Pirates of Treasure Island

In August this year, there was a kickstarter campaign for releasing a range of 28mm pirates of Treasure Island. I'm not only going to say that these are really nice miniatures. But I have also been waiting for almost ten years for them to be released.

Mr. O'Brien from the
Pirates of Treasure Island range

It was back in December 2008 when I first blogged about this range of pirates. At the time, Legends of the High Seas was slowing growing to become my skirmish game of choice after having played Mordheim for many many years. Wargames Foundry and Black Scorpion Miniatures were the pirate manufacturers of the time.

Through a Polish forum I got to know sculptor Flis Wojtek, who had been working for Black Tree Design and Warlord Games. He had shared photos of greens of a lot of characterful pirate miniatures that were supposed to be released through Black Hat Miniatures. However, that never happened, until ...

The full range of the Pirates of Treasure Island
via the Black Spot pledge (source)

Kickstarter to the rescue

Now it is almost exactly ten years later and I was very positively surprised to see these miniatures again in the form of the Pirates of Treasure Island kickstarter campaign. Black Tree Design is now EOE Orbis and they released the figures at last.

The whole range consists of 29 figures plus a number of extra miniatures such as a monkey climbing up a flag post or sitting on a powder keg. Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel Treasure Island, there are figures for all the characters: Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver, etc. This results in a useful mix of proper weapon-wielding pirates and civilian types. Beside the mandatory doctor, cook and grenade wielder there are a few unique poses that you rarely find in any of the other pirate ranges: a maniac with a burning powder keg or a marauding pirate kidnapping a mistress.

The figures

Today the figures finally arrived. They had to be sent to EOE's UK hub first and from there to Germany so I received them a little later than other backers. Funnily, this makes it even more close to being exactly ten years after I first saw the greens.

During the kickstarter, I had to go with the "The Black Spot" pledge, of course, which is the entire range plus a few accessory models which seem to not be intended for general release - whenever that may be (at this time the pirates are not available on their online store).

Painted pirates at the bottom (from left to right) for scale comparison:
Crusader, Wargames Foundry and North Star

These figures are very fine sculpts and they will look perfect alongside my other pirates. The casts totally hold up to the expectations I had from viewing the photos of the excellent sculpts. In the photo above I put three of these new figures next to some painted pirates from other manufacturers for comparison.