Drake is one of the most promising new miniatures games and settings I have seen in quite some time.

Fantasy, but very different than your bog-standard Tolkien lookalikes.

The concept is that in the land/continent /world of Dara, which mostly is populated by humans and near-humans, the ancient Dragons have awakened. The Dragons are seperated into clans, and have promptly started infighting, and have conquered or otherwise become the de facto rulers of the human nations. These peoples are used for fighting the other dragon clans togther with a very diverse set of beasts and magical “chant” creations. There are now four major factions that are in opposition to one another, and one unaligned faction that plays both ends towards the middle.

I found the shear scope and imaginativeness (not to mention the potential) of the setting extremely attractive, and have spent far too much on the first kickstarter, and will probably be spending far too much again on this second one.

Also, they make really nice minatures. True scale 28mm, which means they are a bit on the small / thin side when compared to Warhammer, especially because the true scale means everything is actually (almost) proportionate to real life and not cartoonishly oversized like warhammer.

The game itself is a skirmish game with a bit of the feel of magic the gathering, with chant (spell) cards playing a siginicant part. All dragons and a few other units are spellcasters, and you get to customize your deck of chant cards before the game. (These are not collectible or trading cards, you get all cards available in the deck supplied with the game).

The peoples we have seen thus far is the Gondor-like Rivercrest, the Prehispanic first americans (aztec/maya)-inspired Kayamayuk, and near-human stone age savages called Cherek (wooden spears, clad in animal skins) and nomadic Sarmations (wielding crossbows and ballistae), and with the second kickstarter (that is ongoing at the time of this writing) they also introduce the Shi, a heavily egyptian-inpired human faction, with massed, lowly infantry and their snakelike dragon allies/guides.

I coud go on, look rather at actiongamesminiatures.com for the whole story.

at any rate, I recieved the first shipment of mins from the first KS, and have at last gotten round to actually painting one of them:

Rakhera – The Demon. “The Poison of the Night. The Stealer of Dreams. The Killer of the Dawn.”

Chant creation, summoned magically to the battlefield.

I painted this close to the concept art. I struggled getting a sharp picture of this one. It is too bad a lot of the finer details and colour variatons do not show up in the picture.