It’s been a few weeks now since I attended GenCon, and I’m still working through the backlog of reviews and unboxings and whatnot. Seriously, the dearth of blog material alone makes it a worthwhile trip! Today we take a look at the Relic Knights starter that I picked up from the Ninja Division / Soda Pop Miniatures booth.

I chose the Black Diamond faction primarily because of the Questing Knight therein, Leopold Magnus. His anime-armoured style appealed to me, so even though I normally find myself playing the “good guy” factions in games, this time around I’m apparently open to a little bribery and corruption…

Let’s start with the contents of the Battle Box. Here is a spot where I do have to tip my hat to the powers that be at Soda Pop. Whoever decided the contents of the starter did a bloody good job. We get cards for all of the models, providing stats et al. We get a mini rulebook – not a quickstart set of rules, but a full rulebook, albeit one with teensy tiny printing. These are pretty much to be expected, but then you also get both an Esper deck – essential for playing the game and replacing dice – and a playmat to help you organize and keep track of your cards.

Then we find a bag of model components, and the other bonus item, a faction-specific (in terms of colour) token pack. These will be used to represent various effects and templates in-game. Lost story short, it’s a pretty darn well appointed starter box.

The Black Diamond starter comes with:

Leopold Magus

Static

Diamond Corps (5)

And a sweet little tank.

The Diamond Corps are the grunts of the Black Diamond mercenary group. The starter comes with three different poses, all plastic, and an assortment of heads.

The arms pop around the shoulders nicely, albeit a little staticly. If that’s even a word. Still, these are grunt troopers, we can’t all be emperoros of mankind.

Nothing says Assembly Line Infantry quite like a sprue of helmets.

Most Black Diamond models feature a sort of shield covering their left shoulders. It may be where they store their bribes.

I’m not entirely sure why this pic ended up in the middle of the unboxing, since there’s nothing in it that comes with the starter, but these are the Dragon Forge bases from the Crux Mechanica series that I’ll be mounting my Black Diamonds on.

Anyway, back to Relic Knights…

The Blitz Tank is eight components worth of adorableness. Each track pops onto a mount which then connects to the body, the turret pops on top, and the two exhausts go on the back. Don’t believe me? Here…

This is one of the track mounts, showing the keyed plug by which it’ll join onto the body. Those two pegs?

They’ll go into the sides of the tracks. You really should connect the tracks to their mounts before attaching the mounts to the body.

If you do, you’ll end up with something like this on either side of your little tank.

Then you just need to pop your exhausts on the back and suddenly…

Cute little tank!!!

Static is the Cypher from the starter, and comes in two tiny pieces. These Cyphers are tiny, such that there really isn’t anything else to show of him… bear with me though, I’ll show you the painted model in a minute.

Now, Leopold Magnus… the little tank may be the cutest and most fun model in the box to go “Vroom! Vroom!” with, but Leopold is the Questing Knight. For Warmachine players, think Warcaster. He’s the lynchpin, and comes in six components.

Looking at the underside of the collar attacked the cloak we can see a couple of plugs looking for spots to rest. You’ll find them on back of the torso. What this means is even just by pushing these two components together you end up with a nicely secured connection, such that I even debated eschewing glue for a few seconds.

With the collar in place you can pop the head on top, and a little tilt reveals the sockets into which we’ll plug the arms.

Like so, really. When painting the model I left the right arm off and painted it separately, so that I was able to maintain easy access to all sides of the model.

The legs and hips are a single component and pop nicely onto the waist. Bam, you’ve got Leopold Magnus.

Now, we could leave you there, but I promised to show you some painted modellage.

Because I gotta be me, my Black Diamond mercenaries will actually be red and deep green. I don’t expect to use this much orange on the other models from the starter, but I’m not going to rule it out either.

Painted teensy tiny Static! Of course, I didn’t see that mould line until just now, which may in the end just be further evidence of how annoyingly tiny the model is 😉

Leopold Magnus, on the other hand, gets the whole cape-billowing treatment. I inserted the right arm at a different angle that we showed in the earlier picture, resulting in the staff being held along the body rather than across it.

Swoosh! Billowing cape! I’m sure some of the more talented among you would have put some freehand on there…

The Black Diamond Battle Box is one of six available to players interested in Relic Knights. You can check them out on Soda Pop’s site, or perhaps your FLGS has been able to secure some stock to tempt you with. I’m rather pleased with the models in the end, they were fun to paint, and I’m keen to line up a game against the local crew sometime soon…