Tag Archives: wizkids

Skull & Shackles Minis Reviews By An Eleven Year Old Girl

Posted on September 1, 2013 | 5 comments

Well I liked my Skull & Shackles minis – awesome sculpts and really good paint jobs, better than previous sets even, and the plastic the perfect medium between too hard/brittle and too soft/bendy. (Set one was too soft and set two was too rigid).

But the real test is when my daughter checks them out!  She reinterprets them and ranks them in order from least to most scary.

  1. Jack Sparrow (Kerdak Bonefist)
  2. Miss Creepypasta (Luccaria)
  3. Machete Dude (Barnabus Harrigan)
  4. Sea Monkey (Elder Brykokalas)
  5. Water lady with aqua-puppies (Duppy)
  6. Blaze Monkey (Greater Host Devil, wingless)
  7. Shark Mama (Brinebrood Queen)
  8. Mr. Yelly Shark (Shark)
  9. Mr. Derpy Shark (Hammerhead Shark)
  10. Cyclops who looks like he’s throwing a temper tantrum (Cyclops)
  11. Giant snake with lady face (Aquatic Naga)
  12. Mad sea monkey (Sea Devil)
  13. Mr. Cuddles (Drowning Devil)
  14. Barry the Chopper Dragon (Sea Troll)
  15. Mrs. Tarantula Lady (Paeta)

I generally agree though think Mr. Cuddles is scarier.  But then again I was already married to a spider with a woman’s face so perhaps I’m used to it. It’s unfortunate that the least scary is one of the end bosses of the Adventure Path though!

You can’t see the “aqua-puppies” in the Duppy pic very well since it’s in the clear part but they’re there.  And the expression on the Cyclops’ face really is hilarious, it makes up for him being anemically small (I’m sure it’s book legal since they’re only 8 feet tall or something, but I hate large minis that are really only marginally taller than medium ones – make it a taller than normal cyclops if you have to, but he doesn’t look that intimidating next to normal characters…)

Naturally since she selected the Paeta as the scariest I then chased her around the house with it for a while.

(Also see her and her friend’s review of my Rise of the Runelords minis…)

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Ten Year Old Girls Review Rise of the Runelords Miniatures

Posted on August 25, 2012 | 4 comments

I had my new minis out from yesterday’s post-purchase initial review of the new Wizkids Pathfinder Battles Rise of the Runelords minis. (My that’s a long name.)  Go there to see the pictures for context. My daughter and one of her little friends saw them and decided to give me their opinions on them.  It was hilarious. Here’s as much as I could capture from stream of consciousness 10 year old girlspeak…

Storm Giantess: “She looks like she’s about to do something to me.”
“Cut you into pieces?”
“Yeah.”

Ogre Brute: “Looks like trollface meme guy.” <brief interruption where they tell me I’m so uncool and not up with the hip new things and we have to Google trollface. He does.>

Mash-fell-knocker (their pronunciation of Malfeshnekor):  <in a high voice> “Who’s a good doggie, who’s a good doggie, who’s a good doggie?” <in a harsh voice> “I kill you!”
“He looks like a monkey with elf ears.”
“He looks like a mix between a bat, a dog, and the ‘My precious’ guy from Lord of the Rings.”

Lucretia: “Her hair and eyes look evil.  She’s kinda bald but pretty. She must be the queen of something.”
<imitating Lucretia>  “You must obey me or be cut into pieces!”

Lyrie Akenja: “For Pete’s sake woman, put on a shirt!”
“Put on a shirt!  Put on a shirt!  Put on a shirt!” <chanting together>
“She has a wand, what is this, Harry Potter?”
“Oh look she has a kitty!”
<a long discussion on the pros and cons of kitties ensues>

Ogrekin: “Looks like Invader Zim with a muscly body and something on his head.”
“Looks like a bodybuilder with a messed up face.”
“Yeah, his face is jacked up.”
“Is that a baby rattle he has?”
<i do have to admit the ogrekin’s weapon is underwhelming, needs more meat on it>

Faceless Stalker:  “It looks like a beast that paints itself.”
“Put on some clothes!”
“His weapon looks like a spoon.”
<reading the base> “6 of 65!  Wow!  Good job for nothin’, guy!”
<this is a pretty weak mini, I agree with the girls>

Wraith: “Tornado man!”
“He kinda reminds me of the Statue of Liberty!”
“I know!”
“He’s not the Statue of Liberty, he’s the Statue of Liberty’s torch.”
“Yeah.”

