I’ve played Games Workshop games since the early 90s, which probably means I’ve been a bit desensitised by the price of miniatures. But this week I spent £42.50 on something that made me think about what we actually get for our dollar.

For the price of five Space Marine Heavy Intercessors I bought two opposing warbands, a medieval house, fences, livestock, a gaming mat, dice, tokens and a rulebook. An entire wargame, so naturally I wanted to find out if it was any good.

The book deserves a lot of praise as it acts as an all in one with build instructions for the models, an introduction to the period, painting guide, and a playthrough of scenarios that slowly teaches and expands upon the rules as you go.

What is Pillage?

For those not familiar, Pillage is a historical skirmish game set during the early middle ages in Europe produced by Victrix Limited. It allows players to take control of small warbands of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons or other warriors as they fight raids, capture settlements and make off with treasure and the occasional cow.

It’s very different to Warhammer and focuses on fights between perhaps a few dozen models at most. The rules are relatively straightforward, with a focus on narrative scenarios, terrain and objectives rather than simply wiping out your opponent. Combat is deadly, so charging headlong into the enemy isn’t always the best idea.

Building the Warbands and Village

Assembling the models in the set took me about two and a half hours which isn’t too bad considering I ended up with warriors, a house, some fences and livestock.

The warriors were straightforward enough to build, with each having only five or six pieces and the joins were all clean and I had no fitting issues.

The build instructions were excellent, using full scale pictures of the sprue and colour coding the locations on each piece to show which were to be used with each figure.

This made it really easy to find them on the sprues. It’s a simple idea, but one that makes assembly so much easier. There’s also plenty of spare pieces so that you can customise your warriors rather than building them in the poses they suggested. But for this, I decided to follow the recommended builds so that I could play through the introductory scenarios.

The house was a little different, the roof required six supporting pieces four of which are already assembled and just needed gluing into place. The other have to be assembled from different bits before being attached.

Unfortunately the instructions don’t really show how to put those pieces together and I struggled with this part, so rather than messing it up completely I just placed the four ready made scaffolds on there.

But overall, I’m really please. £42.50 and two and a half hours gives me two assembled warbands and a battlefield ready for the first raid.

At this point, I did notice when I places the models on the paper mat, the creases in the mat caused the fences to fall over fairly often. The mat may need to be flattened out between books etc before it can actually be used.

So, for £42.50 and two and a half hours of assembly, I’ve got two warbands, a small farm and everything I need to start playing. The miniatures went together easily, the terrain looks decent, and the only real frustration so far has been the house and a gaming mat that refuses to lie flat.