Engineers were an essential element in any army, particularly in Western Russia, which was underdeveloped in terms of roads and other transport infrastructure in 1939. Apart from clearing the way for the army, another key role for the engineers was to clear minefields, which only became necessary once the German invasion had been stopped and the Red Army began to move forward again.

This is a set of game pieces for the Zvezda 'Art of Tactic' game system. It consists of three poses of Soviet pioneers as shown. Each figure can either be attached to a separate base, or grouped together on one large and uncontoured base with a large flag/marker. The first figure is holding a mine-detector (nicely done and very thin), the second seems to be chopping wood and the third is carrying some cans. All wear basic Soviet infantry uniform, but are a bit clinical in appearance, and in particular the pilotka caps are really poor. The man with the axe must be removing small twigs as he holds the axe close to its head. Still as game markers they are perfectly adequate poses and with no accuracies errors as such.

A second sprue holds some short lengths of barbed wire fence, a very short sectional bridge (total length 39mm), some very small anti-tank traps and a bunker-like thing with a flag on top. All these accessories are out of scale with the figures - the bunker is wildly so as it is only 11mm tall. Of course as game pieces this does not matter, but they are of virtually no use to more general military modellers.

See the sprue image for full details of the parts that go to make up these figures, all of which have separate arms to make the poses more realistic. With only four figures this is not a figure set in the traditional sense, but the figures are accurate if not as well done as we are used to from Zvezda, while the accessories are not much use as anything other than game pieces.