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Pace picked up. 70K yesterday.
* Pledge manager released
* Prices of extras announced
* Stretch goal hit
* Bases stretch goal added at a lower stretch goal number

It's all artificial scarcity. KS is for the creator, not the backer, and the creator can add and delay goodies at their own pace, to control the momentum of the KS. My guess is that Reaper was working on the Pledge Manager and international shipping for the core set (I think they have the set pretty much fully planned, because the shipping for the core set is known -- and larger than the total of the core extras) for the last few days, and let the rate of pledge rate fall. Now that they have the international shipping settled, they can focus on the funding.

So I'm currently in for The $12 add on dragon, the core set and I'm thinking about grabbing the core set expansion. I hear tell that the Bones, even for their price... aren't exactly the best, and don't take paint very well. I suppose I'm just trying to talk myself out of $162.... any one have more info? Especially someone who pledged on the last Bones KS?

Some are good, some awful. I think an honest review would be that I wouldn't go out of my way to purchase a bones figure.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
So I'm currently in for The $12 add on dragon, the core set and I'm thinking about grabbing the core set expansion. I hear tell that the Bones, even for their price... aren't exactly the best, and don't take paint very well. I suppose I'm just trying to talk myself out of $162.... any one have more info? Especially someone who pledged on the last Bones KS?

I would have to question your sources.

Disregarding things which are opinion - they take paint great. You do have to watch out if you plan on priming them and use a primer with an aggressive solvent as it can react with the plastic. Personally I have been skipping primer entirely and just applying my base coat straight to the raw plastic. In my case I do use an airbrush which allows me to thin the base coat down quite a bit and apply it very thin. If you do try to base coat with a brush though, you can get some beading if your paints are thinned too much.

The rest largely ends up being opinion. The material is generally more flexible than other materials used for miniatures (metal, resin, HIPS...). This can be a downside in some cases, but an upside in others. Doing things like painting the inside of a dragons mouth is much easier as I can just pry it open and get right in there. Spears however are not so good in soft plastic - though I have just been swapping those with metal shafts and GS points.

Detail is generally good. It isn't as crisp as the metal masters are, though I strongly believe that that has more to do with the tooling than with the material. Generally speaking anything larger than man sized has excellent detail. Smaller things tend to have the greatest degree of loss - though to be honest in the vast majority of cases you would be hard pressed to identify the Bones miniature from the metal one once they are painted (without picking them up that is).

To be honest though, we are still a couple of weeks from the end of the campaign and you are in the US. Reaper figures are easy to get here, and almost every hobby shop I have been in in the past few months has had some Bones figures in them. You can pick up a couple for yourself and see how you like it. For a few bucks spent, you can make up your own mind and then decide if you want to pledge. It isn't for everyone - but then again you still have people who haven't gotten over the change from lead based to lead free pewter miniatures either...

I'll see if my local has anything. I am not hopeful. Dude barely stocks GW even. I do use Krylon as my spray primer, I don't think it's aggressive... not sure how I'd check that though. I do brush paint, which is another argument imho for priming. Especially for models like say... that dragon I want. Or the turtle dragon in the core set where the paint job is gonna get complex.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
I'll see if my local has anything. I am not hopeful. Dude barely stocks GW even. I do use Krylon as my spray primer, I don't think it's aggressive... not sure how I'd check that though. I do brush paint, which is another argument imho for priming. Especially for models like say... that dragon I want. Or the turtle dragon in the core set where the paint job is gonna get complex.

Don't use Kylon primers except for maybe the dual Paint + Primer.

Primer info from the Reaper forums:
Recommended aerosol spray primers and paints:

Army Painter white and colored primers

Krylon Dual Paint + Primer

Duplicolor Sandable – slight tackiness possible

Rust-oleam Painter’s Touch Ultra Cover 2x – slight tackiness possible


Problem aerosol spray primers and paints:

Krylon white primer – doesn’t bond, stays tacky

Testors Enamel flat black – stays tacky

Walmart Valu flat white – stays tacky

Krylon Primer red-brown – stays tacky

Citadel spray

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
So I'm currently in for The $12 add on dragon, the core set and I'm thinking about grabbing the core set expansion. I hear tell that the Bones, even for their price... aren't exactly the best, and don't take paint very well. I suppose I'm just trying to talk myself out of $162.... any one have more info? Especially someone who pledged on the last Bones KS?

