Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Friday 17 April 2015

New Blog on 25mm Ros figures!


Iain very kindly drew attention to a blog which I had not seen before, which is dedicated to the (legendary) 25mm Ros wargame figures, which were a brilliant idea in principle but disappeared quickly.

The picture at the top is borrowed from the blog, which you will find here. I am very impressed - this is what blogs should be - celebration of the rare and the obsolete and the vanished - works of true affection. Humbling. My own short post on Ros was some 4-and-a-bit years ago, and is here, and I hope that it captured my appreciation of Ros's efforts - obviously their 6mm figures are very successful and rightly celebrated, but most wargamers and collectors are unaware that the 25mm range ever existed. Well they did, and it was a splendid idea - deliberately cheap and cheerful - you got 10 infantry or 4 cavalry to a bag, and the idea was to enable rapid build-up of inexpensive armies.

Not sure why they stopped making them - the "true 25mm" approach meant that they were a bit big for the 20mm collectors and were also rendered obsolete by the sudden growth of mainstream 25mm into something rather larger. Maybe they arrived on the scene a couple of years late - they would have made comfortable table-mates with S-Range and Lamming. I had a few units - the only one I have left now are my ferocious Chasseurs Britanniques, who have, admittedly, some non-Ros command figures - these chaps have been the heroes of many of my battles over the years; there is something especially satisfying about the occasions when they see off much more prestigious units, manned by more revered makes of figures.

Here they are.



Anyway - best of luck to the Ros blog - I would follow it officially if it did not require me to be recalibrated to Google+ (which a friend recently described as "the Betamax Facebook" - I would not have a view on this). I shall watch the blog with friendly interest.

7 comments:

  1. Hmm....followed it on blogger with no difficulty. Very nice chasseurs. SHQ officer I think?

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    1. You are indeed a better man than I am, Gunga, but nothing new there! Chasseurs - 2 types of Ros private (flank & battalion co), SHQ colonel on a NapoleoN horse, NapoleoN standard bearers, foot officer and drummer are intermediate Minifigs with head transplants. Flags are an educated guess based on a sketch incorporating the arms of Conde. First up, best dressed! They are conspicuously not light infantry - they were never light infantry.

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  2. Bravo! Do you know, I think I my have a few. I think they'll paint up rather well

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    1. I'm especially supportive of all blogs for unusual or extinct figures!

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  3. My Rospac Greek hoplites, Thracian peltasts and Scythian foot archers were the core of my greek and Persian armies for a decade and did service for 30 years.
    http://gatheringofhosts.blogspot.ca/2009/11/hordes-of-poor-quality-infantry.html

    I must need more coffee, I don't seem to be able to find a link to said blog.

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    1. Ross - I think the link works - you click on the word "here" and say the magic word. Good show with the Ros ancients - I never saw any before.

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  4. Got some of the Rospak Romans, they went out before I could buy any Greeks. I'd completely forgotton about the metal Ros ranges.

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