cost of the real version. I took a gamble and picked one up, because for the price being asked it was worth it for the figures. It's true they haven't quite got the definition of the figures in the 'real' set, and the plastic's softer and cheaper, but they'll do. The board, card and dice are irrelevant (unless there's a good wargames campaign to be had out of a standard Risk board, in which case I have one going spare).

So what do you get? You get six sets of plastic figures, with a man standing about 12mm tall. Each set consists of 40 musket-armed infantry in a tricorn hat, 12 cavalry charging with sabres and 8 cannon with an attached crewman (who is carrying a flag). That's a grand total of 240 infantry, 72 cavalry and 48 cannon, or two armies each of 120 infantry, 36 cavalry and 24 cannon. For the money that's pretty good. I wish I'd bought the second set actually.

Here they are on 25mm square bases:

The infantry are based as a standard four base Maurice unit - I can do seven of those for each side, with a few spare figures over. With four base units I can do four units of cavalry (two figures to a base) with figures to spare. Artillery at one cannon to a base is going to give me plenty of spares. Careful juggling of figures should allow me to put some of the flag-waving cannon crew into the infantry ranks, and some of the spare infantry can become gunners. Spare cavalry will do for generals. In Maurice terms neither force is large, but it's a start. I can always pick up another set next time I see one, and have more figures than I'm ever likely to use.

The basing is half the size of standard Maurice basing (50mm frontages), but it's a game in which base widths are the standard measurement unit, so it just means a smaller playing area which suits the resources I have at home very nicely.

The 25mm bases, grouped into a 50mm square block of four bases, fit (just) in a standard Memoir '44/Battle Cry hex, so a game based around those systems is also viable.

All in all this knock-off Risk set is a useful source of figures for an era I might want to game but in which I don't, at present, wish to devote too much time or money to. The next step is to see how they look painted.