Reaper Bones: Soft Giants

Amidst the chaos lately, one nice thing that happened is our Reaper Bones Kickstarter goodies arrived. Hubs went in on the Vampire level plus a bunch of the extra things. On top of that, I added all of the 8 Giants offered and a Mister Bones (because, shoot, he was $1).

Overall, I'm very impressed with the detail of the sculpts. Before the Kickstarter happened, we'd gotten a few of their Bones, but none were as detailed as these Giants. I wasn't too sure how all that detail would look in the Bones plastic. They're not as crisp as a resin or metal model would be, but for 75-80% of the price, who'd complain?

I'd say that all told, the Bones plastics are about 90% as nice as the metal ones. For the price, it really can't be beat, especially as other miniature lines continue rising in price. Just as an example, you can look at their Bones Minotaur ($3.49) vs the Metal Original ($16.99). Not quite as nice, but really close.

Of course, as soon as I opened the box, I wanted to get working on these straight away. But with all my hobby items packed up (still, sadly), I had to go out and purchase glue and another hobby knife. For under $10, though, it was worth it to get some hobbying done (and have a little time with my mind off other things).

However, I wasn't thrilled that scraping mold lines, in the traditional sense, is basically impossible. You have to gently shave them, scraping will get you no where due to the soft nature of the plastic. This plastic is also very unforgiving, one little misstep with the knife and your model can lose his nose, a finger, some hair, or other delicate bits. It's more difficult to accidentally decapitate a model made of harder plastic.

Somewhat disappointing, too, was that the swords and other extraneous bits were seriously bent out of shape. Now, I understand that it's 100 degrees outside, and was probably 150 in the delivery truck, but this was a real pain in the butt to fix. Several of their bases were also warped, to the point that they wouldn't stand upright. Of the 8 giants, 7 needed repositioning.

Uhh, miss? I think something's wrong with your spear.

For resin models I've repositioned, it was just a quick matter of heating up some water. This plastic, though, responded very poorly to that treatment. They need to be in the hot water for much longer, and (especially the swords) took several times to get them to the desired position. Eventually, they were "close enough" and I gave up after about 30 minutes of fussing with them. They're better but still not great.

In summary, though, the Bones line has a lot of good minis for great prices. While the softness of the plastic has a few disadvantages, it will be great for those that are really into conversions. I can't imagine anything easier to do conversions with than this plastic.

I picked up the giants to play some of Reaper's miniatures game Warlord. Hopefully sometime in the near future I'll be able to give it a whirl. But my time until NOVA is ticking down, so we'll see how much progress I make on my wolves in the coming days.