I’m really looking forward to this game, but one thing I think is a missed opportunity is that the miniatures look too large on that overland map. I think Runewars board game sized minis would look perfect on these tiles. The tiles even resemble the Runewars tiles. Could you imagine playing Runewars with full size minis? And since you only have two square tiles for the skirmish battles it would allow room for a lot more stuff to happen instead of things possibly feeling cramped.

And then, with the reduction in plastic comes cost savings which could be used for more cards or more figures, such as another enemy type. Or better yet, $20 off the retail price!

Other than that, it looks to be an awesome game, and I’ll definitely be getting it when it comes out. I may try subbing the figures out with my Runewars minis. Does anyone know of a website where you could buy Lord of the Rings or generic fantasy mini miniatures?

Like say a Games Workshop store?

They even have/had a Tolkien License for miniatures, so replacements may well exist for most everything.

Mind you I wouldn't imagine these to be cheap.

One thing I noticed (look at the bow and arrow) is that the minis look slightly chunky in a potentially good way that's possibly a difficult design choice trade off:

Ultra-realistic or oversmall minis can have parts that really easily break (some of FFG's older Terrinoth battle-based games were notorious for this- flimsy bits so you found them in about four broken pieces in the bag.)

The key factor here may have been durability and this game may not have that problem of easily broken pieces.

Yeah, the miniatures look nice. I’ve got no complaint about the quality of them. It’s just that the figures being on a much larger scale than the map throws me off a little bit. And I know it’s the same scale in Runebound, but in that case the map is not crowded with so many figures. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll forget all about it once I get to dig in and actually start playing.

The size can be problem with very big companion. In gameplay video with 6 players the board was guite full, when all the heroes were in the same region, so in those cases smaller minis could work better. But this is board game, so durability is big factor to minis in here!