Showcase: Dark Souls' Ornstein & Smough

 

Here's the first post in a series on the Dark Souls boardgame. I'm starting with an iconic odd couple, Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough.

These two aren't just a memorable bossfight in Dark Souls, but also fan favourites, as made evident by several deviantart accounts, endless reddit threads about the weight of Smough's hammer, and I'm sure fanfiction.

The figures are well made. I was a bit surprised they didn't put any detail on the top of Smough's hammer. But of course this isn't the most obvious feature of these chaps: The hammer will always and forever bend down a little, no matter how often you bend it up. The fact of the matter is that they put a huge, solid chunk of PVC plastic (and this model's a big one! The base has a 70-80mm diameter) on a comparatively thin  stick. In hindsight, the only solution I can think of is bending it straight, then chopping the stick part off at the hand, drill a deep hole into either side (going up to the hammer's head way into the handle at the other side, and put a metal pin in it. Not sure a paperclip would suffice. Either way, it's a weird oversight by the people who ran the most popular boardgame kickstarter in history. I'd chalk it up to the old problem that sometimes during the process of drawing figures on a computer people might forget that the thing has to work in the actual physical world as well. Of course the material doesn't help either.

But anyway, these chaps are impressive and beloved characters and it's cool to have them in miniature form. 

Painting them was a bit interesting, because .... well, they're all gold really. Ornstein ist a bit more relaxed in his colour scheme, bascially looking like a member of the Adeptus Custodes. Smough on the other hand is ALL GOLD. An interesting challenge, and I hope I fulfilled it to everybody's  satisfaction.

Fun figures for a fun game. Dark Souls (the boardgame) got a bit of flak at release due to not being your usual dungeoncrawler. It's a solid game though, and Steamforged, along with the community, worked out big volumes of optional house rules to tinker with the game. So that's cool.