Carnage
By Thomas Ziems
Published by Holistic Designs & Ziemagination Games
$65.00Carnage. The very word evokes powerful mental images. Images of blood, guts and all the other exciting things that make adventure gaming more fun than just playing Monopoly. Carnage is the exciting new miniatures game from Holistic Designs & Ziemagination Games.
The history of Carnage is colorful. The game was designed several years ago and has been run as an annual event at GenCon ever since. Last year, Thomas Ziems got in contact with Chris Wiese at Holistic and together they plotted the arrival of Carnage as a product. They chose to include a huge stack of miniatures in the box, and a rulebook with a 4-color cover. And now it is finally here.
Probably the coolest feature of this game is the huge pile of plastic miniatures you get: 96 pieces spread across 2 races (the humans and the heptars) and 6 troop types (you get infantry, archers, and mounted guys for each) are an amazing value. And the figures themselves are quite good. A lot of character has been included in the sculpting, making these figures stand on a par with even some Games Workshop releases.
At GenCon, the miniatures had not yet arrived. To make up for this, the company included large-scale resin casts of a couple of figures from the game (they are normally used in the mold-making process). This was a nice touch on the part of Holistic, and I had fun painting something that wasn't very tiny for a . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: September 4, 1998
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