Goblin Commando on Goblin Dog: “Oh look it’s a gremlin!  It’s a gremlin riding a puppy.”
“He looks like the guy from that book… Origami Yoda!” <I feel pain and regret that apparently kids nowadays don’t know Yoda except via derivative media.>
“He looks like the gremlins from that movie where the girl’s little brother gets taken and she has to marry someone and they attack her face!”
<a long Q&A ensues where I try to figure out what movie she’s talking about>
“Yeah, Labyrinth!”
“I’m bored, can we go play Littlest Pet Shops now?”

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Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords Minis, I Haz Them

Posted on August 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

I was in a local game store and discovered they had the new Wizkids Pathfinder Battles Rise of the Runelords minis!  I grabbed some boxes and thought I’d share.

I got one Huge box that came with a Storm Giantess,

then each of the normal boosters had a Large; I got an Ogre Brute and Malfeshnekor himself;

and then each normal booster had three medium/smalls in it – from left to right, Lucrecia, a wraith, a faceless stalker, Lyrie Akenja, a goblin commando on a goblin dog, and an ogrekin.

And here they are in ensemble to show relative sizes.

The sculpts are very nice and the painting is very nice, I like all these figures, they’re very distinctive.

I am disappointed a little in the Huge, however.  For $25 there’s no real fine painting work – her cloak, for example, is one big ol’ swath of the same purple and her trident is a homogeneous green (and made of a much more flexible plastic than the rest of the mini, it’s quite warped and not able to be made convincingly straight.  On a Huge I expect more detail than that.  The Large ogre brute is really nice and has more detail and nice washes – he looks better than the Huge; heck that whore with the cat (Lyrie) has more detail than the storm giantess.  Lucretia’s high cheekbones and piercing eyes are really, really good

But there’s a lot of improvement from the already good Heroes and Monsters minis – go see my old review of those and compare the ogre and goblins to this ogre and goblin – the ogre in particular is like 1000% better sculpt and paint.  And the small boosters having 4 rather than 1 mini is much better.

What they did right, they kept up – the bases are nice and flat, none of that D&D Minis falling over/warped base crap. Easy to unbox, all were in fine shape.

They’re high quality and nice.  I am not sure I plan to buy a lot though – they are expensive as crap! I just dropped $60 on these 9 minis.  Sure, you can get discount cases blah blah – I might do it if I were about to run Runelords, but other than that I’ll get a couple and use my rich legacy base of minis, Reaper kickstarter unpainteds, and pawns to fill in the gaps.

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Pathfinder Minis: Heroes and Monsters Review

Posted on January 25, 2012 | 2 comments

Earlier this week I read this review on ENWorld about the new prepainted plastic Pathfinder minis licensed from Paizo to Wizkids. I was in my FLGS today and they had a batch, so I picked up a large and normal booster to see what I thought.

I was lucky in that my normal booster, which can have either one medium or two small minis contained two goblins, and the large booster, which has one large, contained an ogre. The goblins and ogre are very iconic monsters in Pathfinder and have a different and distinct look to them than in earlier D&D.

The figures came out well – in D&D Miniatures boosters figs were usually pretty bent up, and often they don’t stand straight (either the base being bent or the figure doing the “V8 lean” on the base). These figures have nice hard bases and the goblins’ little weapons were striaght and good-looking.  The ogre’s club was slightly bent (he came out of the plastic shell while still in the box) but one bend and it was true.

The sculpts are good and the paint jobs pretty detailed.  The one weakness is that the big primary color they use on each mini, usually for the skin, needs a little more something – a wash or whatnot, it looks very homogeneous.

Here’s some large scale pics for you to check out.

The ENWorld review complained a lot about the amount of wrapping they come in. I was ready to ding them on it too, but really it’s just a box with a plastic blister in it – not even the little annoying plastic baggies that D&D Miniatures used. I do wish that they had boosters with more minis in them – buying one or, in rarer cases, two to a pack is a little annoying – but here’s my “trash picture” to compare to the ENWorld one.

Basically I put the plastic blister back in the boxes and then put the small box inside the large one and closed it. Voila. Less packaging is always good but I think the guy was being a bit of a drama queen about it – of course if you’re buying cases worth you’re going to have box detritus. If you want them to just put a dozen minis in a ziploc and send them to you I suspect you’ll have a lot of complaints about other stuff in return. But I was happier with the packaging here than with D&D Minis because the unpack process is “open box top, pull out mini, done.”

In fact, I just went and bought a brick from RPG Locker because I enjoyed these guys so much! I’ve never bought minis “in bulk” before…

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