World of Warcraft Miniatures Game

There's not a whole lot to say here, aside from the obvious. You can read the "official" stuff on the Upper Deck site. Also on there are some better images of the figs, including 360° views of the four preview characters shown above. The Gnome, Orc, and (Blood?) Elf I recognize, the thing with the tail, not so much. I've been out of the WoW loop for a while, he may be a playable race for all I know.

Mike McVey is a name that's been around the miniatures industry for a while. He's had some sweet gigs with some fairly serious companies, such as Privateer Press, WotC, and of course, Games Workshop. Now he's thrown his lot in with the powerhouse franchise of WoW, which could be a boon to miniature gamers, fledgling gamers I should say. I don't know how many current, veteran miniature gamers are out there now looking for the next, big pre-painted thing, but it might serve as a gateway game to former online-only players. They may get a pack or two, just to have a character to stick on top of their monitor, and maybe they'll give it a whirl. If they like it, they may take the ball and run with it, who knows, it could eventually snowball into them checking out other tabletop games. Even if just half a percent of WoW players turned out to get into mini gaming, that'd be fifty thousand new players on the scene. More consumers means more companies will put out products. Sure, a lot of those products may be crap, but it gives a chance for someone who may actually have a decent game to at least have a shot at getting it in the hands of the public. More of a market means more risks can be taken in a gamble for a payoff.

I'm not too terribly thrilled about this game, the minis don't blow me away, although I'm not the biggest fan of painting, so the pre-painted aspect is somewhat appealing. We've got the WoW board game on the shelf, and it's really cool, but that's about as deep as I want to wade back into the WoW pool for now. maybe I can score some of these new minis as singles to replace the monochrome plastics that came with the board game.