Mom Miniatures Dwarfs review

Mom Miniatures are a Spanish company with a fair sized range of resin fantasy miniatures. I was particularly drawn to the dwarfs, so made a small order to get an idea of their quality and suitability. The photo above I grabbed from their website, showing the unit I ordered fully assembled and ranked up on 20mm squares. On placing the order I received a confirmation email telling me I would receive another email when they had been shipped. Eight days later, the postman delivered them. That’s quite impressive given the current circumstances. I am UK based, there was no hassle with VAT, import duties or such like, I am still unsure what is supposed to happen in the brexit set up?

Here’s how they look out of the blister pack.There are ten unique head sculpts on one body pose, five axes, five hammers and ten shields. The shield arms have a slot to receive the back of the shields, which you can see at the bottom of the picture. You could, of course, use your own shield here.I have not assembled them as yet, so here’s another photo from their website to show how they would look.

The quality of the casting is good. There are no holes or bubbles that I could see. There is a mould line but it was easily removed with a craft knife. I would be tempted, maybe, to paint them without the shield fixed, to allow access to face and beards.

How do they compare with other minis? I have lined up a selection of my own minis and put them into height descending order. The metal GW slayer is probably tallest due to his big hair! The next figure along is a modern GW plastic hammerer/iron breaker. Then we have the Mom figure, and the next one along, the mystery ivory coloured specimen, is a resin Iron Crow dwarf by Durgin Paint Forge. Finally, a couple more metal GW dwarfs from the 90s.

In size and bulk, the Mom Miniatures dwarf is probably nearer to 35mm than any other scale. Stylistically, it’s a good match for the Iron Crow dwarf, with bigger flatter nose, similar styled beards and a slightly less serious aesthetic. I will certainly be happy to mix them into my collection, I base on rounds and tend to play skirmish games so scale issues are less of a concern to me. There are bigger difference between my older and newer GW figures who happily fight alongside each other. Stylistically, it’s a personal opinion of course. I absolutely love them! So much so that I am hoping to build a new warband using the Mom and Durgin figures together. Just a small band of course, a few clan warriors, some handgunners maybe, the berserkers of course are a must, maybe some miners to dig up the salt, and a handful of characters. And maybe a war machine for good luck. Yeah, that’s definitely a small warband.

Hammer time

It’s been such a long time since I played or painted any Lord of the Rings, but having recently got a copy of Oathmark, I have been dusting off my Mordor collection. We have played just one game so far, using basic blocks of troops to get a handle on the rules. The next step is to introduce characters and more specialised units, which for Mordor means trolls. 

I only have one painted troll, so it was the perfect time to dig out that plastic troll languishing in a cave somewhere at the back of the drawer. I made it straight from the sprue to begin with, but decided it looked a bit similar to my old metal figure. So I changed the helmet a little by chopping off the horns and putting one back in the centre, rhino style. Then I replaced the plastic hammer head with a metal bit, from an ogre butcher I think. Two small changes which make a nice, unique model.

I must have painted the first troll about 15 years ago. At the time I made some changes to the pose, to calm it down a little, rather than wildly swinging the hammer. I entered this figure in Golden Daemon, and though it made the final cut, it was easily vanquished. It’s not hard to see why. It’s a brown blob with very little contrast. I always said I would remedy this at some time, it’s only taken 15 years or so to get round to it.

At the time I was influenced by the film palette, but this time around I want to go back to the original source. In the books, trolls are usually described as black or dark skinned, so that’s a potential palette. I will probably go for a grey skin with blackened  armour, but am still pondering. It’s good to be back in Middle Earth again, with the fire of Morgoth in my belly!