The Zombie of the Month- May 2015- Bones Zombies! By Reaper Miniatures

   If you watch our Sunday News regularly, you know that a little while ago we had this ginormous pile of Reaper Bones on the table when our Kickstarter pledges came in. (And, if you don't, you should. Seriously- I'm told those videos are highly amusing). Now, you know I couldn't sift through all of those minis without kidnapping some of them to turn them into a Zombie of the Month article!

The Zombie of the Month- May 2015- Bones Zombies! By Reaper Miniatures

   What’s so great about these Zombies? Well, first of all, the Bones material is a great thing to use for a horde. It is extremely lightweight, inexpensive, and doesn't break. I mean, it doesn't. You can cut it, but you can't shatter it or crush it. And you might be able to scrape some paint off in your attempt to break it, but mostly, you could have an entire horde out of Bones material and fairly well toss it around with impunity while doing little damage. Which is just great for moving large numbers of minis around- you don't have to be as careful, and you can transport large numbers around without needing a weightlifting belt. That being said, Reaper is including zombies in their Bones Kickstarters sporadically, so there's not a horde's worth available in any particular genre yet. I don't even know if there's a horde's worth of any genre in their product line to start with, but there are a lot of Reaper zombies available in several genres, so maybe someday we'll get there! One can only hope!

   Other than that, I just think we have some interesting characters here. Unfortunately, I do not know all of their names. I tried to look them up, but the item numbers on the Bones add-on list do not match the item numbers on Reaper's website, and even with their totally awesome Figure Finder, it can be hard to look for a specific miniature. I'm pretty sure the Western ones are named Stone and the Undead Outlaw. Let's face it, zombie plus western is just yes. The big guy is from the Lords of Darkness set, and is obviously meant to be some sort of ogre or troll, depending on what renderings you go by for those creatures. And the other guy I believe to be some sort of ghoul. Okay, technically, a "ghoul" is not a "zombie", but let's be fair- every time you see a zombie movie where it's really just a plague turning people into blood-crazed maniacs, those are ghouls. And yet we still call it a zombie movie. Just because the poor soul got stuck on the wrong side of the living-dead line when it started trying to eat human flesh doesn’t mean I'm going to discriminate and not put him on my shelf. If he's basically brainless and trying to eat me, he fits.

The Basics:

            Scale- Like many of Reaper's models, these guys are a slightly tall 28mm scale- not really "heroic"- they don't look really big- but taller than some other 28mm models, with a human height of 32mm. The zombie orc is obviously taller, coming in at about 43mm tall.

            Genre- The ghoul and the big guy are very medieval fantasy (hence the fetching underbite on the big guy), and the two Western-looking dudes are, well, Western (which, in case you never realized it, is also the Victorian era, just on this side of the pond).

Material- Bones material, which is a kind of PVC. Whacky stuff- you can twist it all over the place and it just goes back to the way it was. The only downside to that is, if it came to you bent or otherwise out of shape, it is not as easy to correct as metal. It is very difficult to destroy, though, save with a sharp object. You can cut through it like butter, which makes it fairly easy to do conversions with. The debate is still up on how good the details get with it, and it's hard to tell off of anything Reaper has released so far, because they are only reproducing older models art this time, most of which didn't have very sharp details to begin with.

Parts ‘N’ Bits- That…doesn't really happen with Bones. You get the model, and that's it. Almost without exception. But hey, they're cheap, so shut up.

Assembly- All of these guys come as one piece. That is not a universal among the Bones releases thus far, but it is very common. Again, probably part of their being older sculpts. It was a simpler time.

Bases- As is common among the Bones figures, they come integrated with small, irregularly shaped thematic basing. It's not too hard to get them onto game bases, though, either on their integrated bases or cutting them off.

Ratings:

Sculpt- 4 brains out of 5- Considering ALL of Reaper's Bones minis are sculpts that are at least a couple years old, these are pretty good. There are a fair number of details, and everything seems to look exactly like what the sculptor meant it to look like. They may not                                                               have quite the dynamic depth of details that we                                                           see in minis nowadays, but you can't really say                                                           there's anything wrong with them, either.

Affordability- 4 brains out of 5- Bones is dirt cheap. The only reason this isn't a 5 is that Reaper has not yet seen fit to create cheap bulk packs of zombies, so you are still buying them at individual model prices of around two dollars per mini. If you are buying them post-                                                               kickstarter, that is  ;)

Value- 4 brains out of 5- And again, mainly because all of the Bones zombies Reaper has are very period specific and older sculpts, so they may clash with your horde and are not likely to be show-stoppers.

Availability- 1 brains out of 5- These were from the Bones II kickstarter, and have not yet been released to market, so you won't find any right now unless someone sells off extras from their Kickstarter pledge on Ebay. However, I expect that to change soon, and once they are released to market, they should be incredibly easy to find- heck, even your local gaming store might have a display of them (mine does).

Pros: Inherently inexpensive even at retail price; nice sculpts

Cons: Pretty genre specific, not available in a large selection of sculpts in any one genre