Heroscape Rising Tide Knight Primus Adelbern and Ordo Borealis
review by Alapai
The Knight Primus Adelbern & Ordo Borealis box for Heroscape features what it says on the label, the Adelbern and Ordo Borealis characters for Heroscape that can be used with Jandar’s forces. As with all of my reviews this year, this review is not about the viability of these characters in the game, but about the hobby aspect of them. In contrast though to last month’s Malifaux minis, which focused heavily on the construction of the minis, Heroscape is a game where the miniatures come pre-assembled, so this is more about just the painting of the minis.
The first thing I noticed with these minis was how poor the wash on them was. Heroscape is one of many games that uses miniatures that doesn’t have to be a hobby game. Like Unmatched or Steamforged’s Horizon Zero Dawn board game, Heroscape uses miniatures as game pieces. Heroscape does offer Premium Painted versions of their boxes where you can pay an extra amount to get pre-painted minis, but having your minis painted to play the game is not required. And if you do want to have painted minis, you can also just get the unpainted ones and paint them yourself. But as the game doesn’t require you to paint the minis, Renegade Game Studios made the decision Restoration Games also made for Unmatched and put a basic wash on the minis to give them more dimension than completely unpainted minis. Unfortunately, while Unmatched’s minis generally looked decent, Heroscape’s looked really splotchy and awkward.
I tried to remove the wash with some soapy water which did a little, but not much. I then tried using a light grey primer so I could use Citadel’s Apothecary White Contrast paint, but it ended up not looking how I wanted, so I then used a paint stripper to remove as much as I could so I could put a white undercoat underneath the Apothecary White.
Since I wanted them to share an aesthetic, I did paint them using a batch method where instead of painting each model one at a time, I painted all the sections that shared a color on all the minis, then moved on to the next color. So for example, I painted the fur with Apothecary White, then did all the weapons in a silver, then the armor in a blue. Often, you’ll do batch painting when you have lots of miniatures you are trying to paint at once, but I’ve used it on smaller groups of minis as well. It allowed me to put a light coat on the sections I then want to use some Speedpaints on (as those work best over light colors), then it could dry while I was putting the light coat on my other minis.
An additional thing that I ended up using a lot of for these minis were paint markers. I used ones from both Army Painter and AK Interactive. Paint markers are basically like brushes dedicated to one color. You fill the tip with paint (pressing the front into the lid for Army Painter or pushing the back for AK) and then just color more like a marker than a brush. Both worked really well, with the Army Painter ones providing a small range of colors like their namesake Speedpaint (or Citadel’s Contrast or Vallejo’s XPress) and the AK providing a solid color.
Finally, I utilized some diorama basing material. Since the minis were polar bears, I added in some snow. I took some PVC glue and placed it on the bases and then poured some of AK’s Snow Microballoons onto the mini. It made the minis look a little more like they came from an actual environment than just being a figure on a base.
All in all, I enjoyed painting these minis. There were a good amount of features for painting and they were a larger size than most minis, meaning you didn’t need to be as precise as with smaller minis.
If you’re looking to paint a mini, but aren’t looking to assemble a mini, Heroscape boxes have a wide variety of different figures. And while part of a game, you don’t need to pay for a license so they can be a little cheaper than, say, Unmatched Marvel figures where part of the cost is the Marvel brand.
Heroscape minis, including Adelbern, are available now from our webstore.
