S02E20 – Miniatures

Welcome back to Save Vs. Rant! Today’s episode is all about miniatures, in the context not only of their own hobby, but as part of board gaming and roleplaying games.

Miniatures are a phenomenal part of gaming! Take it from us, everyone loves miniatures! Along with artistic images, they are one of the strongest sources of sensory fun to be found in gaming, be it the delicate lightness of plastic, the ponderous weight of metal or the robust satisfying heft of a wooden figure.

Even so, the quality of the casts and the sculpts has remained largely steady. While there are some outliers among both old and new miniatures for poor design, for the most part minis purchased singly are high quality. The semi-soft plastic miniatures frequently sold in blind boxes tend to occasionally be pretty terrible, but they are, for the most part, about what you would expect for the price. Metal minis have, of course, varied by sculptor and character design changes with the time (the character designs of a lot of the 2nd edition setting absolutely scream 1970’s and 1980’s) the skill of the artists has remained very solid.

In today’s podcast, me mentioned quite a few companies – particularly Ral Partha, Reaper, Games Workshop, Army Painter and CMON – several of our personal favorites. Reaper’s Bones line of affordable plastic miniatures are phenomenal and highly recommended.

Honestly, to a large extent, this episode was an excuse to order some miniatures of ourselves from Hero Forge. The resemblance is honestly absolutely uncanny. Here’s Timmy Skittles, our music producer:

The intrepid Timmy Skittles!

Here’s Jeremy, our Jeremy:

The resemblance is honestly uncanny!

And I’m there as well!

You could probably identify me on the street from this likeness!

Honestly, they’re pretty delightful and we’re excited to add them to our collection. It’s frankly a pretty impressive service, and something that I know the gaming community immediately recognized the potential for when 3D printing was just starting to appear! It’s great to see the inevitable evolution of the technology finally come to fruition!

And just to be clear – Dark Souls the Board Game, Rising Sun and Conan the board game all have gorgeous miniatures of fantastic quality, and it’s a shame that such fantastic art should be connected to such mediocre games.

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