Walls from Games of War

A few months ago, Games of War released some Spanish-style walls as the latest addition to their pirate buildings range. I finished painting my lot this weekend to show them off just in time as my last painting project for the year.

I have been loving the products from Games of War for years now - not only their nice pirate buildings, but more so the fantastic ships and boats, such as the British cutter, the longboats and small ships. With the release of these walls they have expanded their buildings range which should be interesting not only for pirate games such as Blood & Plunder but for a variety of other settings as well.

Full disclosure: Being a great fan of Games of War I'm in occasional contact with Alan of GoW. These walls were sent to me as a thank you for bouncing around ideas. As a gift, not for review purposes. I frequently reject free offers for reviews as I don't do that. Nevertheless, I think you should be informed about this when reading this post.

Range

The "range" consists of the following items:

• Three different variants of normal wall sections (A, B and C)
• A wall section with doorway
• Pillar (one variant)
• Large Gate

Wall sections, pillars and gates from Games of War

The different pieces from the walls range.
The three sections on the bottom show the backside of the section above.

You will want to use many pillars as they are intended to be used for connecting the wall sections even when setting up a straight section (not only when setting up corners). If you wanted, you could place some of the sections directly next to each other, glue them and fill the gaps with modeling putty.

Fitting wall sections aligned next to each other

I decided to go with a mix of flexibility and practicability: I glued pillars to one of the two doorway sections, to three normal wall sections and to the large gates. For the large gate you need pillars to hold the gate. Since I have two gates, I chose to keep one of them intact and together with two pillars create one "gate section". Then, I cut the other gate into two pieces - I am not sure, but the gate piece actually seems to be intended for this. The result is a mix of raw/single sections and "combined" sections that allows me to set up a wall rather easily without fiddling with too many single pillars.

My finished set of walls

The reason for glueing pillars to just one of the two doorway sections is that I can think of set-ups where the doorway section is used to directly connect buildings.

Walls against the double storey pirate building

Size and Style

Back in May I painted up a set of Spanish-style walls from Empress Miniatures. My biggest quarrel with them was that the door and gateway are a bit too small for average 28mm miniatures. These GoW walls are higher and much better scaled for standard-sized figures.

Comparison of wall sections with doorway from
Games of War (left) and Empress Miniatures (right)

As usual, the detail and quality of the GoW models is top-notch. The pantile tiles are perfect and not some cheap workaround to create the look. The textures and structures are also great.

In my review of the Empress walls I mentioned that I don't like bases on scenery pieces. The GoW walls have a sort of base without which they would barely stand. I painted the base part in a brownish grey so that it blends with a cobblestone street underground and the wall colour itself. For walls, I guess it does make sense to have bases if you don't want them to fall over all the time.

Conclusion

To my mind, the walls from Games of War are the nicest models for Spanish/Caribbean/pirate settings. They are perfectly scaled and the details and style is equally great. I was in the process of painting the Empress walls when GoW showed off a preview photo of their walls on Facebook and I immediately regretted having bought them already as I knew that I wanted the ones from GoW. However, since then, I have used the Empress walls in a number of games and they have also worked great and I do like them. With these new walls I now have enough to set up a large country estate.