Ravenloft Boardgame?

[frankthedm]

From the looks and sounds of it, they went with a cheaper, lightweight plastic for the miniatures, which will make them more prone to tipping over and/or breaking (especially if it's that really brittle crap some other manufacturers use for cheapie plastic minis).

Could you be more specific on which manufacturers? The more brittle plastics tend to be from manufactures who expect the customer to be painting the figs and handling with care appropriate for a hand painted fig. Mage Knights and other clix are fairly durable with paint jobs used to double as bomb disposal gear.

and...well, almost anything in place of the Kobolds with spears.

This I agree with 100%. That big fat worg from Harbinger would have been perfect.

 

[Herschel]

The wolf is actually the Harbinger Worg.

 

[CrimsonReaver]

Wow, you must have super powers to be able to discern the quality of plastic from a YouTube video. I had them in my very hands and couldn't give you the molecular structure as they felt just fine (and not brittle) to me.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO6Iu5ctXMk]YouTube - Unboxing Castle Ravenloft Part 1[/ame]

Between 4:05 and 4:15, Trevor Kidd says they miniatures are "all sculpts you've seen before, but they're made with a different plastic and they're all unpainted."

And in the Mike Mearls unboxing video, some of the miniatures appeared to have little jagged plastic edges, like leftover bits from when they were popped/cut out of the mold. I've seen that before, on crappy lightweight plastic miniatures (not from WotC), and that's what sparked my fear of these being shoddy, inferior pieces.

Though, if you've handled them, there's no argument that you have a better knowledge of how they feel than I do. I was just going by what I heard and saw, and how I interpreted that.

Could you be more specific on which manufacturers?

Sadly, I can't. It wasn't WizKids or any of the more well-known producers of minis. These were just generic unpainted miniatures lumped in with DDM, Reaper, and other fantasy minis from some no-name company. They were horribly lightweight (I think there were 20 in this little plastic case, and the whole thing couldn't have weighed more than a single DDM Ogre or Troll) and they had no flex or bend to them at all. And they all had these nasty little jagged plastic slivers sticking off along the seams.

They were absolute trash - except for the fact that I didn't mind destroying them, so I actually set some of them on fire, scorching and burning them to make "charred villager" minis and clipping others into pieces to make a huge corpse pile. Even so, they weren't worth the money.

 

[Herschel]

Of course the plastic is different. DDM base color is black, the Ravenloft minis are reddish, clear blue, off white, etc. Saying it's "cheaper" or "worse" plastic is quite a leap and, quite frankly, unsupported in any way.