Wednesday 23 December 2015

In Dulce Jubilo, You've Failed Your Saving Thow

See, this is why I don't let Admiral Ackbar decorate my kitchen.



By the time you read this, I will already have seen the new Star Wars film. A fiver says I still won't have calmed down. 

Today once more brings the joy of Dungeon Saga! This time, it's the trap tiles.

Left to right - sticky glue trap, gas vent, poison darts and floor blades

Remember when I said the Pile of Bones counters got a lot of flak on the Kickstarter Forum? Well, they got a light ticking off compared to the sheer overwhelming hatred this set of trap markers got.

Cage from the ceiling, hallucinogenic mushrooms and two blanks

The concept is great. Double-sided 3D resin tiles, with blank dungeon floor on one side and some kind of surprise for your ankles on the other. They were an add-on, there to replace the card tiles that serve the same function in the Adventurer's Companion.

Pit trap, stone deadfall, slashing blades and spikes

If a dungeon allows you to set traps, the thinking is, you stick three counters out. One is a dud, the other two are live. So when someone treads on the square, you flip it to see what you've walked into/under. The resin tiles nearly do this, and they're pretty decent stabs at bringing the card tiles to life.

The other two blanks, for completion

There's a problem, though, which is that the blank sides need to be identical. They aren't.

Blankety Blank! With your host, Legs Brawken.

It's not bad, on the whole, although the resin's a bit cheap and bendy. The detail is very thin on this side too, even careful drybrushing can eradicate it. Best of all is the inclusion of one with somebody's thumbprint embedded in the resin and the one where someone's taken a spatula to the surface before it dried, that's what really got many people's goats.

Top left, you may just be able to pick it out, is the thumb. The scraped one is second one in from the left on the bottom. It's really not that bad, at least in these awful photos. 

I dunno, Mantic don't seem to rate proofreading as a necessary step, regardless of whether the printing is in three dimensions or otherwise. It's not a game breaker for me (especially as I'll likely be playing over Skype, where the image quality is so poor nobody has any idea of what they're fighting anyway), but I can certainly see why people are saying this is shoddy. Still! Paints up okay, and a fun concept if nothing else.


1 comment:

  1. Nice idea, lousy execution. And apart from their terrible order fulfilment (which does make me question when/if I'll see my missing components), this seems the only time Mantic screwed the pooch in terms of construction.

    Oh, and the unproofed Adventurers' Companion, of course - but now we get to have two copies: one to use and one to burn in righteous anger on YouTube!

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