Mantic Undead - Bare Bones Cost

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years you must have noticed the huge range of non Games Workshop plastic 28mm kits now available.  The first I recall hitting the geeky streets were the Perry ACW kits swiftly followed by the Warlord Ancients.  Mantic Games were the first to come on the scene with fantasy kits and have been very well received. 

As my goblin army has been nearing completion (more on this next week), I’ve been looking for a new army to start work on.  I’ve always fancied undead (not in that way), ever since I painted up some zombies and skeletons for Advanced Heroquest back when I was a lad.  I really liked the plastic undead range by Mantic Games so I decided to see what I could get for my Frugal pennies.

The Mantic undead range has been reviewed so many times that I won't go over old ground, suffice to say that I can confirm that the quality is fantastic, even if the range of poses is a little limited.  As this is a Frugal Gaming blog I’ll be looking at the price.  I ordered my figures at the end of last year, but I’ll use the post VAT increase prices to make my point.  Looking at the various deals available, the prices break down as follows (click on the picture for a bigger version):

As you can see from the deals available the best price per individual figure is the Undead Army set, giving a mighty 110 figures for a measly £50.  You don’t get any of the bells and whistles with some of the other sets (such as catapults, cavalry or metal army command group) but to act as the bulk of an army I think it’s a fantastic deal, and I can always pick up the other bits and pieces as I go along.  The other sets offer loads of great options and if you're looking at picking up a huge force then you'd be wise to go for the Liche King's Horde; the revenant cavalry models are amazing!

Frugal Conclusion
Simple really, with prices and quality like this you can’t go wrong, get some.  Oh, and I’m looking forward to seeing their forthcoming Orc and Goblin range as well!

Frugal Afterthoughts
To get an additional discount I’d recommend going to Wayland Games, I bought my Undead Army Set from them before the price rises and (with their discounts) only paid £39 with free delivery!  The customer service was excellent, even with the bad snow my order arrived within 24hrs of me ordering it online.  Thanks guys!

Happy gaming!

Dave

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Von's Frugal Year: Month The Third

Turns out that I've finished my latest batch of essays a day ahead of schedule, so I've time to leave you with some food for thought before I scurry off to the Barbarian North for a week and leave the laptop behind.

First things first: how did the Frugal March go?

Spend Less - brilliantly. Not a penny spent. Jokes about the state of my bladder are not welcome. ;)

Game More - brilliantly. Minor dilemma resolved with minimum of gamer angst. Some thoroughly enjoyable games were played, too, beyond the Space Hulk and WFB I've already used precious bandwidth to opine about.

We broke out Zombies! when an old mate from Wolverhampton came down to see us, which was fairly enjoyable up until the elimination of two players in short order. Zombies! is, in theory, a first-past-the-post game that should avoid situations where two players are out and waiting for the rest to finish, but a run of bad luck can leave someone eliminated early and two players of equal skill can stonewall each other from meeting either of the victory conditions for quite a while. While I like the screw-your-opponent potential of Zombies! a lot, I can't help but feel that the zombie apocalypse setting works better for co-operative gaming, and the thing about co-operative gaming is that there's no advantage to eliminating another player. You might even want to let someone who's 'died', or otherwise had their presence removed from play, back in, so they can continue with the fun times. The other thing with Zombies! is that it suffers from a bad case of expansion creep, with a lot of extra little boxes out to tempt with foolish expenditure.

The House of Von also had a little away-day when another old mate and former Mage player came back down for a weekend visit, and we decided the time was right to play 1000 Blank White Cards again. We've traditionally sat down and played this astonishingly Frugal game (pack of blank index cards, pair of scissors, some black biros, DONE!) in pubs or coffee houses or other public places (because it's hilarious and because we meet all sorts of nice people who are interested... plus the occasional batch of less-than-nice people who find people having fun in public offensive to their delicate sensibilities, but we don't care about them because they're dead inside) and it's usually a damn good laugh.

Finally, the Dark Heresy campaign is lurching forward. Three characters have now been generated, but a schedule conflict has forced one of our players to bow out (he works on an odd rotation and the only days when he's free at the same time as everyone else are days when we're already committed to doing other, non-gaming stuff), so it's back on hold for that bad boy until I can recruit another player or two (going to see some people who might be interested tonight...).

Oh, and I got some more work done on the battlefield: a set of eight modular hill pieces have been cut, painted and textured, as has a cover sheet for the river (so the table can be extended to its full 4'x4' dimensions for games where the extra six inches of flank might be important). I'll get some pictures taken of those (and the Dark Elves) when I'm back from the Northern Wastes.