Saga Russian Princedoms Fortified Wagon

This is a fortified 'heavy baggage wagon' for my Saga Eastern Princes (Russian) force. This is in fact the reason I chose the list. I started wargaming over 30 years ago when our club was primarily gaming WRG 2nd edition Renaissance rules. One of our club's members had a large wagon laager in their force that I always thought looked 'way cool'. Fast forward 30 years and given the chance to have one of my own I jumped at it.

The wagon itself is from Essex Miniatures. It is their stock number C&W8 - "Eastern European War Wagon w/Protection". Saga allows for bases for the wagon from 40-50 mm wide and 80-120mm long. The Essex wagon fits comfortably on a 45mm wide base, but just barely squeezes on a 120mm long base. I would strongly discourage using wagons from larger 'epic' sized 32mm figure lines. The crew are Old Glory figures. The axe-armed figures are from their medieval civilians pack and the crossbowman was a gift from my uncle from his dead lead.

The special rules for the wagon have it moving slowly on the battlefield, but it is heavily armored and most enemy units cannot attack other units in your force if they could also attack the wagon. I'm unsure how this can be used effectively, but I'll have fun figuring it out.

I usually prefer to save the fun units to paint until the end of a project to keep my motivation up. With several units in this army requiring shield transfers that are still in the post, I broke form and went ahead and completed this unit while watching Thursday Night Football. Total painting time including basing was about four hours.  I'm going to count this as 8 figures in the painting totals.  This unit costs 1 Saga point bringing my Eastern Princes force count up to 2 points. We usually play 6-point armies, so I'm 1/3 of the way there.