Wargames Bakery recently ran a 4th Basius Kickstarter for their brand new mini Basius pads, the Texturis range. I'd previously picked up a couple of larger double sided Version 2 pads so I thought I'd give some of these little ones a go.
I showed an uncharacteristic level of restraint and picked up 8 of the 76 available designs.
The pads are roughly 50mm square, though some are a little smaller (40-45mm) to allow for pads with repeatable designs to not have overlapping sections. A number of them are cut down highlights of their bigger pads for a fraction of the price and weight - it looks great having a shelf full of pads but they're rather hefty so these little stampers are great alternative.
I mostly picked up different styles, though 3 of them I picked out for my new Eldar army that can now hit the building stage!
The mini pads themselves are quite small compared to the Version 2 pads - you could fit 9 of them on a single pad, if you had 9.
It's all well and good showing off pads, but how do they do?
I started off the Eldar style ones - The Eloar, Crafted World and Spirit Stone. They'll probably look better on bigger bases, which is a shame as most Eldar are on 25mm bases. They're different designs and heights, but they all have the same light thorn pattern through them which ties them together.
Misty Mountains and Tundra are both rocky and mountain-like with large deep sections so I didn't play with those this time around as the Misty Mountain rocks will eat a lot of GS that I don't want to use until I actuall need them. However, I did use the other three - Factory, Manowar and Tank Trax.
The factory pad has 3 metallic textures on it, with the two main textures split up by the rivetted cross beam.
Manowar is one of several wood effect pads which creates a wood flooring effect. There is a Greenstuff World textured roller that creates a similar effect but it's planks are a lot wider and deeper, closer to bark than finished planks.
Tank Trax is another base for 40k in my book - the track design is a close replica of Imperial tank tracks - I'm not sure how similar it is to the likes of Bolt Action tanks as I don't own any, but used sparingly I think it'll add a bit of character to some bases across an army. This base is a 32mm base, so I think that as with the Eldar style bases this looks better on larger bases so you have enough space so that the tracks don't take up the entire base.
That's a whistlestop look at my latest Kickstarter arrival - I'm expecting one more before Christmas to add to the three I've now received over the last 4 or 5 weeks. The team at Wargames Bakery make great basing pads so I'm looking forward to getting full use out of these.