Tuesday 11 June 2013

DreadBall: Boot Camp

Started prepping today. Got out the 10 male Human players, the refbot, and a ball.

I had expected a friend of mine to come over this last Sunday, and I wanted us to be able to do a quick tussle. When I started to put the gaming pieces (players) together, I realized that there was no way the individuals would keep their composure without the use of some kind of adhesive.

This is a BIG minus in my book; DreadBall is essentially a board game, and as such, I expect to be able to play the game right out of the box. It will be hard to convince board gamers to pick up the game when they have to be modellers before they can start playing, but, well...

The task at hand.
More daunting that you would ever imagine...
Blurred pic courtesy of bad lighting.
As a result I used a lot of little balls of sticky-tac to secure the various arms, legs, and hands (Forge Fathers), but I had to give up on the Veer-myn, as some of the models have only a very shallow half-ball joint to position one arm by. Another weird choice, and in my book, a design flaw. Also some of the Judwan are way too flimsy to be held together without glue.

But, in other words, I have to remove a lot of gooey white stuff from the sockets for various limbs. Nice going.

I started out with one of the 2 Guards, as they are the bulkiest, and I have not removed mold-lines for almost 2 years. So, with no current practice, and ever-dwindling eye-sight, I wanted to do the easy tasks first.

Easy? By no means! That Guard might be the worst mini I ever had to prep for painting. Not because it's a bad sculpt, but bvecause of a combination of not-so-accented details on the armour with possibly the worst material I've ever encountered in a gaming piece. This 'hard plastic' is impossible to scrape with a sharp blade without making the surface all roughed up, and it is difficult to cut without the blade going astray. I ended up using my diamond needle file set, but the result is not quite satisfactory.

I don't think I'll manage more than one of these per day, lest I use too many sanity points.

To finish the models for priming, I need to get some small washers (20 mm-ish or so) to glue them onto. I could use the provided clear acrylic hex bases, but I want my minis to stick to magnetic sheets.

About the acrylic bases, btw: I had expected that the integral bases wouls snap-fit into the central cavity on the hex bases... but NOT so. The holes are substantially larger than the figure bases, so again, adhesives are required.

All in all, Mantic could have done better with this product. The plastic may be a cheap solution to keep costs down, but I think I would prefer a slightly higher price for a material more like the plastic used by GW.

You can't beat the DreadBall rules for playability, though. I haven't played a single game with the official minis, yet, but I played several test games with Blood Bowl minis on a mock-up pitch during the frantic Kickstarter days, and fell in love completely with the game.

So, if DreadBall doesn't get me back into hobby gaming, nothing probably will...


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