State of the Bones

A 10.8 lbs box of Reaper goodies arrived at my house last week. I am now 268 miniatures further in the painting hole than I was previously. My wife has already claimed about 20 of them, but considering she has painted about 1/2 a mini in the past 10 years I expect they'll stay white for a while.

Okay, so what do I think of them, you ask? I have decidedly mixed feelings. First off, I am glad I didn't "double Vampire" like I heard some did. There are plenty of figures here for a while, and if I ever want more they aren't that expensive.

Casting quality: I have not seen more than one or two issues with the casting, and even those were fairly minor. The flash and mold lines aren't terrible, but removing them is a pain. I haven't done a side by side comparison to their metal counterparts, but after priming the Tre Manor Ettin he looks very nice. I'll look through my collection of unpainted Reaper metal and see what I have duplicated in Bones.

The bending: This one is daunting to me. I have been told that boiling water/cold water will allow these to bend/harden so that warped elements of the figures can be corrected. While that appears to be true to start, the pieces seem to slowly warp again over the next couple days. The Cloud Giant woman in the photo is a good example of this. I have tried multiple times to straighten her club but when I come back to it it always looks like it does here. Thinner things like axe handles seem to have stayed in position after heat/cold alteration.

Taking paint: I painted a Bones Minotaur a while ago, and one of the things I loved about it was how well the model took and kept paint, without any sort of prep on the mini. Compared to my normal models, where paint sloughs off if I look at it harshly, this is a very welcome change. The Bones I have tried from my Vampire box have been very hydrophobic, so either the mold release was different or was washed off for the retail package and not the kickstart packaging. I hope their domestically manufactured minis are more like the Minotaur in that regard.

Gluing: Some pieces require assembly and some come pre-assembled. I have no idea why. In my experience a very thin cyanoacrylate (superglue) gives the best results. Maybe because the material is a little porous... I dunno.

The figure case: So some of the 10.8 lbs was the figure case, which is good not great. I was hoping for that big Reaper logo on one side, but the case is blank. As such, there is no obvious front/back, so opening the case is a crap shoot if you haven't marked which way is up. The first time I opening it after filling it with minis I dumped half of them on the table. Whoops. The cells on the foam trays are quite small, so I ended up cutting the walls on many of them to accommodate larger figures. Even so, I have all the infantry for my 2k+ Eldar army stored in there, minus anything on a 40mm base. It absolutely will not do 40mm based minis on their sides (unless you put two trays so their cavities face each other, which I was not willing to do.