Smurf Wars: An Introduction

I don't believe I have to introduce the Smurfs here, they are well known throughout the world. They might however not strike you as material for 28mm wargaming, but you are wrong there, The books offer many examples of conflict and near civil war that are easily gamable, be it without anyone getting seriously hurt, but hey, that's something anyone with children can get behind, right?

Smurf on smurf, now you smurfed it!

This project started as a bit of an accident. On the one hand, I knew of the Pixi Minis (them again) smurf village in the right scale. I have however invested enough in Pixi ranges (Asterix, Lucky Luke) to know the pricetag and to be fair, most of their smurf sculpts are a bit iffy.

Then the official Smurf store opened in Brussels when I still lived in the neighbourhood and I inevitably wandered in eventually. That's when I discovered on one of the shelves 2 different resin smurf house piggybanks. Sure, they each had an oversized smurf sculpted to the side of them and the mandatory coinslot, but other than that, they (a) looked perfect for 28mm and (b) unlike all the toys, looked exactly like the houses in the original comic. They were, I believe, priced at 12€, so naturally, I bought one of each, even though I had no specific plans for them. Step one.

Around the same time smurfs happened to come up in the conversation with a sculptor friend who was doing some work for me. Turned out he had a soft spot for smurfs too and we went on a bit about that. (Yes, two grown adults had a prolonged e-mail conversation about smurfs) I didn't think much more about it until a couple days later he sent me a picture of this:

Yes, that's a 20mm-ish tall smurf he sculpted (enlarged here to over double size for the picture). One thing lead to another, I threw the green into one of my moulds and found it scaled very well with the piggybanks:

We agreed to work on and off on this project, when time allowed and get enough for a game for the both of us (not a commercial project). Most of the future smurfs were or will be converted from this test piece figure. Aside from the normal "villager" smurfs, I decided to add figures to recreate three famous conflicts from smurf history: the black smurfs (purple smurfs for the English version), the King smurf (le schtroumpfissime) and the Smurf Menace (smurfs vs grey smurfs).

Smurf Wars was on!