Rapture skirmish tabletop: Sample minis unboxing and first impressions

(continued from the butterfly end of my recent workbench update)

Recap: I recently ran across a new Sci Fi skirmish wargame from some enthusiasts from Germany, called Rapture by Gravity Bay (btw, the game name is great, but not suitable at all as a hashtag / search term... I'll go for #RaptureTheGame instead). The artwork is gorgeous, the story (near future post-pandemic SciFi) fascinating and, although I don't play much, still motivating for me: the rules look eminently playable, fast paced and modern (more on that below). 

A "print and play" preview of the game with rulebook and printable counters and proxies for the minis is available free of charge here.

After a 12 month+ grassroot campaign where the game was presented at big shows and in various gaming clubs (look for "Gravity Bay Rapture" on Youtube for examples), the game is about to go to Kickstarter (placeholder here) for funding of a first normal production run.

Until then, a handful of minis is already available in the Gravity Bay online shop today, so I couldn't resist ordering a few to try them out. Here's a first report on what I got.

Turnaround time from order to delivery was so-so, but I wasn't in a hurry. And I even got a friendly note handwritten on the back of the invoice, a very nice gesture.

Although I spend 98% of my non-historical tabletop time with building and painting and very rarely actually play the games, I had read through the preview rule book and quickly saw many things I really like. Maybe this game will even by playable in real life.

Things I like about the game include: 

• small armies with few minis per side, so one can get playing quickly and collect many different factions
• only a small table (3'x3') needed, reducing the entry barrier to create enough appropriate terrain pieces - the game looks like it will be better in crowded areas with limited lines of sights and multiple levels
• quick games playable in an hour or two, so suitable for a working dad's calendar
• preprinted (and really nice) unit cards with all stats and special rules - yay! No army list fiddling, no memorizing or listing out special rules, just pick up the cards and play. Just as I liked it with Demonworld years ago, and removing the army list creation part that I find so tedious in many other games (GW, I'm looking at you! - but I'm also cutting corners with canned unit values for other games with too much variation, like Piquet)
• modern rules engine (no Igo-Hugo), with activation based sequence of play and unit stats changing as the game continues
• very simple basic rules engine with simple unit stats. This creates a simple baseline for incredibly many ways to vary unit stats, strengths and weaknesses, individualize factions, add chrome to units etc. Even the first three factions already look like they will play very differently from each other.
• fantastic game setting, backstory, artwork (check out the Gravity bay website).

Things I don't like after first read through:

1. Additional purchase needed to play: one of the really cool game features is that unit stats change as the game progresses, e.g. as units use life points and/or morale. But these changes need to be marked on the unit cards - to do that without damaging them you need transparent card sleeves and a wipe-off felt tip pen. 

I know where to get the sleeves (just have to hit the right size) but not the pen, and would like to get both packaged with the game instead of having to chase them separately.

2. No premeasurements of movement and firing distances - I don't like this in other tabletops, either (maybe another reason why I used to enjoy Demonworld so much, I guess I'm a board gamer at heart). 

It rewards a weird talent (estimating distances between an inch and a foot), and encourages gamy behavior like taking pre-measuring terrain pieces (for exaple, I have 25x50 cm terrain plates, giving me an unfair advantage over opponents who don't know this), or taking unimportant pot shots to get a "free" measurement. 

However, I'll be happy to accept the pot shots (not the pre-game measuring, though) as a feature, not a bug, after trying it out in reality.

The boosters with the first minis. Each contains pieces for one mini, a round slotted base, a unit card with stats and a backdrop with a photo, product information and the legal blurb. F.l.t.r.: one mini each for the factions of Atlantis, New World Order (humans), an individual mercenary (crossover model from another game, event mini only) and an Angel.

After unpacking, the first impressions of the minis are very good. They look really nice, have fantastic, fine detail (e.g. very vivid, expressive faces), dynamic-but-not-silly poses, good detail, and big diversity in size/impression/character.

And best of all: correct proportions (!) - wow. That's what drove me away from many classical tabletop minis and back to the good old German flats, I just don't like the chubby / chibi proportions of the traditional metal tabletop minis (historical, fantasy or Sci-Fi) and even many of their plastic and resin successors, where forearms are as thick as correctly proportioned thighs, fists as large as heads and gun barrels as thick as arms. But these minis have really thin, correctly proportioned gun barrels, fingers, even noses. Nice.

Unpacking the first minis: unit cards with picture and stats on the front (and special rules summaries on the back), and the 2-3 part minis for Atlantis and NWO.

These are also my my first (soft) resin minis, so far I've only used resin castings for terrain and a hard resin 3rd party conversion kit for some GW stuff. 

As a newbie with this material I have lots of questions, for example how to clean up the minis (scratching off mold lines and other bits with my usual trusty pocket knife didn't work too well, but I seem to remember warnings not to use files on resin as the filings / dust is supposed to be dangerous).  

I also wonder whether my usual habits for basecoating (with car anti-rust base and normal white spray base coat) and paint selection (water color with clear spray varnish) will work on the resin surface, especially as the thin bits I like so much are flexible and bendy. 

And: how do you go about converting such models? How do you cut them, fill gaps, which materials can you combine with this soft resin? And, for that matter, how do you just straighten out the nicely proportioned, elegant gun barrels if they come out of the booster slightly bent?

A beginners guide to this kind of resin castings (or are they 3d prints?) would be welcome.

The most complex model of the first batch: the Angel. Comes with body, two wings, extra pieces for one extra calf, four arms, heads, feathers behind the head and two small feathery bits I couldn't find on any of the pictures in the booster or on the website, so left them off the mini.

Assembly of the Angel was interesting, because many pieces and links required careful cleaning. But overall it went nicely and at first glance normal modelling super glue seems to create very hard and stable bonds quickly.

The minis display very little visible flash (but there is some, so I guess they are cast not 3d-printed, after all). There is enough to require cleaning, and esp. there are imprecisions affecting the mortise-and-tenon links between the bodies and limbs. These needed some scratching and fiddling and didn't really lead to perfectly clean results.

The assembled minis, waiting to be basecoated.

I can't wait to get these basecoated and painted. The minis should be very painting friendly and I already have lots of ideas for color schemes. 

I hope this initial batch will get me into the phase waiting for the kickstarter results, and I will post an update when I have the first results.