D&D Miniatures Starter Pack: A D&D Miniatures Game Product (D&D Miniatures Product) [用品]

It's true that there are other prepainted figures out there, such as the Wizkids line, but the problem with these is that the click base interferes with a good D&D game. (I could rebase them, but that again takes time and ruins them for any MageKnight game.)

How are the miniatures? For approximately $1.25 a figure, they're what you would expect. Flexible plastic, limited colors schemes, and cheap. Which has a benefit: my personally painted figures I guard like gold while I carry the prepainted D&D Miniatures around loose in a cardboard box. No worry about them bending out of shape, and if they do bend out of shape I can reshape them by warming them in boiling water, holding them in a new shape, and cooling them in cold water. (Young children should have their parents help with this.)

Contents of the box: The starter set comes with 8 non-random terrain cards, a rule book, a 20 sided die, a players map, and 16 figures. (I believe the distribution is 1 rare, 5 uncommon, and 10 common, but it might be one less uncommon and one more common. Ultimately, you're better off getting two expansion packs than one starter if you're looking for rares.) Each figure has a statistics card, which allows for more tactics than the simple MageKnight click-base games. The flip side of the card has rules for using the figure in D&D.

Out of the box, the game plays pretty well. They have a simple ruleset where you just pick miniatures, but after you get a larger selection of them you can design your own alignment based faction and fight.

It's not perfect. For one, the flip side of the battle map has templates for some spell attacks, so you should photocopy them before you play (or get two starters...) I think the set is lacking in commanders which makes it difficult to put together a 100 point faction without a large amount of figures (I'd guess 1 starter and 6 expansions but since the figures are random it's hard to say.) I wish that they had included more possibilies for terrain cards had had included 8 randomly selected cards, to give a secondary collectable nature to the game. I also think that there should always be one large figure per pack, but instead only around half of the rares are large, and no commons or uncommons are rare. Finally, I wish that they had more care deciding figure distributions -- there are Unique figures, which means that you can only have one in your group. Since they're uncommon, you'll be more likely to get them, and having more than one unique figure is useless for the miniature game.

Most of my complaints are just nitpicking the game. The rules are well-written. The game is pretty fast paced, especially if you're already familiar with D&D. As a miniature painter/D&D player, I recommend both the miniatures and the miniature game they come with.

In all, I believe that the miniatures are fairly affordable when compared to their metal predecessors. Their stand-alone playability makes them increasingly worthwhile for those that have no interest in standard RPGs. Lastly, I find their combat rules to be well written and brilliantly devised, while still based on creatures appearing in the various monster manuals.