Product Review - Kobblestone Miniatures

This is a quick product review on some Kobblestone Miniatures castings which I just ordered.  I've been working on terrain for a table to go with my Haradrim army.  The two hills, covered here, are part of this.  There will be a small village in the center of the table, with walls, houses and a market.  The village will need, of course, a water source, hence a well.  I have seen many, many traditional European/North American wells but nothing that really fit what I was looking for with this table.  Until, that is, I found this.

Picture from Kobblestone Miniatures.

I went online to place the order.  I was torn between the Spanish type well.  SWMBO suggested, rather unreasonably I thought, that I just buy both.  Why didn't I think of that?  As I was scrolling through the page she said, "What's that?  You have to buy that too".  "That" is their market set, which is totally awesome as will be shown below.

The package, as these things often will, looked too small to contain all of what I had ordered.  The looks were deceiving, however, and everything was there.  I love the moments between when you realize that your order has finally arrived and you actually open it to see what you got.  It's every bit as good as Christmas.

The contents of the box. 

Product Description:  I ordered three items, the two different wells and the market stalls.  All of the pieces are resin.  The casts are very good, with only a couple of bubbles across all of these pieces.  Both wells are two pieces.  The market stalls are each a single piece, three stalls.  Each stall also comes with a huge amount of wares to be laid out around them.  All of these are 28mm scale.

One set of wares.

Style and Character:  9/10.  These are great pieces.  The wells are both just gorgeous and don't look like anything else you commonly see.  they look functional but have a great style all their own.  The market stalls are each different but are consistently styled between them.  The trade goods make this set.  Holy crap there are a ton of them and they have a lot of variety.  Rhys can't stop looking at them.  He is just fascinated by them and thinks it is great fun to identify everything on the tables, in the bins or baskets.  These pieces are overloaded with character.

Most everything is identifiable.

Production Value:  9/10.  There are a couple of air bubbles in easy to see spots.  some of the pieces are very fragile and will require some careful basing to ensure they survive gaming. (see the carpets with goods on them below).  Having said that, these look great.  The castings are clear and well detailed.  You can identify what each of the vegetables is.  the wood grain on the posts is clear, the small details all look great.

Assembly and conversion:  8/10.  There really isn't much assembly required.  The wells are each in two pieces and just slide together.  Super glue once and you are done.  The market goods are all loose, but I intend to leave most of them that way so that I can set them up how I want them.  There is not a lot of scope for conversion on these.  They are great scenery pieces that do exactly what they are designed to do.

Quality:  8/10.  These are, as discussed above, really good casts.  There are several components that are very fragile and will require some careful basing to keep intact.  These make them less useful as gaming pieces without that extra work.  I'm exceptionally pleased with how these look but I'm very nervous about having them on a games table.

Price and Service: 7/10.  The price for the castings is great.  The market stalls, especially, are more than fair for what you get.  So why only 7 out of 10?  Shipping.  Three times I got all the way to check out on these and then cancelled the order because shipping was almost as much as the items I was ordering.  Normally that would drop this down to a 5/10.  The 7 pulled it out because shipping turned out to be five dollars cheaper than expected and they promptly refunded me that money.  Honestly, with the great prices and high quality, I would have been willing to order a couple more items to get to a "free shipping on any orders over X" deal.  Sadly, they did not offer such a deal.  This right here is my only gripe with the whole process.  The service was great.  As I stated above, they promptly refunded me the extra on the shipping.  There was a constant stream of emails telling me where everything was in the process.  The items were very carefully wrapped with "Fragile" warnings on the pieces that I needed to be extra careful while unpacking.  These guys were a pleasure to do business with.

Overall Score: 8/10.  The shipping cost was really the only downer on this.  These are fantastically characterful pieces for a great price.  They are well cast.  I'm not only looking forward to getting these on the table, I'll be buying another set of the market stalls as well as investigating some of their other gorgeous products.  I highly recommend you check them out and I've placed a link to their website on the right hand side of the blog.

All three stalls together.

The Spanish well.  I love this piece.  I have no idea where it will go, but I love it.

The Celtic well which started the whole thing.  this is just a super looking piece of terrain.

Another angle on the well.