Space 1889: Kraag Warriors unboxing

Hopefully I don't scare off any potential readers with the term unboxing. I must say that I find the genre (notably on youtube) to be enormously boring and uninteresting. When I popped open this box I could feel the vintage leaking from the plastic wrap and disappearing into the sky so I thought I should take some photos.

Space 1889 is, of course, the colonial/victorian adventures on mars where everybody wants 'liftwood' that only grows there to allow for playing naval vessels. I played in a RPG campaign that was fun, and there are a lot of wargaming aspects that predate the rpg. 

The martians come in 3 flavors (which I suspect match the general racist categorizing that happened around egypt/sudan at that period of history): canal martians (civilized), hill martians (nomads) and mountain martians (feral/slavers/flyers). These are the latter, and live in fortified vertically oriented mountains fastnesses that they raid for slaves from. Easy fodder for villains. The Belgians are also the canonical bad guys resulting from their rapacious activities in Congo that are duplicated on mars. 

 

 The castings are quite clean with respect to mold lines. There is an alright amount of variation. One thing I quite like is all of them are duplicated in flying and non flying poses. Even better, they come with stout flying base equipment (metal bases! precut wire!)

Perhaps the most nostalgic part of this was the booklet that came enclosed. It gave information about martians in general and mountain martians in particular. And then it gave painting directions! They even describe various techniques like washes and glazes without formally calling them that. How retro. How useful in the age pre internet.

These figs are still available through RAFM, a Canadian company. I suspect RAFM has a bit of a twilight existence, but they still have some old minis with charm (including 15mm traveller stuff, and 25mm fantasy). They had a bit of a resurgence a decade or two ago with some sort of modern rule set.

My interest in 1889 was piqued by some photos and reading some war game reports. It's already slipped to the backburner again, but hopefully these charming figs will see some paint before too much time passes.