Holy shit, and I thought LEGO® minifigures were expensive.

I’ve recently gotten into the board game Dungeon Twister. It’s a fantasy strategy game; the object is to escape from a dungeon in which the layout is never the same twice, and even shifts over the course of play! The eight characters assigned to each player are represented by cardboard standup tokens. They get the job done, and the art on them is very good, but what if you wanted some more three-dimensional versions of your team?

“We represent the lollipop guild…”

The good news is that Dungeon Twister‘s distributor Asmodée offers a full set of figurines cast in blue and yellow resin (to denote the game’s two player colors), and they’re fully paintable, as seen above.

The bad news is the price: they’re $24.99 for a set of eight. That may seem relatively reasonable at first; it’s around the same price-per-figure as the popular Warhammer series, and these are single sculpts, not model kits. But to play a full game, you need to take that $24.99 figure, and double it: otherwise, you’ve only got enough figures for one player!

When it comes to the game’s expansion packs (like Paladins & Dragons and Forces of Darkness), things get even worse. Instead of $24.99 for a set of eight, you’re looking at twice as much: $49.99 for eight figurines! And again, you need yellow ones and blue ones to play, so for a playable set of sixteen, you’re looking at a hundred bucks! There’s also additional zombie figurines for use with Forces of Darkness, and these go for $15.99 per four-pack.

“BBRRAAIINSS! …and boobies.”

Altogether, you’re looking at spending an absolutely obscene amount of money if you want playable sets of figurines for Dungeon Twister. Granted, it’s nowhere near the amount you’d spend to build a powerful army in Warhammer, but the difference is that the figures are the game in Warhammer. In Dungeon Twister, they’re just an optional accessory, which sometimes cost more than the game itself!

Talk about highway robbery. I understand that these figures are high quality, and imported from France (which certainly helps drive up the cost), but you’d think that taking a small hit on the price up front would really help the damn things catch on. Sorry, I don’t have hundreds of dollars just to spend on a gaming accessory. I could get Dungeon Twister itself plus every expansion for a hell of a lot less!