I brought the starter box from Amazon for £40 and that was apparently 60% off according to them, which turned out to be accurate when looking on Fantasy Flight Games website which listed it at $99.95. Anyway, with Amazon Prime, I got the game the very next day.
Upon opening the box there was a rule book, lore guide and a rules reference book. Taking a look through these I was impressed, the lore guide I loved but I am a sucker for good lore and backstory, the guide starts with a nice short story giving a good background to the world and was a great read too. Continuing through the guide it gave everything I wanted or needed to know about the main races and heroes in the world, along with some lovely artwork and a final story about a last stand against the undead army. The rules reference was a very good addition too, starting with building your army, setting up a game, a glossary of the game's rules which there are 92 different parts of and finally there are two optional rules and four quick look diagrams for playing the game. Lastly, the Rule book or learn to playbook was a more in-depth look at all those rules and plenty of handy tips about the game and building your army, the rules themselves look very good and I like the idea of the spinning wheels behind your men to denote the action and modifier affecting the action.
Next up were the boards with all of the pop-out counters. Starting with the first board there is a double-sided terrain counter one side being a ruin and the other a woodland, there is also a smaller one that is a rocky outcrop and a cheval de frise. Both are good enough for some quick and easy terrain to throw down, as are the other similar terrain counters. There are the command wheels that I talked about earlier, there are boon and bane tokens, movement templates, energy tokens and a range finder. All of the tokens are well made and printed very well, I like the quick terrain too and the double-sided means that if you have two box sets you can have multiple ruins or woodlands etc.
Next up out of the box were the bases for the figures, the dice and the plastic parts of the wheels.
The deployment cards are pretty cool as well, I like that you could basically shuffle them and have a random deployment each game. The scenario cards are very good as well but more than six would have been nice.
There are the terrain cards describing the effect the terrain has on your units, the quick reference cards for each side are very useful.
The unit cards are very well made and give you everything you need to know about your units, also if you like the look of the art for them you can use them as a basis to paint your figures off of.
These are the upgrade cards they are to upgrade units or specific figures/heroes. They can be used to improve morale, attack and defence etc.
These are Morale cards, these are drawn by the opponent when one of your units need a morale test. The number of runes on the card determines the severity of the attack and there are other effects on each card.
Now are the figures, the undead I really really like. I got a real Army of Darkness feel about them. I truly love the look of them and think they will paint up brilliantly, however they feel very flimsy especially around the arms and they are quite hard to clip together without cleaning up any slight bit of flash near the sockets. Overall though superb looking undead figures and the worm is incredible too!
Again lovely looking figures and the armour made me think of Dragon Age Origins Grey Wardens and that will be specifically reflected in my paint job of the. The battle damage on the shields does look very good but did make me think about making the addition of shield transfers difficult. While these are a lot sturdier than the undead the spears are very warped and will need me to dip them in hot water to reset the plastic straight which I do not like doing. Another plus though is the golem, it looks great and very intimidating, painting it will be very nice and allow me to really go wild on it. Overall disappointed with the spears but still think they will be great to paint.
These are the heroes that come with the box set, both look great, no flash and look like they would be really good to paint, the bases look really nice as well. Overall the figures look great and very impressive as heroes even if the living hero is very flimsy feeling.
Overall I think that the box set is very good and worth the money I paid for it. The figures are really nice, so nice I am willing to ignore the extra work I have to do on the spearmen. I fully recommend the game and think it gives a good basis to start your collections of fantasy armies off with. There are also other figures that you can add to your armies or you can add completely new armies. I do think if you want to get into this buy the box set between you and a friend, split the armies and encourage each other to paint, play and expand your forces!
Rating 8/10
Dante
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