More than a year ago, I decided to put money in the Sedition Wars Kickstarter. It was already going perfectly, with enough funds to be a reality, and starting with the nice and interesting perks, so was a sure bet.
The base game comes with 50 miniatures, cards, scenario board pieces and the rulebook, but the perks ended up adding dozens of new miniatures, plastic markers, cool dice, a painting DVD and additional campaigns in PDF. The minis were both more base soldiers and monsters and some special characters for free.
They looked so cool and I was so happy that I ended up adding to the base perk one additional character ("suspiciously similar" to the main Dead Space videogame character ;) and the "terrain pack", with lots of doors, futuristic furniture, defense towers and similar stuff.
I received the first game and part of the "free perks" a while ago, but only recently I've been finally able to finish assembling the miniatures, so it almost got overlapped with the arrival few weeks ago of the wave two, containing all remaining free stuff plus my additional paid items.
I now have my "workshop table" full of Sedition Wars minis but I'm almost done assembling even the wave 2 ones, so I can now give a review of the general quality of the product.
I haven't yet read the rules nor played any game so I don't know how deep shallow or great or crappy it is. At least they did a second run of unit cards and sent them for free, so while it might look it didn't took enough testing at least they tried to fix it.
Well, let's go with the minis themselves.
The minis are great 25mm sculpts. I instantly fell in love with the design and poses of them, both the human soldiers and alien monsters. Some of them are more bizarre, others more "organic", others almost like an alien robot... but all look quite cool and have dynamic poses.
Instead of getting lots of same-pose minis just with different weapons, there are male and female soldier variants, helmet or no helmet, raised or lowered weapon... Looks really cool to see just two or three repetitions of some marines.
And of course the special characters are cool, both in their human form and mutated/infected alien counterpart. They are going to be hard to paint with so much detail on 25mm but definetly cool sculpts.
Then, we go into the materials... and then everything gets grim. Except a single wave 2 miniature (which comes in resin), everything comes in hard plastic. And while hard plastic can have really good level of detail, and it indeed has here with the miniatures has sometimes an amazing level of detail... oh my the moulding lines.
The f***ing moulding lines. The terror of miniature assembly and painting. Piece joint holes can be covered with green stuff, but moulding lines can only be "fixed" by trying to remove them as best as you can. And Sedition Wars is a disaster regarding plastic injection.
By far the worst moulding lines I've seen in years assembling boardgames and miniatures, it gets even worse due to being smaller 25mm minis. I've spent countless hours removing mould lines, and in some places I directly gave up. hairs, armour pieces, helmets, faces, arms... I've seen variants of any human and alien body piece with big ugly crossing moulding line :(
Some piece joints are also not perfectly molded and require cutting or softening + green stuff, but as I said before that's easier to tackle with.
Miniatures are great, game looks cool, it was worth the (kickstarter) price due to the amount of components and extras, but if the centerpiece, the minis, come far from perfect, overall image suffers a lot. And I suffer as I bought the game first for the miniatures, second for the gameplay.
I'll probably do another round of smoothing the day I paint the minis, but what could have been perfect ended up being just "good" for a basic flaw.