First, let me preface with saying that if you have the time and budget to allow painting models - do it. Nothing has the physical presence of a painted model on a gaming table. If you're unsure about your skills, there's no better advice than to just try anyway and there are plenty of great tutorials on the web, including Sean Sutter's tutorials on the Metal King Studios youtube channel.

With that being said, I'm a new dad of an infant and spend 12 hours of my day between work and commuting. Time is something I have precious little of and with mom staying home to take care of the babbo, expendable income is also pretty limited. Luckily, RelicBlade is incredibly accessible. A full set of PDFs for everything the game has to offer comes in at a measly $22! But what don't you get with the PDFs? The miniatures, of course!

There are many remedies for this situation; if you're a longtime gamer, you probably have plenty of miniatures with which you can proxy but a large portion of any game is its aesthetic and Sean's art is just stunning - something just didn't feel right with using my cheap D&D minis. So with that in mind, my solution for proxying is Print-and-Play.

To accomplish this, I've purchased some 26mm coin cases and arranged a collection of some of the many images of RelicBlade in action. You can get about 20 coin cases for $6-10 on amazon or at any local hobby store and while they're slightly bigger than the bases for RelicBlade, they'll work nicely. I'll be using a 1" hole punch to punch the images and placing them within the coin cases. For the play area, I've purchased a square yard of green felt that I'll be cutting down to a 2'x2' square and I'll be including some 2D terrain from other games.

Total purchase: $22 for PDFs, $10 for coin cases, $6 for hole punch, $5 for felt square. That's $43 and about a half hour of work for tons of warband combinations. Additionally, your collection takes up very little storage space and is incredibly portable, allowing you to take RelicBlade anywhere but especially your favorite pub.

Cheers!

*edited to correct amounts