I don't know where you heard that. Bones is my second-favorite medium, after plastic, because it looks great, paints well and is very easy to work with.

There might be some detail loss on the very small and intricate models (mostly the women), but 95% of the Bones 1 minis were amazing. I had a lot of the minis in metal already (dwarfs, time chasers, some of the elves), and the difference in detail is unnoticeable for most of them. Honestly, if the loss of superfine details is that much of an issue for you, you probably shouldn't be looking at Reaper sculpts to begin with.

As far as painting them up goes, I've painted more Bones models than all other kinds combined in the last 5 years. I wash them in dish soapy water, scrub them with a tooth brush and then let them dry. I don't even prime them. I just paint an undiluted layer of paint (GW's Foundation paints, usually) over them and then paint them like any other model. I'm not the most talented painter in the world, so maybe that's why they don't seem to be an issue for me. However, my wife is a better painter than I am and she's had no complaints at all, except to wonder how she will paint Cthulhu's floppy tentacles.

 Sean_OBrien wrote:

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
So I'm currently in for The $12 add on dragon, the core set and I'm thinking about grabbing the core set expansion. I hear tell that the Bones, even for their price... aren't exactly the best, and don't take paint very well. I suppose I'm just trying to talk myself out of $162.... any one have more info? Especially someone who pledged on the last Bones KS?

I would have to question your sources.

Disregarding things which are opinion - they take paint great. You do have to watch out if you plan on priming them and use a primer with an aggressive solvent as it can react with the plastic. Personally I have been skipping primer entirely and just applying my base coat straight to the raw plastic. In my case I do use an airbrush which allows me to thin the base coat down quite a bit and apply it very thin. If you do try to base coat with a brush though, you can get some beading if your paints are thinned too much.

The rest largely ends up being opinion. The material is generally more flexible than other materials used for miniatures (metal, resin, HIPS...). This can be a downside in some cases, but an upside in others. Doing things like painting the inside of a dragons mouth is much easier as I can just pry it open and get right in there. Spears however are not so good in soft plastic - though I have just been swapping those with metal shafts and GS points.

Detail is generally good. It isn't as crisp as the metal masters are, though I strongly believe that that has more to do with the tooling than with the material. Generally speaking anything larger than man sized has excellent detail. Smaller things tend to have the greatest degree of loss - though to be honest in the vast majority of cases you would be hard pressed to identify the Bones miniature from the metal one once they are painted (without picking them up that is).

To be honest though, we are still a couple of weeks from the end of the campaign and you are in the US. Reaper figures are easy to get here, and almost every hobby shop I have been in in the past few months has had some Bones figures in them. You can pick up a couple for yourself and see how you like it. For a few bucks spent, you can make up your own mind and then decide if you want to pledge. It isn't for everyone - but then again you still have people who haven't gotten over the change from lead based to lead free pewter miniatures either...

@KalashnikovMarine: When not fully primed, the bones pieces can be a real pain to paint (especially if you mix paint with water rather than thinner). Generally speaking the detail is quite soft at times but still passable. Sometimes the flexibility does work against it on smaller flimsy models (halflings etc) because they will always assume their original pose after being exposed to warm/hot conditions. So if for example your model comes bent drastically forward at the ankles, you'll have to spend some time reposing it with the hot/cold treatment to make sure it doesn't bend back after exposure to the elements. However on larger models (say the beholder and larger) it does end up working greatly in its favour.

Personally I find them drastically above quality of most of the prepainted D&D figures you can find, and are generally speaking create a decent painting surface after priming, but don't pile on the paint because areas like chainmail or faces sometime do have only very slight indentation for detail.

For their average price per model some of them are absolute gems (for example: pretty much every civilian model) but others are quite specialized and tend to polarize (pathfinder models, creatures etc) people. In all honesty they're not fine detailed resin quality, but they will serve pretty much every purpose unless you're trying to enter a high-quality painting competition with one (in which case you have your work cut out for you certainly). Best of all they are very durable, though I don't tend to throw them around a couple have survived being trodden on accidently (only the bases cracked, not the models thankfully).

It's value however is entirely subjective, you have to see if the pledge + shipping + extras meets your requirements for that price tag before going ahead.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
So I'm currently in for The $12 add on dragon, the core set and I'm thinking about grabbing the core set expansion. I hear tell that the Bones, even for their price... aren't exactly the best, and don't take paint very well. I suppose I'm just trying to talk myself out of $162.... any one have more info? Especially someone who pledged on the last Bones KS?

