Wednesday 6 April 2011

Dwarf Kings Hold

I've been excited waiting for this game to arrive, and theres a simple reason why, its the same reason I have thousands of painted toy soilders, it was a game I was bought for xmas at some point in the early 90's, that game was Heroquest.  Heroquest was what started me (and many others of my generation) in the wargaming / roleplaying world, since that board game my interest has spread far and wide over the hobby.  Hoping for a new Heroquest was a bit much, but still I've been aticipating this game alot and it arrived this morning, so I am happy with it? In a word yes, but I do have some niggles.  First off there is a major difference between this and the Heroquest/Warhammer Quest style of dungeon crawler, there isn't a party of warriors all radically different who 'level up' this is more akin to Space Hulk in a dungeon, but thats cool as i love Space Hulk to. so component review:

Board Sections: Yeah the artwork is pretty seem to be of high quality, no issues here for me, I like the added flexibility that not 'jigging' the board sections brings, although i would have liked to have seen some plastic connectors similar to those in Warhammer Quest, but still its not a big issuse.

Tokens: made out of the same card as the baord sections, they're card tokens, and seem fine.

Dice: erm you get 7 D6's, they roll ok...

Rulebook: a 21 page black and white small rulebook containing 6 scenarios.  Some nice simple rules, hopefully providing interesting tactical challenges, although as I've not played it yet can't be sure on this.  Would have liked a few more sceanarios, but apparently we will be getting more online and in the mantic journal.

Models: the models themselves are fantastic, the skeletons in particular.  They are the standard mantic sprues: 10-man skeleton sprue, 2-man skeleton warmachine sprue, 10-man revenant sprue, 5-man dwarf sprue and the 2-man sheildbreaker sprue.  The sprues also contain another 2 skeletons bursting out of the ground, 2 undead hounds, a dwarf dog and a dead dwarf. I'm actually a lot more impressed with the dwarves in person than I have been looking at them on the web and now plan to add more to my dwarf army.

These are the 7 dwarves you get, the 2 on the right are the sheildbreakers.
As i said above I'm really impressed with the quailty of the skeleton models, not exagerated the way GW ones sometimes are, and I already have 30 of the Revenants so knew exactly what to expect.  There was one problem with my undead sprues though;


I have 10 grey skeletons, 2 bone coloured skeletons and 10 grey revenants.  If I wasn't planning on painting them having 2 skeletons in a differnt colour to the others would be very annoying, if I was primarily a Board gammer i'd be miffed.  That brings me on to another point, the models are squarely aimed at poeple used to wargaming not board gaming as extensive assembley is required, its fine with me and I prefer the added flexibility, but it's something to bear in mind.  I have one more niggle with this set, where's my square bases? come on mantic I can't be the only one planning to use these models for Dwarf Kings Hold and Warhammer (and potentially Kings of War), the simple inclusion of square bases would have made this a much better product for me.

Mantic Points/Discount Card: you also get 2 mantic points and a £5 discount at mantic games website, which is a nice bonus, i spent mine on square bases......

So overall I'm happy and impressed, a few small niggles that won't bother me once the gorgeous models are painted.  An impressive first attempt on the quality side i think and I can't wait to play it.  I'll post my thoughts on gameplay once I've actually played it.

5 comments:

  1. You were just unlucky not getting all bone skeletons, sadly:
    http://40kforums.com/imageupload/images/img4d91c45f04fd1.jpg

    Personally I don't see the issue with the square bases - the number of models in comparison to a unit size on KoW (or WHF) and the fact that units come in convenient numbers generally for KoW means I'm leaving mine unbased and "exclusive".

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think its more annoying knowing that other poeple got all bone undead, oh well I'm painting them anyway.

    The esclustivity was initally the way I was goning to go too, then my unit of 30 revenants looked at me, and I looked at the 10 new revenants and it just didn't make sense not to base and use them for that too. I've now ordered a command box of skeletons to bring that upto a unit of 20 as well.

    I've spent most of today playing the game and am now completely in love with it, the niggles no longer seem important.

    thanks for taking the time to read and being my first commenter.

    ReplyDelete
  3. One thing I liked about Heroquest was how the undead were white, orcs green, chaos grey, etc. These models are generally nicer, though I agree that they're probably not so easy for board-gamers.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Note you can always use Heroquest models for this if you are feeling lazy, at least for the first scenario!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. my set of heroquest went bye bye a long time ago unfortunatly although I keep getting tempted to pick up a set on ebay!

      Delete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...