August 22, 2014

Sentinel Tactics arrives!

I received a shipping notice and tracking number late last week, and after a few failed delivery attempts I was finally able to pick up my Kickstarted copy of Sentinel Tactics - Flame of Freedom by Greater Than Games.

This was the first product of theirs that I've chosen to Kickstart, but I do own all of the Sentinels of the Multiverse games and expansions. In fact I had to order the original game directly from the publisher, because at the time there were no Canadian distributors even carrying it. Well that's all changed and the publisher has grown up. Ah makes me so proud!

Back when the campaign was running I almost didn't pledge, which would have been a shame now that I've seen the awesome stuff that came in the box. My hesitation stemmed from the SotM expansion "Vengeance" which I found to be overly complicated without adding a comparable amount of fun. Now I'll qualify that by saying that Sentinel Tactics is NOT an expansion for the card game; it's a brand new miniature skirmish board game, and after a brief unboxing looks like it's going to be really good fun.


After I opened the package I dug into the core game first. There are a lot of things to punch out here, and they've generously provided plastic bags to put things in. Once you've punched all the cardboard bits out and put them in bags however, you'll immediately realize they won't all fit back in the box. If you're neat, they will fit in the box insert without the bags.

The printing quality looks to be a good standard, but I was a little disappointed with the tiles. The prototype tiles during the campaign looked very crisp, but the released tiles have a kind of filter over top of them which sort of hazes out the details. While it makes the spaces very easy to identify, it sort of dampens my excitement a bit.

Next I dove into the Uprising expansion. Like the core game it comes with pile of tokens and counters, cards for all the characters, and another scenario book that looks like a comic. (I apologize for lack of photos, you'll have to troll around on the internet to see what I'm talking about.)

I also received a box of miniatures for both the core set and the expansion. They're a little bit smaller than I thought they'd be, looking like true 28mm figures, rather than the 32mm scale you'd expect from something like Heroclix. Upon closer inspection it looks like a very similar, if not the same, material as that used in Reaper's Bones miniatures. I'll post up a more detailed look at the figures after I've had a better look at them.

Despite all of that exciting new stuff I ended up a little disappointed at the end, because my core game miniature box was entirely in lacking bases for the figures. I'll have to wait for Greater Than Games to get back to me about my request. In the meantime I'll be giving the base game a try using the cardboard character tokens!

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