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.
This project started as a bit of an accident. When 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:
1. The black smurfs (purple smurfs for the English version)
Based on the album "les schtroumpfs noirs"/ "The purple smurfs", the story behind this is a smurf gets bitten by an exotic bug, which makes his skin turn black/purple and gives him an irresistable urge to go bite other smurfs. The bite is contagious and each smurf who gets bitten turns into a black smurf itself. Soon the village is run over and Papa Smurf develops an antidote in a desperate bid to turn the tide.
This game will basically run like a zombie game. You'll have your regular smurfs (civilians), you'll have your infected (the black smurfs) and you'll get Papa Smurf and a few others armed with the antidote, trying to turn as many of the infected back into regular harmless smurfs.
1. The King Smurf civil war
Based on the album "The Schtroumpfissime" / " The King Smurf". When Papa Smurf goes on a trip, one of the other smurfs turns demagogue, then elected leader and then self-proclaimed King. From there, things rapidly go down hill and when smurfs start to protest some of his actions, things turn ugly quite rapidly. Malcontent smurfs go live in a hidden camp in the forest (Robin Hood style) and the King Smurf quickly goes about fortifying the village against an attack, while trying to root out the dissidents. In the end, the rebels end up storming the village and an all-out smurf civil war is fought.
This would be the skirmish game. For this aspect of the game, some armed smurf miniatures (halberds for the King's troops and makeshift weapons for the rebels) and a King Smurf mini are all that is required.
3. The Smurf Menace (smurfs vs grey smurfs).
The third conflict lends itself both to skirmish games and mass battle as it involves a second smurf village. In the Smurf Menace story, solidarity among the smurfs has reached a low when a second smurf village is discovered in the woods nearby. These smurfs, who all seem to be counterparts of the regular smurfs, including a Papa Smurf in dark red clothes and a Smurfette with black hair, dress in grey clothes, quickly earning them the name of "grey smurfs". Before long, it is revealed that the grey smurfs have an agressive nature and want to enslave the other smurfs, something in which they initially succeed. It is revealed they were magically created by Papa Smurf to teach his little smurfs a lesson on the values of friendship, but you could say that one blew up in his face.
This aspect of the game will require some angry looking smurfs with spear and shield for the grey smurfs and can use the regular smurfs with makeshift weapons used for the King Smurf battles.
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Not to leave this post without some actual miniature painting, here's the prototype shown above after it got mastermoulded and while these were intended for converting more variants, I couldn't resist the temptation to get one painted up to see how it looks.
Painting it revealed a few points of improvement (like putting the eyes closer together), but overall, not a bad start. More to follow...