In case you were wondering, some of the parts to make my groovy Rough Riders were sculpted by Rob at Curious Constructs.

Sunday 27 September 2015

Kingdom Death: Monster - Unboxing and Magnetising

I have been off of the blog for a while but I had to throw up a quick post for this one! My copy of Kingdom Death: Monster arrived (finally) so I have been one happy man this weekend! First off, I know there are many people out there that are thinking of magnetising their survivor models. I gave it a go and with the right tools it isn't all that hard.


Before I discuss how my magnetising went, here are a few of my excited unboxing photos.

 My add-on box arrived first.
 I opted for plastics over the resin models but was pleasantly surprised by the level of detail. These models are beautiful.
 The Scale is 40mm to the eye so a little bigger than 40k. I must say I am in love with this scale.

 My core box arrived the following afternoon, just before the weekend! The pictures don’t convey how big and heavy the box was.
Just for reference, that table is 3.5 foot wide – the board is big!
The hunt board.
The core miniatures
The core and unlocked (free) miniatures

As soon as I could I busted out the four starting survivors and the Lion, and gave the intro game a bash. 


I absolutely loved it but let’s check out how this magnetising went next.

 I used three magnet sizes; 1x1mm, 2x1mm and 2x2mm. I also have 1mm and 2mm drill bits. I went out a got a new pair of drill bits just for this and I was grateful once I started. Sharp drills make it easier to get clean crisp holes so the magnets go in snug and are easy to glue in place. 

I started by removing all of the parts from the sprue and cleaning them up. I glued the legs together, the front and back torsos together and the two parts of the arms but left the heads, torsos, legs, arms and hands all separate from each other. 

I drilled into the leg piece with my 2mm drill, then interested a 2x2mm magnet.

It is really really really important to get the polarities of the magnets the same. After the first magnet went in I made sure the other legs matched this polarity and that the adjoining torsos were the opposite. I also kept the same alignment for the join at the neck and head so the magnets all kept eachother together. 
 The hands looked a little difficult because the wrists are about 1mm wide. In reality it wasn't too bad because you only need enough space to glue the 1x1mm magnet on and then you can drill a recess up into the arm for the adjoining magnet. Here is a bunch of photo of one of the hands.

Here is one of my magnetised survivors. 

There is a 1x1mm magnet in the neck and a 2x2mm magnet in the torso under the neck. If this one was the reverse polarity to the leg-waist one it tended to flip over, so I kept them all the same.

There are 1x1mm magnets in the arms and 2x1mm magnets in torso. These torso ones were hard to keep in place because the neck and waist magnets wanted to pull these ones horizontal. I had to hold them in with a tooth pick until the super glue dried. In future I will do these ones first. 
 There are 1x1mm magnets in both sides of the wrist. The only thing that was tricky here was getting the depth of the arm magnet right. I only drilled a little bit at a time and kept dry fitting it until I had the right depth. A little fiddly but not too difficult. 
Here is one of the survivors (unarmoured with only a shard of stone). Because there are so many arms you can experiment placing the shoulder-arm magnet at different angles. This guy has his arm out to hold the lantern but I have lots of other arm positions too. Below you can see that I should have made the shoulder join deeper into the torso as the joint sticks out a bit. My later ones were much better.

Here is another survivor. I have fully magnetised this armour kit which has loads of extra heads and hands. It will be great mixing and matching  them with the other armour sets. 
I can't do much to smooth out the neck and shoulder joins unfortunately. For the other kits the survivors are wearing clothes so these parts will not be so notable. 

Here is a comparison to the single post starting survivors. 

While I'm at it here is the Lion

 His joins will need a little bit of green stuff.


I’ll run though a full hunt some other time but here is a quick rundown of my into hunt.

In the opening moves the White Lion went straight for my centre survivor (Abraham) and mauled him badly.

A further three times the lion went back to him, dragging him away from the other survivors to continue mauling him. 

During the fighting my other male survivor (Cain) died of mortal terror and one of the women (Jezebel) went quite insane. Any insanity rating over 3 is ‘insane’ and her insanity rating was 8. 
Towards the end of the game the other women (Maria) became so frightened that she gained a phobia of the dark and would never hunt again. Seeing that was the case I decided that she could recklessly throw her stone at the lion. 
In a crazy stroke of luck the stone hit the lion in the throat and paralysed him! 
This gave Abraham a chance to crawl over to him (with his torn Achilles tendon and other injuries) and strike at the lion. He must have been angry about all of the mauling because he ripped the lions jaw off its face which was enough it kill it.
  Essentially, I rolled 10 on a D10 three times in a row for all of this to happen, it was pretty epic. 

