Citadel skulls

Visually, you can never go wrong by adding a skull or two. I don't know what it is about the insides of our own heads, but for some reason we humans think fleshless cranial bones are pretty cool. I'm no exception, and in fact I've had a tattoo of a skull on my arm for years now. Skulls are iconic and striking, and so I've often found myself wanting a spare skull while working on my gaming miniatures. Last year, I purchased a box of 340 miniature skulls from Citadel, and this is my review of the product.

I'd passed by the Citadel box of skulls for months because I always felt there had to be a cheaper way to get tiny decorative skulls. I looked around, hoping for some off-brand miniature skulls, but the few I managed to find online always ended up being no cheaper.

I got close to finding some spare skulls when I purchased some 3D printed gravestones, one of which had some skulls piled up against it as decoration. This wasn't resin, so there were visible printer lines, and while the striations aren't really that noticeable, it did persuade me that $50 for 340 high-quality skulls is actually not a bad price. That's not even 15 cents for each skull. What I didn't expect (because I did absolutely no research on what I was about to buy) is that the sprues in the box include xenos and ogryn and daemonic skulls in addition to the old classic human skulls! So yes, that's 15 cents a skull, but some of the skulls are huge (well, "huge" for a miniature) and cryptozoological.

So I bought the box, and I couldn't be happier. Plenty of skulls, easy to paint (I just sprayed them white while they were still on the sprue), and infinitely useful. I can have skulls on the ground, against tomb stones, against buildings, in corners, in piles, adorned on spikes, hidden in coffins, on unholy altars, under foot, dangling from a trophy belt, at the end of a chain, mounted on a wall, and anything else I can think of.

You don't realise just how many 340 skulls is until you see it on a sprue, and I can confirm that it's a lot. Maybe I'm just still getting used to them, but miniature boxes are always either smaller or bigger than I expect. The box for a Knight Questoris is huge (to be fair, it's a big model) while my techno archaeologist came on a single sprue in a tiny little blister pack. The box of skulls is smaller than I'd expected, but it contains 4 sprues of skulls.

Skulls for the skull throne, indeed.