New Miniatures Review : Mantic Skeleton Regiment

24Feb/100

New Miniatures Review : Mantic Skeleton Regiment

It's possible Mantic has passed you by, if they have and you have an interest in 28mm fantasy wargaming then I suggest you check them out.

Very recently they launched their undead range and on Friday my skeleton and ghoul regiments turned up. I'm planning a couple more articles on these sets, so if what you see in this first post is of interest, make sure you come back.

So this is the box that I came home to on Friday. In size and feel its actually a lot like an old VHS video box! The overall look is very swish and as my wife said "I was quite impressed when I saw that".

Inside you'll find 2 sprues of assorted skeleton bits, 2 sets of bases, 2 pieces of foam/sponge, 2 sets of shield stickers and a nice poster/leaflet. The box is designed to be a storage or carry case, hence the inclusion of the sponge. Some experimentation suggested that although the built skeletons all fit in the box, the foam is quite thin so they move around a bit. Adding in another layer or two of foam or some thick cardboard would soon sort this out. The leaftlet is on one side a poster and the other side a general background, building and painting advice leaftlet. Its a nice introduction and full colour. It largely refers you to the Mantic site for more detailed guides should you need them.

So what do you actually get? Well for £12.50 I got 20 skeletons, yes read that again, 20 skeletons for £12.50. The sprues you can see above, but for those that are interested in the detail, I made a list:

20 assorted legs (5 styles)
20 assorted bodies (13 styles)
10 loose heads
14 loose spears (plus 2 broken)
16 loose swords
3 other loose weapons
a choice of bell or horn for the musician
a standard
7 posable arms
some fun bits

Its worth noting that these pieces are not all freely interchangable without some conversion work. By default 6 of the bodies only fit onto 3 of the legs, the remaining 8 bodies using the other 2 styles. 3 of the body styles come with weapons attached, the rest have hands that will fit the assortment of weapons provided. 8 of the bodies you are free to choose heads for, the rest not so much without a pair of clippers.

This means buying multiple boxes of skeletons (and if you look on the site you can buy the 'troop' and 'command' sprues seperately if you wish) will result in less variety than you might initially think, but of my initial 20, no two are the same. Whether this is an issue or not is up to you, not so many years ago, many plastic figure sets were all identical!

I do not have GW's current skeleton regiment (for vampire counts anyway) so I can't suggest how well the parts would interchange with that set, however my experience of the previous set and the current Khermi suggest that without conversion, you'll not find much you can use by default.

Here's most of the regiment, one guy has been kept back as he is due to be the subject of a painting tutorial very soon, so you can both see how these guys look painted up quickly and its an opportunity to get another tut up on here.

These guys fit together really easily and require relatively little cleaning up. The weld lines were minimal on sprues I got and the gates are largely in places that were either hidden (under rib cages and so on) or easy to clean (on swords or helmets). The bases are interesting, the figures coming on small round stubs that you can insert into 20mm square bases if you wish - I do as I play warhammer and the round stubs allowed me to face the skeletons in different positions as I wanted, but at the same time mean each skeleton is really well attached to his base, something I haven't always been able to say for my GW guys.

The command sprue guys are really quite fun, with the posable arms, heads and more interesting torsos you can scatter about some more animated (ho-ho) minions in the otherwise shambling squad.

So overall, I really rather like this set so far. The skeletons form a shabby but regimental unit I'd be pleased to include in my Vampire Counts army and I'm hoping they are going to prove nice to paint as well (we'll see soon). The fun bits I mentioned on the sprue include the cute little critter above (its a skeletal dog) - you also get a wound/objective counter, a skeleton popping out of a grave, a shoulder pad (haven't worked out a good place to use this yet!) and what I think is a dead dwarf head...I wonder if that's a hint for what Mantic may be planning for the future?

I hope that was interesting - there will be more pics next time, as well as a skeleton painting tutorial and some Mantic vs GW undead shots for comparison.