Reaper Bones USA

Finally, I'm doing a post on something other than 3D printing. I've bought quite a few Reaper Bones plastic miniatures over the years, and I'm quite familiar with their advantages (cheap, light) and disadvantages (shallow detail, bendy). When I heard that Reaper came up with a new type of Bones miniature, called Bones USA, using a new production process, of course I had to order some and see for myself. The selection is not large yet, and I ordered a number of sci-fi miniatures and a fantasy wizard.

https://www.reapermini.com/miniatures/bonesusa

This is a "Death Marble", which is a large floating globe drone. As you can see from the shot, the details are very sharp, but some mold lines are visible.

When assembled (just pushed together and not properly glued yet), it looks quite nice, with well-defined panel lines. It looks close enough to my 3D printed drones that I can probably use it as a "boss" drone. It definitely shows sharper detail than typical Reaper Bones miniatures.

Here are a couple of "Viceroy Enforcers", humanoid robots with heavy guns. Again, sharp detail, but with some mold lines. Since these are much thinner than the "Death Marble", I tried bending them. There is some give, but the guns and legs are not nearly as bendy as the white plastic from older Bones material.

The next Enforcer is much smaller than the others, which is kind of strange. Nevertheless it has the same excellent detail.

As you can see with this size comparison, it actually fits more with 1/72 scale miniatures than with larger 28/32mm. With 28mm miniatures, it will be a very small robot. No matter what though, I think all of these will see service in Stargrave.

I also ordered a fantasy wizard ("Darius the Wizard") in the same material. The detail on this model actually makes it quite a bit better than other fantasy Bones miniatures I have, and I especially love the rat familiar which is tiny but characterful. However, in addition to mold lines, you can also see a bit of flash on the top of his hat.

Overall, the material reminds me of the "Ultracast" material from my Battlegroup Northag crowdfunding purchase. It might be the same technology that allows plastic injection into flexible molds designed for metal miniatures. The technology also ties into their name, with the "USA" bit meaning that they are produced at Reaper's home facility in Texas, which means it's something that doesn't require a factory like traditional soft plastic injection molding. This material seems to have somewhat sharper detail, but with the same issue with mold lines.

When I prep and paint these, I'll have to take note to see how easy it is to remove the mold lines, which is always tricky with soft plastic.

Don't worry, I'll be back with more painted 3D prints soon.

A Quick Review and More Kings of War

Since the Kings of War tournament for late March was canceled due to the pandemic situation, I had some more time to paint new additions to my Kings of War army. This also involved exploring new unit types.

A while ago, I bought into the pre-order for Oathmark Miniatures' plastic goblin wolf riders. I've always been impressed by the quality of Oathmark's castings, so I jumped at the chance of more classic Tolkienesque goblins rather than cartoonish green goblins.

I bought two boxes of these miniatures, which contain 15 goblin riders each. That's quite a sizable number for use as auxiliary units in my Ogre army.

The box consists of three goblin sprues and 5 wolf sprues. The goblins show the typical high quality casting from Oathmark, and each sprue contains enough arms for the choice of all miniatures being archers, spearmen, or swordsmen.

The close-up above shows the excellent detail of goblin faces.

However, the wolf sprues were not as impressive. Each wolf comes in two halves, but other than the manes and tails, their bodies are almost completely smooth! The lack of fur texture can be a problem during painting. It's very strange that there is such a lack of detail compared to the riders.

I painted up enough for a couple of troop units in Kings of War, with removable individual bases. When painted up, they generally look quite good. However, being spoiled by a lot of the newer plastic kits, I ignored the gaps down the front of the wolves' heads. Newer kits don't usually need greenstuff to cover up gaps like that. After painting them though, the gaps are quite obvious. Maybe I have to use some paint to try to hide them. I'll definitely remember to fill those gaps for the next ones I build.

A close-up shows that they are very nice painted up, despite some of my issues from above.

This is the second unit of them, and I will remember to fill the head gaps next time!

Aside from the goblins, I based up a couple of plastic pre-painted mammoth toys from Michael's, which will function as quick and cheap war mammoths for Ogres.