Budget Fantasy - War Trolls!

Some of my readers may be familiar with my penchant for keeping my fantasy armies to a tight budget; I'm not one for going out and spanking away £60-100 on the lastest GW model; not whilst eBay, rummage stalls and toy shops exist!

Rather less may be aware of a growing range of fantasy models in the traditional 20mm toy soldier scale coming out of Russia these days, not the Technolog models I've featured before, but the models from Dark Alliance, an offshoot of RedBox models from what I can see.

One of my random trawls of eBay threw up a set of Trolls they recently released, and I was intrigued.

Not my photo, but you get the picture...

Scanning a few photos, two things were obvious;

1: like most of the Dark Alliance range these were stylistically, shameless ripoffs of the Lord of the Rings movies, and
2:  These guys looked to be huge.

I decided to take a chance on them and stumped up the £11 post-free an online vendor with stock wanted.

Scant days later the package was in my hands.  Inside were 8 heavily armed and armoured trolls in a brown plastic.  Chunky is a fair description, so bendy swords and so on are unlikely to be a problem here.  On first sight the detail was pretty good, some decent sculpting, though the models have a fair bit of flash to clean up.  But the real question is how well they'd scale to 28mm models.

Pretty well as it happens:

Bang on I'd say

By comparison to both a plastic and metal GW troll, they are almost exactly the same height, taller by a shade if anything.  The poor swordsman at the front shows they are suitably imposing.

So I'm pleased with my little purchase, and can certainly recommend these to others.  For my part 6 will join my Kings of War Orc army (in regiment stands of three), whilst the other two will go towards the retro-dungeon/Dragon Rampant project.

It's also worth noting that this box was dubbed 'Set 1'; Dark Alliance has produced sets of models spread across several boxes already, and this most likely means we can expect another pack at some stage, now that would make for some nicely varied units!