Beware, this will be pic heavy.
A while ago, Curtis Fell, head of Ramshackle Games and all round decent bloke all told, ran a kickstarter project to fund printing for an expansion to his game ‘Nuclear Reconnaissance’ and sculpt a few more models for the line to go with it.
Though it was successfully funded and finished a while ago, it took me a while to get hold of all my pledge rewards due to some Royal Mail shenanigans. Now that it’s all here I thought I would do one of those unboxing things that’s all the rage with kids these days.
So, to start with, my rewards were 2 vehicles, 10 models and copies of both the main rulebook and its expansion The Tome of Tridlins. As Nuclear Renaissance is a skirmish game, this is a great start to getting two small warbands going and something I may even manage to paint (be still my beating heart)!
Everything was very well packed and secured safety so it all arrived in once piece and without any damage which was nice.
The books themselves are lovely. The main rulebook covers the creation of the world and has some nice artwork and fluff pieces that establish the setting, which is post apocalyptic Mad Max style setting crossed with British humour.
Tome of Tridlins is almost twice a thick as the original book and quite an impressive step up in terms of presentation, formatting and the general rules. It has some errata for the main game, a fully detailed campaign system, additional skills and weapons for gangs to take and rules on how to create and make different types of gangs than those featured in the main rulebook.
Now for the Minis themselves. Though mostly single part resin models, the amount of detail on them is very impressive for a small manufacturer and a testament to those who sculpted the models. Though I saw a bit of a bubble on one of the bigger models (that was dreadnought sized and easily half the price!) otherwise, to me, they were all produced to a higher standard than competitors like GW’s Finecast or PP’s resin/plastic mix, regardless of the size of the models.
The large models in particular were very impressive in their detail and robust enough so they don’t feel like they will shatter if I drop them, having an almost rubbery feel to them. They also came with a few options for weapons on the “RoboTron”.
I suppose my only complaint was the amount of flash attached to the models. There was little to none on the character models, but any of the flatter pieces of kits I was sent had quite a lot on them, in particular the vehicle. Also, all of the untextured surfaces were slightly sticky and had this weird effect where they seemed to had a small layer or harder resin sound the outside of the piece. Thanks to advice from Godzooky and Inquisitor Samos of Warseer though, I’ve been told this is a common occurrence of small “cottage” companies who cast their own models and just needs a bit of filing work done to clean it up. So that all said, I can’t really say a overpoweringly poor thing, especially when the detailed bases and models more than make up for having to do a small amount of work to finish them off.
All in all, I’m glad I backed the Kickstarter and I will try to get you some pictures as soon as I’ve assembled and painted some of them! If you liked any of the pictures, then you can buy the rules and models (and download the main rulebook free as a PDF) on the Ramshackle Games website. From the look of their latest Kickstarter which ended today, the quality of sculpts is only improving over time and costs seem to be going down!
Combined with a good rules system and Curtis being a very approachable and friendly person (who bent over backwards to try to find out where the Royal Mail had sent my items) and I shall be keeping my eye on Ramshackle Games. You probably should too.
