During the French and Indian War, tactics by necessity evolved quickly in the North American wilderness. After some initial bloody tactical disasters, British leadership rapidly recognized the need to adopt a new way of warfare, shifting from a regular European style of fighting to more irregular tactics led by light infantry units. The recruits in these groups wore cut down hats, coats and leather leggings and carried equipment focused on swift movement and close, skirmish-style combat. To build out my FIW Britsh light infantry units, I’ve drawn upon a variety of manufacturers.

To begin, I purchased the single offering of British light infantry models available from AW Miniatures. This small package comes with two copies each of just three different poses with two firing variations and one model loading on the move. The figures are dressed in the popular jockey caps of light infantry soldiers along with spare equipment on chunky molds which scale well with a variety of manufacturers.

Seeking to layer in some significant variety to my forces, I went next to Redoubt Enterprises and their large offering of FIW figures. Redoubt offers two six-packs of British light infnatry, one with jockey caps and the other wearing basic round hats. The packages each come with no duplication of poses, offering a lot of variety in firing, loading and advancing sculpts. One figure in each set comes with a separate hands and rifle piece meant to be glued with the musket raised high in melee mode. I chose to invert the piece in a loading posture on each of the two models.

Finally, I went to Front Rank Figurines with their vast listing of FIW models available individually for purchase. Again, there was a lot of variety here with shooting, advancing, loading and at-the-ready troops, many hauling small campaign-ready backpacks. To these, I added two NCOs — one at ease and one commanding trops forward — along with a more formal officer sold as Major General James Wolfe (middle above).

Across three UK-based manufacturers, these figures all fit well together as heftier 28mm casts. With them, I’ve been able to create 3-4 small units of British light infantry which serve as key components to so many FIW engagements on the table.