Here ya go: http://www.reapermini.com/forum/index.php?/topic/47477-bathalian-bones-vs-metal-challenge/

I painted Dain Deepaxe from LTPK5 vs. his Bones counterpart. The Bones model had more mold lines, comes pre-assembled (bleah), and the mold had a mistake (daggar-sized triangle on his chainmail). But I ended up with a better paint job with the Bones model, since painted the Bones model several months later. In other words, if you're looking for display-level miniatures skip Bones. If you're still learning to paint, or are a tabletop-level painter, metal will not help you more than Bones.

Since these are all new models, Reaper's tossing in more unusual ones than in the last KS. Also, the figures are larger and they don't have the $25 Sophie trade-in (which effectively reduced the last KS Vampire to $75), so you're not going to get as many figures for your $100.

Still, if you're looking for a "bulk purchase" of unique fantasy sculpts (and I certainly am), this is the best miniatures KS for it. Quite a few backers mentioned how they missed KS1 and don't want to miss this one.

EDIT: Also, Bones do not need priming. You can always paint your first coat the same color as your primer, or, better yet, an undercoat that best suits your figure.

I've personally not had any issue with bones other than a single model in my Bones I which had a missing face (but it was a hooded model which was fugly to begin with so it didn't matter ).

The only problem I had was I like to paint mainly with washes and bones does not take wash at all without a base layer of paint, so I did have to prime them.

Link to my first Bones painting in my PLog. A couple of models have mould lines, but nothing more than any plastic model really.

Bones are what finally brought me back to the hobby fold.

I'm at the point where I'm about ready to just chuck all my prepaints and replace them with Bones. I think that I can paint just as crappy as some kid stuck in a sweatshop!

I don't bother priming- I just slap the paint straight on them. I don't think I've ever cleaned one either. Thinned paint will be a problem though- don't do it too much.

Otherwise they rock. My computer desk is littered with them in various states of painting. My kids are constantly playing with them, and they are ROUGH. Bones are all still sitting pretty, despite the bumps, dings, bangs, and thumps they constantly take.

I don't see the loss of detail as a huge issue. I suck at painting so I probably would have globbed over a bunch of those little nuances as it is.

If you're painting for presentation rather than play, I can see Bones not being as great of choice. But they're cheap, they've got a lot of variety, they paint up nicely,

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
So I'm currently in for The $12 add on dragon, the core set and I'm thinking about grabbing the core set expansion. I hear tell that the Bones, even for their price... aren't exactly the best, and don't take paint very well. I suppose I'm just trying to talk myself out of $162.... any one have more info? Especially someone who pledged on the last Bones KS?

The PVC plastic used to make the bones is hydrophobic - this means water beads up on the minis. So, if you water your basecoat down, you'll get bad coverage and the paint won't take. Same result if you just slap a wash on.

However, it takes undiluted paint well. Just wash them in soapy water, dry them, and base coat them. Once the base coat is on you can thin your paint down however you like.


Like the other folks have said, buy a couple to see for yourself. I don't think there is anything on the market that can beat their quality at their price point.

I haven't had issues with mine. I primed with Army Painter Skeleton Bone or whatever it is called, and it works nicely. Unprimed, you REALLY gotta scrub them with a tooth brush and that helps with the beading issue. Really though, just prime them.

Past that, the quality is good if not as nice as metal in some cases. For the price though, really fantastic. And really, unless you are a top end painter, it probably won't make much difference in the finished piece

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
So I'm currently in for The $12 add on dragon, the core set and I'm thinking about grabbing the core set expansion. I hear tell that the Bones, even for their price... aren't exactly the best, and don't take paint very well. I suppose I'm just trying to talk myself out of $162.... any one have more info? Especially someone who pledged on the last Bones KS?

I think they take paint pretty well. IMO, they dont paint super well "out of the box" like some say, at least with the paints I use (mainly P3). I prime them w vallejo primer through an airbrush, and it works great. Plus the paint jobs are resilient as hell, better than plastic from what I can tell. I didnt find the mold lines hard to clean up, just use an xacto to slice off the flash rather than a file. I think there's a psychological benefit to their cheapness, as I blasted through my 26 orc horde in like 2-3 days of casual painting. Paying under a buck each didnt leave me agonizing if I did the best paint job I could. I just wanted some throw down bad dudes, which is what I got.