 I am really loving this game. It was definitely worth the wait! More to follow next time. 


26 comments:

  1. I severely regret not backing this game. I'd trade my robotech mini's for this in a second. The models are just gorgeous.

    Are you magnetizing because of all the different weapons and armor options?

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    1. Funny, I regret not buying more when this launched! It is a stunning game.
      I'm not sure how much you know about this game but there is an armour kit and weapon load-out 'unlocked' for each monster. I want to be able to interchange armour and gear in any game as much as I play. That was my motivation to magnetise all parts of the miniatures.

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    2. I figured as much. I didn't know if they had different weapons as well. Being able to upgrade the characters and such is a great mechanic, so magnetizing is definitely smart, if not annoyingly time consuming!

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  2. Thanks for sharing this. It's really interesting to see it in actual practice and not just on the Kickstarter page.

    It took me a long time to make a decision, but in the end I decided not to back this. The Hunt you showed here looks cool, and the minis are really nicely done (I love that scale!), but I didn't think it had enough actual game for me to enjoy. Although the action in the Hunt looked pleasingly brutal and and almost RPG-like, I wish there was an actual dungeon crawling element to it, and not making all of the actual action revolve around a boss fight over and over. I'm glad you're enjoying it though.

    That's a crazy amount of work you're doing with the minis. It looks great. I was thinking of doing the same when I was considering buying the game, but all of that work is part of the reason I ended up not backing it.

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    1. I can totally understand the thought of wanting to do the extra work on this stuff and then deciding it is all too much to bother with. I had a proper big play through with a group of 5 other mates today. We played through 3 settlement phases, hunts phases and showdown phases. Scattered all through the play were story events that triggered by all sorts of things. There is actually a lot more game in this than was ever pitched and looking back the KS pitch didn’t do a very good job at selling how awesome the game play is. These KS can be a real gamble though and a massive investment. It is a hard call to go all in or pull out.

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  3. Magnetising all that..... No. I got to help my mate unbox his KD:M and there are just too many pieces!

    Still though, I can't wait to play. Looks so fun.

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    1. It is. As long as you find brutal gruesome death fun.

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  4. 1) You're mad (but we knew that)
    2) They're pretty (which is nice, as you backed a KS)
    3) Good to hear from you again !
    4) What else are you doin' ?

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    1. I have been a real shocker at jumping between all of my projects. Not blogging tends to be the result of project hopping for me. I project hop when I don’t put in regular hobby time and am stressed. So I guess the answer is that I have been too busy at work and have taken a haphazard approach to my hobby time.

      Here are a few project that I have been working on: continuing my Necron city, built an open track Leman Russ, modelled myself and the misses, started building a palm tree forests, converted a medusa, modelled up some battle cannon emplacements, painted some more red lions, and started a new command squad.

      What would you like to see pictures of first Zzzzzz?

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  5. Hey, your post is such an amazing resource for people who want to take on this endeavor for themselves, thank you!

    I'm just wondering, how do you handle alternating weapons? Did you magnetize the weapons too, so you could swap them as needed, or just glued them straight to the hands that you switch in and out? If the latter, arent there not enough hands?

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    1. Cheers for the comment.
      The standard for each weapon seems to be one in the left hand, one in the right hand and then one or more not held. Then there are several hands that can be glued onto the weapons. I started by magnetising the weapons that were being held and as I have played more I have stated gluing additional weapons to hands. I have only been magnetising the hands, I don’t think it is possible to magnetises weapons ‘to’ the hands. One other thing that I have done though is insert a magnet onto the waist or back of some models and insert a small magnet onto a few weapons. That way I can have models with a weapon on their hip (on a belt) or on their back. I’ll have to post up a photo of how that looks.

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  6. Really interested in Unknown 7 questions, also I might sound quite lame but I am also curious about where to buy the magnets and how many you would recommend (and the drills I guess can be found in any hobby shop?).
    Thanks a LOT for this guide it's so terribly useful I am so glad I stumbled upon it before I started painting and assembling my stuff.

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    1. You are totally welcome Sadevile.
      I got my magnets from EBay. They were sent out from China. It looks like there are quite a few sellers. If you want to magnetise everything you will want a lot of them! I have got drills from lots of places – hobby shops hardware stores. If you can get them separately buy yourself 2 or 3 of the 1mm ones in case you break them. Good Luck!

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