Paizo has announced Pathfinder Battles, a new line of randomized prepainted miniatures much like the D&D Miniatures that WotC discontinued back in January. These are different from the non-random prepaints they announced in May.
There’s a good bit of glee and consternation over the news. To break it down:
- Again, Paizo does it better than Wizards. Ha ha ha ha haaaaaa.
- The minis are randomized, though a normal booster has just one Medium creature in it. I don’t mind the randomization, it’s kinda required to make the economics work.
- The normal booster price is $3.99, which is steep for one mini. If they put them in boxes of multiple minis, wouldn’t that help keep per mini price down (and waste a lot less packaging)?
- The scuplts look good, but I am frankly dubious about the paint jobs. The rat’s fur and the gnome’s hair, for example, use very unnatural simple colors.
So good on Paizo. I’ll probably buy some, assuming they look good when they come out, but a better per mini price would make me a lot more bullish about it.
Geek Related 
From reading the Paizo forum, it seems the small booster packs are because it’s a small set, 40 minis. And I guess Wizkids has had luck selling similar sized sets with these size boosters. They did say that the second set, Rise of The Runelords, will probably have larger sized boosters. It is a 60 mini set coming in June 2012. In between the 2 sets they are gonna put out Encounter Packs, which are gonna be non random minis. My guess is packs of common monsters like goblins, etc.
MAN AM I EXCITED ABOUT THIS. I have too many metal minis to paint and this kind of stuff saves me TIME TIME TIME. Paizo, stickin’ it to the man, trying to become the man. Pretty crazy when an upstart company starts smoking the biggest name in the biz on a regular basis. They should buy the brand and be done.
It’s also worthwhile to note that Paizo has said they’ll be buying several cases of these and breaking them apart to sell singles via Paizo.com.
Update – it turns out the paint jobs on the sample images are computer mockups and not the real ones. So good news on that front. I do wish they’d go for bigger boxes and get the per-mini price down though.