The quick-build kits from Plastic Soldier Company, Italeri, Zvezda and Armourfast can be quite fun to put together and paint. Of course, this genre isn’t where you’ll find the most detailed realism in a model, but all the same, the PSC kits are really excellent, in my opinion, offering many options for variants, crew and stowage configurations. I particularly appreciate the commander figures for the tanks. Compared to the bare, utilitarian minimalism of Armourfast models — which will indeed get you some armor fast, if you’re building up a tabletop army — the PSC models are practically museum pieces.

The A9 was of a generation of early British tanks that were thin-skinned, under-gunned, and unreliable… They were good enough to rout the Italian army from Egypt and Libya in 1940’s Operation Compass, but that is where their usefulness began to wane.

Here I show how my son and I handled the three A9s that came in our box. My son (age 9) did the standard A9, armed with a 2-pdr, as it might have looked in Egypt in 1940. I did the the 2-pdr version in 1940 BEF colors, and the close-support variant in desert colors. We are loving these PSC kits and have already built several others, which we’ll share soon.