Deadzone Arrives
Wednesday was a happy day for me as my copy of Deadzone, shipped on the 14th of February, finally arrives. And by finally, I mean it arrived the first business day following the ship date. I didn’t get it Tuesday because the courier tried to deliver and no-one was home.
I excitedly unboxed and started pawing through my pieces. Even if I wasn’t bored to tears by unboxings there are more than enough of them for Deadzone that I won’t give a play by play of the contents, just my opinions.
The Deadzone core boxset. Image copyright Mantic Entertainment Ltd..
First, Mantic tried to be smart by designing their box to hold the finished terrain players are likely to make for the game. A great idea. Unfortunately they didn’t pad out the box in any way and the contents take up roughly half the volume. This allowed them to slide around in transit with the plastic terrain sprues scraping against each other and damaging a couple of the miniatures.
I haven’t contacted Mantic for a replacement as I want to make sure I’ve cataloged all the damage first. I don’t want to take the miniatures out of the baggies until I am assembling them so I have not yet had the chance to examine them.
I’ve spent the last two evenings cleaning and assembling miniatures. So far I’ve assembled all of the Plague and the Enforcer Captain. I think this has given me plenty of experience with restic.
It seems to me restic is the gamer’s material in the same way that some painting styles suit gamers and others suit modellers. Casting in restic allows Mantic to sell their miniatures at a price that makes it affordable to build large forces. It is not the perfect material.
I’ve read a bunch of complaints about the difficulty of removing mold lines. I’ve heard that the formula has been changed for Deadzone and that the material can be filed and scraped like plastic or metal. I have found this to be the case with the miniatures in my copy of Deadzone. The difficulty I’ve experienced have all been related to the position of mold-lines.
Deadzone Enforcer Captain. Image and model copyright Mantic Entertainment Ltd.
If a mold-line runs over a flat or convex surface it is easy to clean. Frequently the mold-lines on the Plague miniatures follow an organic deformed surface and that can make them difficult to clean.
These are normal for any material. I will say that restic’s elasticity makes it harder to brush off trimmed bits of material that are hanging on by a hair.
There is another problem with the Deadzone miniatures. The casting is not crisp and there are signs that the molds were distorted during casting. I’ve seen pewter miniatures with the same casting flaws and so I don’t think that these issues can be blamed on the restic material.
It seems like quality casting is an underappreciated art. Companies with access to a talented caster produce castings which are closer to the original sculpts in quality while companies with your average caster may make a good sculpt, or material, look bad.
This is all I’ve experienced so far. I’ve read the rules but don’t like commenting on rules until I’ve played them. Some of the most complex-reading rules played wonderfully, even in challenge convention conditions.
Expect a future post on the terrain and then a play report in the next couple of weeks.
