Project Pandora: Miniatures

This is the second post about the contents of the Mantic boardgame Project Pandora.  The first one just shows the basic unpacking but the miniatures needed their own post.

The miniatures for Project Pandora came in 2 plastic bags.  They were already removed from the sprue mostly but the heads were still on as well as some weapons.  The bags were separated between the humans and the ratmen.  No directions were included or readily accessable on the Mantic site.

Contents of the human bag gives you 9 normal guys with rifles (or special weapons) and one other guy with with a pistol and power glove in a kneeling position.  The rules have nothing for the special weapons but the pistol and power glove do appear.  The normal guy stuff comes in 3 sets of 3 for the bodies, heads, rifles, and guns.

The special weapons do not have hands so you have to cut the grip off and the rifle off an arm to use them.  Since these are models for a boardgame, I am not going to bother with anything like that.

You could probably switch the leader gear onto one of the other bodies but I just left this grouping together.

Slightly differently posed walking bodies.

Slightly different angles for holding the gun.

Another set of slightly different angles for the other arms.  All these slightly different sets leave you with a serious issue in that they each fit well with 1 of the other groups and only kind of with the others.  So you can either get 3 groups of 3 pretty much identical models or models that just look a little off if you do not want to do a ton of work.

Here are the models built.  Certainly not very inspiring without any paint.

The leader is not half bad.

The basic guys are just not really up to the level I expect though.  I tried my best to match the right components but I found that I just ended up with a bunch of guys who look a little awkward.

The ratmen do not really do much better.  You get 4 guys of 2 types and then 2 special guys with a different body type.

Bodies

The 2 basic guns pieces that match up with just one of the two bodies.

Gear for the leader and the heavy weapon guy.

Again 4*2 and then 2 additional ones for the heads.

Full group assembled. 

The mold lines really show bad on the unpainted model due to stress induced color changes when you try to file them away.

More ugly white bits all over the place.

Example basic baddies.

Overall I found that I did not like working with this material.  My dislike it for the assembly process for these miniatures was so strong that I never really even tried to play the game.  I am certainly not interested in buying any mantic resin types models in the future.  I did get the game for like 25 dollars so that is a fair price but would certainly not spend 8 dollars a piece to "upgrade" any of the soft plastic boardgame pieces from Dungeon Saga to this stuff.  I was assembling these about the same time I was working on some Impact Miniatures Trollcast stuff and found Trollcast to be preferable even if it does have more bubble issues.

I have come to the conclusion that I really do not want to have to assemble minis to play a boardgame the first time.  Obviously the quality of multipart plastics that require assembly is much higher than the soft plastic in games like Castle Ravenloft but their is just the higher getting it ready level that gets in the way.