I'll come right out and say it, I love Mage Knight.

I can't say I love all the minis though. The paint jobs vary from pretty good to abysmal. In general the monstrous trolls and such are pretty good but the human characters are splotchy and the colors from the clothes overlap onto the body of the figures and it just looks awful. The best thing I can say about the humans is that they don't look too bad if ya stand back a few feet from them (like you do most of the time anyway).

The figures are made out of that flexible plastic that none of the good miniature companies use (I forget the name). It's not great for re-painting but it's resistant to snappage. I stepped on Seething Knight and bent him flat back, but he pushed right back up with some prodding and he's fine. Let's see your Space Marines do that.

The product itself is 15 for a starter pack (10 minis/ rules/ dice/ crappy comic book I'll never read) and 5 for a booster (5 random minis). Yes, the game is collectible. No, you won't get every figure you want for your army. Listen to me though, the game's a good deal. A buck a mini is accpetable, and each one has more of a unique character and presence on the battlefield than Gretchin #13 in your Warhammer army. 10 figures are more than enough to field a complete army in a decent-sized game. Also, the units are very interchangeable. There ARE factions but it's really no problem to take any random mix of units and play a fun game. For the record the only signifigance of having a "mixed" army is units of different factions cannot be brigaded together and given more efficient orders. It's not such a big deal in a small game.

The innovation that you'll notice right away is the bases on the figs. The bases have a rotating wheel with different slots with different sets of stats for your character depending on its health. When characters are hit/healed you rotate the wheel in the appropriate direction and your charcters' current status is displayed. As every press release on the web site will tell you these eliminate the need for books and stat sheets and simplify the game yada yada yada. Yep. I really like the wheels because they allow the game designers to easily adjust characters strength based on damage taken. Every war game could be made more realistic and interesting by damage tracking (and most use it to some degree) but none can do it as easily and unobtrusively as Mage Knight. The designers had fun with this. Of course Trolls have a sort of reverse damage curve where they get more ferocious as their HPs dwindle, other characters get new special abilities activated as they move down the wheel.

But the gameplay is what really shines. The game reminds me and everyone else in the whole world of chess a bit. You get to order one to three actions per turn depending on the size of the game. Penalties to health are incurred for moving a character on consecutive turns without resting. You have to think ahead a bit and balance your armies offensives because a unit can only activate every other turn without incurring aforementioned health loss. You get points for kills survivors as well as double points for captured units. The capturing rule is very integral to the games strategy because it demands organized melee attacks so figures can support eachother and because it allows big point swings which keep the game exciting and close.

I just can't say enough about the strategic depth to this game. There are enough options to consider I never play a game without making a misplay somehwere along the line, that's the mark of a good strategy game to me.

The next expansion is slated for release in a few months, I'm not sure how the support will continue after that but from talking to some of my buds at the shop they say sales are looking good so I can hope. To recap, the figures are hit or miss, some very stylish and some just terrible. It's collectible but it's relatively cheap and the demand for specific figures isn't really there. The gameplay is complex and quick and FUN.