The other side of the fence

I guess everybody has noticed I'm a big fan of Renedra's wargames accessories. I use their different sized bases for most stuff nowadays, from 6mm tanks to 28mm figures. I also like their scenic range and earlier I reviewed their wattle fences which I liked very much. This time I'm taking a closer look at their Wargaming Fences designed by Tim Adcock.

Wargaming fences from Renedra. Two sprues for £6.00

At first sight it looks like a bargain; two sprues for £6.00, compared to the wattle fences which were £6.00 a pop, though you can buy two for a tenner. The sprues are identical and contain pieces of picket fences, worm fences and ordinary five-bar fences. They also contain a piece of broken fencing which, after some pondering, I decided went with the five-bar fence.

It would seem like assembly would be a piece of cake, I mean, who needs directions for assembling fences? However it's not as easy as it looked at first glance as you get an assortment of different posts which fit only their kind of fence and not the others. You also get some base supports to put underneath, some of which have locator holes, some have none, and one which has an l-shaped opening. After some headscratching and dry fitting I managed to figure out which part belonged to which fence though.

Let's start with the easiest of them all, the worm fence. As far as I know worm fencing is mainly associated with the US from the 17th century and up till today, but might be suitable for other locations as well.

An old 2nd edition 40k Goff Ork used as scale reference.  He's smaller than today's orks, but don't say that to his face.

Each sprue holds three pieces; two with six poles and one with five; slide the edges of the five-pole fence between the edges of the other pieces, adjust the angle you want and fix with glue. Each piece is 8cm long which makes about 22cm of fence since there is some overlap of the edges. Repeat for the other sprue. Now here's the problem; with two outer pieces and one inner piece per sprue, there is no way you can make a continuous fence out of all the pieces. You either make two separate fences, or one longer fence with five pieces and bin the last piece.

"Oi! What thieving grot nicked the middle piece???"

Okay, so on to the Five-bar fence. I mounted it on Renedra bases for increased stability.

There are two whole pieces and one broken down piece per sprue. The whole pieces are 7,5 cm long and the broken one is about six cm. The posts for the whole pieces are l-shaped so you can glue the next section on straight or at an angle, making a corner, a nice touch. Each sprue holds an l-shaped end post and one separate whole post with five holes in it. You can make a complete fence of 30cms with all the pieces, in which case you only need two end posts, or as I did, you can make two 15cm fences in which case you need to use both the l-shaped end posts as well as the whole posts. However using the whole posts require you to cut away the l-shaped post from the last section and insert the bars into the separate end post. The broken down sections are a nice touch I think, but it would have been better if you could attach them to other sections without a lot of cutting.

I need to cut away some corners from the bases, but you get the idea.

On the whole it's quite useful anyway. On to the picket fences!

The Picket fences come in three pieces and a gate per sprue. Two of the pieces have gateposts, one on the left side and the other on the right, thankfully! The gate is loose and nice and the tops of the fence are quite nicely shaped. This fence could grace an American church during the civil war (maybe the revolution too?) as well as a Normandie cottage in WW2. Each piece is six cm long and the gate is two cm, so you get a total of 40cm fence if you use both gates. I decided to use only one gate though, using the other gate posts as end posts. The only detractor is that the gate posts have rather big and ugly locator holes for the gate which need some filling.

Just what a pieceful ork needs for his cottage!

I'm having a hard time assessing this set. One one hand you get some nice looking fences in diverse styles, on the other hand the pieces included are almost too few to be of any use. The five bar fence looks right, but if you want to assemble it into some sort of enclosure it will be pitifully small since you only have four pieces! The picket fence is a little bit better since you get six pieces. The worm fencing is especially bad as it's usually used to mark off huge tracts of land.

Gonna need a bit more than three pieces there, Bub.

For this set to be useful Renedra should have included one more piece of worm fencing on each sprue or scrapped it alltogether to fit more of the other fences instead. I guess Renedra already have decided that this set is not adequate, as they also sell all three types of fences separately. Which, of course makes this set utterly redundant for everyone except the punter who just wants to be able to plonk some random obstacles down on the table. It puzzles me that Renedra still sells the set as it is, and that they even include one (just one!) sprue in their North American Cabin kit. The only reason to buy this set is if you want to check out all the three types of fence before deciding which to go for.

I guess three people each built a piece of the fence without looking at the others...

To sum it all up: all fences are very nice on their own, but this set is far from as useful as it could have been.

I give the Wargaming Fences by Renedra 3 out of 5, not bad but not good either.