About three weeks ago, an acquaintance of mine reached out and asked if I would be interested in reviewing some miniatures from a game that he’s helping design.
I assured him that I would be, but I also that almost no one reads my blog any more and was he sure he wanted to send me models?
Yup, turns out he did.
Welcome back everyone, today we are taking a look at two boxes from the skirmish game Eldfall Chronicles from the perspective of a painter, and I have four more to review at some point soon! If this article piques your interest, the rest of the line is also gorgeous and you can find them all here.
First impressions – the boxes are clean, uniform in size, and made out of really nicely finished cardboard. The cover art is good, and I forgot to take pictures of the back but they show renders of the things contained inside.
I started with the cat box, because I had a very excited 4-year-old girl sitting on my lap as I did all of this, and she really wanted to look at the cute kitty.
Upon first glance, the models are a lovely grey color that reminds me of the hard plastic kits GW and others produce. These are made from a new to me material called Unicool Plastic Resin, and the detail is absolutely incredible.
I was impressed that the little cat was a single piece, and the lion unicorn hybrid was only three. The bases have arcs pre-marked for you (I assume this is important for the game) and have slots custom made for the models themselves which is nice. I did not remember to get a picture of the underside, but there’s a hole cut into the base so they can be easily magnetized! Love to see that.
Naturally, with a frightfully impatient four year old calling the shots, we looked at the little cat first. On the vast majority of the model, there are no mold lines to speak of and the details are phenomenally crisp.
I could only find one small mold line on the tail attached to the ground, and it was thinner than paper, requiring no more than a slide of the hobby knife over the area to remove it.
The unicorn/lion hybrid was similarly striking, with incredibly clean details and casting.
One minor moldline down the belly, a slightly more substantive one on the foreleg here – but again, easily cleaned – and nothing else to note on the main portion of the body.
There is the faintest of mold lines on this foreleg as well, but you can barely see it even compared to the gigantically zoomed in texture of my fingerprints.
Cleaning and assembly of the pair of these took under five minutes, even with the “help” of my daughter. After months of building sprue based models or resin based multi kits with a lot of parts and warpage, this was a lovely change of pace.
The Oni box has some stat cards! I have yet to play the game, so I cannot comment on if these are good units in the system or not. In this pic you can see the magnet slots in the bases.
Unfortunately, the small girl-child accidentally ruined every picture I took of the assembly process by being a hyper little thing and bumping my arm. You can see here that the spear is warped, though the notes on the back of the box indicate that hot water should straighten that out easily, and based on my experience with other resin and SioCast models I tend to believe that.
I would like to comment that whatever blend these are made out of is an absolute joy to work with. If you had told me that I was putting together hard plastic models, I would have believed it. It trimmed cleanly under my snips, carved away like butter under my knife, and assembled seamlessly with really clever cut outs and keyed arm slots. These two took another approximately five minutes to put together (and I’ll straighten that spear out before I paint the guy, I’m not a monster).
Remember that daughter of mine? She insisted the cat get a paint job, so with 30 minutes to spare until I had to make the family dinner I rushed to put a layer of brush-on primer on the little dude, hair dryered him dry, and slapped this paint job on, roughly matching the box art.
I had an absolute blast doing so as well. The details, as I mentioned, are lovely and crisp, the cast job is incredible, and the model itself is so delightfully whimsical and charming.
I am thoroughly looking forward to painting the other three models that I’ve already built from Eldfall Chronicles, and I really recommend giving them a look if you are in the market for something with an extremely unique aesthetic to paint and enjoy. Again, you can find their site here.
Thanks so much for reading, a big thank you to the Eldfall Chronicles team for sending me these minis, and a special thanks to my daughter for spurring my lazy, increasingly old self into getting this cat painted up.
See you next time!