Painting Quality

Pre-painted miniatures have become much more common in the last several years, since the release of Mage Knight. They're a god-send for people like me who enjoy pretty things but have no aptitude (or more importantly, patience) for painting.

The miniatures in A Company of Knights were all presumably painted in quick assembly lines, the only way I can imagine to do this sort of thing cost effectively. The results, overall, are much better than anything I could have done. Besides standard coloring, a decent amount of attention was paid to both shadowing and highlighting, giving the miniatures more depth.

However, there is some variety among the paint jobs. The majority of the miniatures that I received in my box have a good amount of detail; in fact some have a great amount of detail, particularly in the armor and the cloaks. However, two of my miniatures, Bedivere and Gawaine were a bit flat, without any real shadowing. Beyond that, there was one real disappointment among the miniatures, and that was Sir Palomedes who is generally quite nice but had some sloppy work done with white paint. His checkerboard shield is instead a bunch of dots and there's some white randomly splayed around a couple of other places.

This is really meant all as means of description, not necessarily complaint. Though there is some variety in the quality of the painting, it's overall quite nice, and definitely within the bounds of what I'd expect for a $20 product. If you're expecting a perfect paint job, that's wildly out of tune with reality.

When you hold one of the painted miniatures next to one of the unpainted miniatures from the original game, it's entirely obvious how much a win it is to have painted figures, rather than the plain gray from the original set.

Other Painting Notes

A few other notes on the painting:

Some liberties have been taken with the coloration of the characters. This looks like a set of standard decisions because my miniatures generally match the pictures shown on the cover of this product--but not always the character portraits from the original game. These changes aren't big, but you can see them when you have your miniature near your character sheet.

It looks like the changes were generally made to help the predominent color of each knight stand out better, and this is a good thing because I did find the painted miniatures from A Company of Knights a little harder to quickly pick out than the miniatures from the original game with their bright bases. Most of them are actually quite good, colorwise, but the purple knight is a little dark and I had to look carefully at the yellow and orange knights the first time before I could tell them apart.

My only real complaint about the coloring changes is on the heraldry, because heraldry means something and you can't just change the colors willy-nilly. However the original games' heraldry didn't match the heraldry I was familiar with for most of the characters anyway, so I'm willing to accept it as artistic license. (If I had to guess I'd say that the heraldry I'm familiar with from King Arthur Pendragon and other places is probably English heraldry, and this is probably French heraldry.)

Bedivere

One of the nice elements of this expansion is that you get a miniature for Sir Bedivere, the eighth knight of Shadows over Camelot, previously available only in a gaming magazine and from Days of Wonder at conventions. The full rules for Bedivere are available online, but basically he gets to trade out unhelpful white cards (or helpful white cards if he's a traitor).

I've played with Bedivere in one of my games of Shadows. He doesn't change the nature of the game in any notable way, but he's nice to have for variety. I'd love to see a whole pack of additional knights at some time.

The only downside of using Bedivere is that you won't have a glossy cardstock Coat of Arms for him (because you'll have to print it off the DoW web site) and thus it's harder to randomize who gets what knight at start.

Conclusion

Overall, A Company of Knights is a nice expansion for those of us who want to make our Shadows over Camelot games look more colorful, but who don't have the artistic skill or time to paint the knight figures ourselves. The figures probably aren't as nice as what a patient figure painter would produce, but they're generally above average in quality and most folks will be happy with them.

On Style, the figures are generally nice, and a good trade-off for the low price. I give it a high "4" out of "5". On Substance, A Company of Knights adds only aesthetic value to the game, plus the one new knight. Because that's about what you'd expect from a box of miniatures I've just given it the average Substance rating: "3" out of "5".

Please help support RPGnet by purchasing the following (probably) related items through DriveThruRPG.