To match their game piece of Russian Dragoons, Zvezda produced this one of command figures, namely a trumpeter, standard-bearer and officer. All have been nicely done, and for the most part are quite accurate too for the advertised period of 1812 and thereafter. The trumpeter has the swallow’s nest wings and lace that you would expect, both on the chest and the sleeves, although the chest lace stops a bit short thanks to the angle of the piece with the mould, so it is not quite all there. The flag-bearer suffers more from this problem, because he is moulded side-on, so most detail on his chest is lost, which looks odd. The officer is almost facing the mould, so he has no loss of detail and looks good. In all cases the helmets are very nicely done, and the multiple parts help to ensure there is no unwanted plastic, while flash is also absent. The standard, which is realistically flying behind the man thanks to being a separate piece, has been lightly engraved with a design dating from 1797, which had been superseded by 1812 but was probably still carried anyway so is fine.

The poses are good, so these are very useful figures. The three horses are equally good, thanks once more to being sculpted as two separate halves. The second animal in the second row, with both front legs off the ground, is clearly at full gallop, and is the mount of the officer. While the figure sculpting is highly polished, none of them betray much apparent emotion, so the officer figure just looks too cool and casual for an animal that is advancing at full speed like this.

While trying to put together a reasonable army using these tiny sets would be prohibitively expensive, using them to supply the occasional specialist figure like these three makes much more sense. About the only difficulty is that each figure comes with its own, very thick and wide base, which makes it look more like a display piece, and certainly would look strange on a wargame table, for example. Nevertheless these are attractive figures that have been engineered with the professionalism we have come to expect, and if they are a little soulless compared to figures sculpted by traditional methods, then that is not apparent when blended with a large formation, so while game pieces like this present some problems for gamers and model-makers, they are still very nice representations of their chosen subject.