Only the weak believe that what they do in battle is who they are as men.
Let’s unbox the latest truckload of goodies from CMON: B.Sieged: Sons of the Abyss.
Personally, I’d like to meet the person who named this game and give them a good long shake, because I can’t stand it! The ‘B’ sieged pun is bad enough; but then they went and stuck a colon next to it and gave it a subtitle. Argh, can’t stand it, not like it was in my day, grumble grumble…
Anyway, with that grumpy little whinge out of the way – wowsers! Look at all the stuff! Yes, it’s another Cool Mini or Not Kickstarter campaign, and I have to say that, for the price of a quality boardgame, you get about three times the usual amount of quality boardgame here. Also, as I mention too many times during the video, there are lots of lovely 3D markers that will work rather nicely in other games. And on top of that, the shipping was less than half the outrageous amount I usually have to stump up for international game postage. Well done CMON! I’ve also backed their latest The Others, and for my money they’re churning out some of the best value thematic gaming experiences you can find these days. Sure, there’s a tendency towards lots of dice rolling and swingy swings of luck, but I don’t always want an intense strategic experience. Sometimes I just wanna chuck dice and move gorgeous plastic figures around!
So let’s rip off the shrink wrap, open the mysterious brown parcels, and check out B.Sieged: Sons of the Abyss!
So much to paint in there, but I doubt I will have the patience to do so. I find the repetition very tedious when there are so many similar miniatures. I may do the heroes… when it finally reaches the UK…
I think with games like this – boardgames, as opposed to tabletop miniatures game – the key is to develope a very fast, chunky style of production-line painting and churn them out quickly in batches. A quick base coat, a wash, and big bold highlights. The stone creatures can be done very quickly with drybrushing, and some bold yellow and red ‘lava’ highlights – you could do all those stone toads in an hour or three. There’s no need to apply masterpiece techniques to something that will only be played occasionally, just whip ’em out and brighten up the look of the game; after all they’re being seen from the distance your eyes are away from the tabletop, not studied up close.
They’re such lovely, chunky designs I think they’d be fun to paint quickly. I may give it a go when I’ve finished this damn Hadross army!
I’ve just finished my Imperial Assault figures. With the Stormtroopers I sprayed them white, patched up any bits I missed and then applied black to the visor and blasters. Bases grey for standard units and edged red for elites.
Simplistic, but it works… from a distance. Did similar approach with Shadows of Brimstone.
It’s difficult sometimes to pull back on the throttle and just do a basic job, but you usually forget all about the fact you didn’t bother with the finely detailed work once you start playing the game. There’s only so much time available to paint, and a quick paint job is better than no paint job in many cases.
My biggest gripe is not the painting but cleaning the flash/mould lines. Ok, eyes give me trouble too but if it looks good from 50-70 cm away then it’ll look way better than unpainted.
It’s pretty much impossible to make a miniature without some from of mould line; these don’t seem much worse than any other figures, though the one on those toads is in a slightly tricky spot. As long as they don’t go across faces or horizontally over wavy cloaks (hello Mantic!)
Looks like a bargain bundle of goodies and the character style and design seem to match nicely too.
Some of CMoN’s rules books have very busy page backgrounds this one appears more sensible.
Hope it plays as good as it looks.
Thanks for sharing.
That’s the only element I felt was wanting – I agree that page backgrounds should be overly busy, but I think the rulebook design is very basic and it looks like they decided not to put much time and effort into it.
Played my first solo of this today. I lost. Friendly fire killed my first messenger. Let’s just say “Never fire the catapult at zone three if there are less than three enemies when the messenger is there and you don’t have any divine grace tokens”.
On the plus side, the variety of KS heroes will keep play varied, but I had no spell caster, so Sorcery tower was useless.