We continue our look at the new Ninja All-Stars range. Besides the generic ninja that come in the base game, you can also purchase some cool clan specific boxsets with unique sculpts to the clans. Let’s have a look.
All of the boxes have the same number of miniatures, 14 out of 7 unique sculpts. You’ll get a couple of big nasty Oni (demons), two Madoushi (priests), a Chunin (boss), a named character and a selection of Kaiken (close combat ninja), Yajiri (ranged ninja) and Kunoichi (girl ninja).
These last three are the soldiers of the clans. Each clan has a prefered fighting style, which will influence how many of each troop they have available. For example, the Tora clan is aggressive, so they can field up to 4 Kaiken, but only 2 Yajiri. While the Tanchyo clan are archery masters and they can field up to 4 Yajiri.
Whatever the quota for each clan is, you’ll get the maximum number of models of each troop they can field. Nice!
Besides the miniatures, you’ll also get a custom cheat sheet for the clan (as the troop profiles have slight variations from clan to clan) and a card for the named character. All this info is also available on the rulebook, but it’s nice to have it handy.
Above you can see a group shoot of what’s in the Ijin clan box. Instead of showing the full content of all the boxes, I’ll close this post with group photos of all the unique sculpts of each clan so they can be shown with greater detail. But before that, I have a couple of negatives to talk about.
As seen on the starter set unboxing, the basic miniatures are cast with integrated scenic bases that have a little ninja star indicating their front facing. That’s not the case with the rest of the Ninja All-Stars miniatures. The base is a separate piece (although they come glued together). I find two problems with this.
First, although the grey plastic bases have also scenic elements, the tab under the mini’s feet don’t. Which might be ok for gaming pieces, but if you intend to paint the miniatures they’ll look ugly as sin. When I get to painting them, I’ll use my regular basing method of Vallejo Textures to cover the bases, and maybe try to leave some of the original texture.
The second and biggest problem is the facing. See, the little ninja star is perpendicular with the slot on the base. As seen in the photo bellow, it works with some miniatures but not all. All of the starts are facing towards the camera on the picture, but note how the big Oni is slightly off to its left and the Yajiri besides him is facing completely sideways! But rules as written, that’s their front facing arc.
I’m gonna ignore it and use their big heads instead of the little starts to mark where they’re looking at, because it makes more sense. I might even have to cover the ninja stars because they’re pointless and look silly now. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a neat idea. I’d love to have plastic bases with little indentations to mark the front/rear arcs for Infinity. But you need to be able to pose the miniature however you want, with slotta bases it limits the poses of the miniatures, and Soda Pop clearly didn’t take that into account with their sculpts. A shame, really.
Other than that, they’re some really cool looking miniatures. See it for yourself bellow!
