Romans are quite possibly one of the most iconic and popular historical armies and one with which we’re both passionate. Once work was started on them we had to ensure a great piece of art and found Pater Dennis, a local chap who is a truly stunning artist and keen gamer. He produced a beautiful cover showing Legionaries clashing with a Celtic warband. We knew that the Romans would have to have some opposition, so we chose a horde army of Celts and are currently producing British tribesmen to oppose the invaders, too.

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ACG: Given that Mongoose Publishing tried selling modern-era plastic miniatures and got out of that market altogether, what do you see in the market that makes you feel you’ll succeed?

In short, experience and passion. Mongoose are great at making rules and developing systems around their multitude of licenses—they are a truly amazing company which goes from strength to strength. What they don’t have though is a wealth of experience at making great miniatures. That’s where we win through; pretty much our whole working lives have been around the processes, people and experiences of making great miniatures.

Add that experience to our passion to produce not just hard-plastic miniatures but the BEST possible hard-plastic miniatures, and you can see where our conviction comes from.

ACG: Are these miniatures produced in China, the UK, or elsewhere?

We currently produce our plastic models in the UK. Our metal models we cast ourselves in our own foundry. Having control over casting is most important as complex models (chariots , for example) can be unusable if only one piece is missing.

ACG: How is the UK/European market for miniatures different from the US?

Apart from the US market removing "U’s" from all our words (colour, Armour, etc)? Seriously though, wargaming is a broad church and there are more similarities than differences. One big difference we’ve known from our GW days which has been highlighted even further is that the US market is streets ahead in terms of gaming activity. Over in the US, a participation game is one where players sign up weeks in advance and celebrate all the great things in wargaming with their fellow players. In Europe a participation game is often one where the players might talk to you between "their" turns! Of course, we’re being a bit naughty with that gross generalisation, but it serves to show that the biggest differences are those of mindset.

Warlord attends shows on both sides of the Pond. We are getting increasing numbers of orders in from the States, particularly as the pound has dropped significantly to the dollar. In general, we see little cultural differences between how countries buy our models … though I would love to know what on earth that customer in Maine was doing with 90 marching Legionaries and 24 mules.

ACG: Any other historical periods in the works?

We’ve just recently announced our latest range – The English Civil Wars and Thirty Years War. These have gone down very well with the gaming public, and we’ve been inundated with emails, calls and letters already.

We’ve also recently acquired Bolt Action Miniatures, Ltd., so we now have a huge range of World War II miniatures, vehicles and terrain. We’ll be adding to this range aggressively in coming months, so keep your eyes peeled on our website or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

We do have other periods and ranges in the pipeline but we tend towards having something to show before we announce new ranges—we learnt that the hard way at GW in the early days!

ACG: Anything else you’d like to add?

We recently celebrated our first year in business and are doing just fine. Is it easy? No, but no one ever said it would be! We both believe that there is a historical market out there, and the likes of the Perry, Victrix and Wargames Factory putting out plastics into the world seems to back us up. We remain convinced that the historical market will remain small but significant. Really great movies like Gladiator, 300 or Saving Private Ryan help enormously, as do computer games to an extent.

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Tags: miniatures game, Roman Empire, wargame