Let me preface this post by saying I am not a Trench Crusade hater, even if some of the things I write below might sound a bit harsh. Quite the opposite: it has been one of my favourite casual games of the past year. I invested heavily in the Kickstarter back in the day and recently also pre-ordered the Carcass Front box set. Partly because I could finally assemble and play the artwork made flesh (plastic) that got me hooked on Trench Crusade in the first place, and it was this one:

So yeah, I like me some leper peasants with some Molotov cocktails, who’ve got nothing to lose other than their eternal salvation. I do not really care much for the lore, to be honest. You can lose me with all that religious crusade stuff, but if it’s a vibe, it’s a vibe – I’ll paint and play it. Last year we also ran a short campaign in my local club, predating the 1.0 rules, and it was great, completely unbalanced and narrative fun.

Now, before I ramble too much, let’s return to the Carcass Front box. I’ll spare you the long-winded sprue review; others (aka hobby influencers) have done that aplenty, and there is really not much to criticise about the box contents. The minis are beautiful, dynamically posed, with build variations and really nice plastic. If I were to compare it to GW sprues, I’d say the plastic is just less “elastic” but easier to work with than GW’s plastic, if that makes sense.

The only pain point is that a lot of gap filling was required, which wasn’t that hard thanks to my reliable helper “sprue goo” – and that is because the seams of the miniatures, where you assemble them and glue them together, are in very visible places (shoulders, arms, hips). Modern sprue design at GW is often extremely odd and confusing, but that’s because they hide those seams in weird, almost invisible places, and thus it saves you time trying to smooth out the inevitable gaps. Now, both those approaches are valid – GW’s approach is super finicky when building the minis, but it saves you time later. Archon’s approach does not save you time, but is excellent if you want to use the entire sprue for kitbashing, as all the connecting points are “natural” – arms, legs, torsos, etc. It can be a happy mix and match within the same set, across different miniature ranges or even within the official TC miniature range.

Hypothetically.

And this brings me to my point of critique.

I’ll just put two photos up here for a size check – the first shows the Castigator in plastic, from the Carcass Front box, alongside the original Castigator I received in resin from my Kickstarter order. For additional scale reference, the second photo shows them with some Primaris-sized Space Marines.

I think you get the point.

It was already obvious with the Prussian box, so don’t go all foamy-mouthed at me with “we’ve known this for a while already” – of course we have. In fact, noe.hammer analysed the sizing of the minis in this excellent blog post a while ago.

My point is not that the plastic minis might be 32mm (or even larger; it seems more like an odd 35mm) – I actually welcome heroic-sized figures for various reasons. One of them is that it’s obviously a skirmish game played with fewer than 10 minis per faction, even in larger games, and the other is that plastic minis with lots of details just look better at heroic scale.

What really annoys me is the scale creep compared to the original miniature sizes from the Kickstarter. We have literally the same guy here, and one is obviously a 28mm resin figure, and the other is at least 10–15% larger. Funnily enough, I got buried on the TC Discord for raising this question, and the size difference was explained away with “he is standing on a tactical rock” or “there is a lore explanation: they are a bunch of incredibly strong lepers”. Critique is not welcome. OK then.

Now, if we ignore that eating Jesus clone flesh gives you leprosy and changes your gene-seed and therefore your growth hormone expression, I think the key issue I have here is this: the whole point of criss-cross kitbashing my Trench Pilgrims is defeated, despite me purchasing official physical minis back in the day. I have all these awesome Carcass Front bits lying around now, which would be great to mix and match with a capirote-wearing pilgrim subfaction, but gluing them together is just comical. Furthermore, this is definitely stopping me from purchasing any resin minis from the official store. Let’s take the Leper Knights, for example, which are currently only available in resin – here in the EU store – what size are those? Do they come in 28mm, or are they matched to the Archon plastic minis? What if I buy their STLs and print them? Are the STLs now sized correctly as they are (apart from apparently being awfully supported, judging by the comment section on MMF)? Or do I need to upsize them? And if so, how much? 10%, 15%?

All questions which basically defeat any further investment in the game for me right now, and that can’t be the point, dear TC team. You can do better, and should do better, as long as STLs and resin minis are offered.

If people have already experimented with resizing the STLs to mix and match them with the new plastic, please slide into my DMs. I might do a follow-up post with your findings and – for the sheer fun of it – also show some kitbashed pilgrims that I had in mind.

Image credit: the opening artwork is by Mike Franchina .