World Famous Comics: Desert of Desolation: A Dungeon & Dragons Miniatures product (Dungeon & Dragons Miniatures Game)
Desert of Desolation: A Dungeon & Dragons Miniatures product (Dungeon & Dragons Miniatures Game)
From: Wizards of the Coast Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Average Rating: Binding: Misc. Supplies Label: Wizards of the Coast Manufacturer Minimum Age: 10 years Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 1 Publication Date: November 06, 2007 Release Date: November 06, 2007
Product Description: Cruel deserts and hostile wastelands hold creatures as nefarious and horrifying as any found in the darkest dungeons of the world. This 60-figure expansion for the Dungeons & Dragons CMG features iconic characters and creatures drawn from this formidable D&D adventure module, as well as various Monster Manual supplements.
This Set is Awesome! First: sorry for my poor english, I'm brazilian Second: I don't play Miniatures Game, I just use the miniatures for my RPG sessions... Review: this set is awesome... it has many possibilities... for my game campaign it fits nicely! I got one Umber hulk that is great! Lots of tieflings and undeads... easy to put on a game session... There are many miniatures that you can use as characters or villains... I recommend this set of miniatures!.... and I will buy more too...
Good fun for kids My 10 year old son has taken an interest in D&D and these miniatures were a terrific way for him to get into it. While I've read a lot of complaints about the quality of these figures from a collector's point of view, from the unobsessed point of view of a mother who likes to see her child play imaginative games, these sets are just great for kids. The minis provide a bridge for kids to cross between toys and the more complex rulesets of pencil-and-paper D&D, and I suspect that was their intent.
They are inexpensive, so I can buy him a couple of boxes every month. He gets the biggest charge out of waiting for the mail and opening the boxes to see what he's gotten this time. For parents who remember D&D when they were young, these make excellent gifts for your kids. They are a great alternative to video games -- and believe me, I love anything that peels my kid away from the computer -- while there is structure for the game, there is also plenty of room for the kind of imagination that made D&D so interesting to so many of us.
It is true that the older packs are less interesting and lower quality, but it is trivial to go to the Wizards of the Coast website to examine the figures that are available in the different series before you decide which series you want to buy. My son has already gotten several of the better figures in the 10 packs that I've bought so far, and there have been many happy hours spent waging epic war between beholders, elementals, fiends and innocent bystanding salt-shakers.
Underwhelming at best After opening over a case of these minis, I can say that I'm quite underwhelmed by the miniatures in this group. There are plenty of repeat creatures - a large fire elemental, 2 more drow, 2 more yuan-ti, a new umber hulk, manticore, and drider. Do we really need more drow or elementals?
There is simply not a lot of originality in this set. The gelatinous cube - a long icon from the earliest days of D&D - finally appears in this set as a rare, but it is little more than a clear plastic box. I could just as easily use a clear box that originally contained dice or something else.
There were a few other minis which I thought were underwhelming. The visejaw crocodile resembled something I could buy as a souvenir in Florida. The warhorse was just a horse with saddle (which appeared to be too large for the scale of other minis). My daughter has similar-sized horse miniature toys. Finally, the macetail behemoth is an ankylosaurus, and you can find one in any package of dinosaurs at a toy store.
There were a few interesting minis in the lot - a farmer (complete with pig) was amusing, finally giving us some commoner figures. But these were in the vast minority.
What WotC needs to do is perhaps release warband packs - maybe a dozen minis that are thematically linked (orc war bands, drow and driders, elementals, adventurers, etc). That would allow a GM to pick up a pack for an expected encounter. Grenadier and other metal mini manufacturers did this long ago, and it worked well. Then WotC could devote the major minis expansions to being nothing but monsters.
Shabby, low-quality junk! There's a good reaason why this brand-new product has already had its price slashed by more than 50% -- it's shabby, low-quality junk, bad even by Wizards of the Coast's abyssmally low standards. The most egregious problem was that there was almost no facial detail on the humanoid figures. Some of the so-called "rare" and "uncommon" figures which I received didn't even have eyes painted in! How hard is it to get a ten-cent an hour Chinese wage slave to poke a dab of paint on the "face" (read: "shapeless blob") of a figure which costs a fraction of a cent to produce? These figures are "rare" or "uncommon" only because Wizards deliberately under-produces the most desirable figure types to create an artifically high demand on eBay and elsewhere, creating an artifical market so that people will buy these packs in bulk and then break them up for sale as individual figures. Other sets have held their value through the years, and it IS possible to turn a profit on some figures, but that sure as h*ll isn't happening with "Desert of Desolation" -- a 50% price cut shows that the bubble has burst. Stay away from this set, folks. Buy "War of the Dragon Queen" for really nice figures, and don't think for a moment that D&D minis are an "investment" -- by the end of 2008 you'll be able to trade pogs for them. (Remember "pogs"? Weren't THEY a good investment? D&D minis are headed for the same garbage heap.)
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Trevor
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