As for quality... its lower than metal, but not by a ton. For a player character/hero model I wouldnt use them (savng a buck or two isnt a big deal on a guy you use every session), but they work awesome as grunts. And big models dont really seem to suffer any loss of detail. I have three of the dragons I got in bones, and after priming and doing some prelim work, I dont notice much difference. Certainly not for the MASSIVE price discount. All in all, a good KS, and one I think good for the hobby in the long run. Hvaing a cheap source of minis beginners dont feel intimidated to start on is nice. And from what I saw, Bones 1 got a lot of people into or back in the mini gaming world.

For me the greateast issues with bones are the bendind swords and spears. Spears are not so problematic, as you only need a metal shaft and some drill work. But the swords are a pain, but the "hot-cold" treatment works.

 The Dwarf Wolf wrote:
For me the greateast issues with bones are the bendind swords and spears. Spears are not so problematic, as you only need a metal shaft and some drill work. But the swords are a pain, but the "hot-cold" treatment works.

Do a search on "plasticard weapons". Plenty of info, even for non-Bones converting!

Shipping to me is $45-ish and doesn't go up much when I add stuff. Pretty reasonable. But I'm afraid I'll still end up dropping this entirely in favour of Mars Attacks.

We need the thread title to be updated.

I think that Bones are great!

I have gotten my children into painting with them. They love it, and I love being able to go to a FLGS and let them dig through the racks and pick the one they want to paint. With a price of $1.99 to $2.99 each, I don't have a problem with buying them local instead of online.

Hell, I started painting again with Bones. The other stuff that I want to paint is too expensive to practice on.

I'm shocked how many people seem to be "holding off" as per the standard KS tactic. When getting your stuff sooner is on the line, why do I still hear a buzz that folks are waiting?

Earth Dragon wrote:
I'm shocked how many people seem to be "holding off" as per the standard KS tactic. When getting your stuff sooner is on the line, why do I still hear a buzz that folks are waiting?

You got me on that one.

Why wait? It's not like there won't be a fair amount more added to the pot before all is said and done.

Maybe it's the perceived value? There isn't enough in the core set to make them happy? The add ons don't have enough "oomph" to them?

I'm going to assume it's because their all waiting for cavalry, fodder infantry, and lots of reptiles that aren't dragons.

I think so many make it standard policy to only sign up in the last few days. I've heard a dozen people here on dakka dakka say as much. I think the policy is just misplaced on this one.

Others could of course be waiting on something they want for sure, but we'll surely see the same explosion at the end.

I jumped right in and got on wave 6... I can't imagine waiting MORE. >.>;

The last week for this should be record breaking. The CEO of Paizo has stated that they will be sending out their official support email then. Combine that with the normal rush at the end and I wouldn't be surprised to see it come pretty close to doubling the record they set the first time around.

I'll bet against that, Sean... I guess we'll find out in 2 weeks. I definitely think it will match the first campaign's total, and likely exceed it... but I definitely don't think it will double it, or anywhere close to that. That'd be 7 million and I just don't think there's the audience of gamers on KS, despite the cross appeal to different types of gamers that this tends to bring.

I'm betting 4 million... which would still be absolutely insane, of course. And it already is, really!

On the one hand I completely agree, on the other that's what most of us thought about Bones KS1 going past 2M or so...

Earth Dragon wrote:
I'm shocked how many people seem to be "holding off" as per the standard KS tactic. When getting your stuff sooner is on the line, why do I still hear a buzz that folks are waiting?

I'm only in for $25 at this point (Kraken, plus maybe the cube). Am primarily into Sci-fi gaming and so far there is not nearly enough in the core or expansion pledges that interests me enough to pledge higher. Last time there were a lot more pieces with possible sci-fi uses via conversions, etc., and I spent something over $200 (four C'thulus ). Still waiting on this one...

Tim

Only 15k until the next goal and reveal.

Hmm, what to want now...

I do enjoy the Egyptian and Desert stuff, but I think we've got plenty of that between Bones 1 and The second expansion.

I think a "ghost" dragon would be cool, since we have a Zombie and Dracolich.

Some primal elementals, and Air Elementals would be cool.

I just made the decision to cancel. The core set just isn't appealing enough and doesn't seem to be getting better - I was tempted to stay in for a few dragons but in the end I thought better of it.