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Falling Star Sailing Ship – Unboxing!

I did it! I took some of my writing earnings and I purchased the amazing Falling Star Sailing Ship! I was asked to share the unboxing and review it, so here we go!

Note: As much as I would love for Wizards and WizKids to ask me to review their products, I purchased this with my own money. The falling star has an MSRP of $250.

Outer box
The box is very long, but light!
In typical WizKids non-environmental fashion, inside the box is another box!
All the ship parts are well packed in plastic, the sails wrapped as well.
The two masts come wrapped and in their own box. Note the sails are tied, and are meant (I think) to stay tied up.
The ship has excellent detail. Here are the masts, showing one base (a strong magnet is embedded within) and a crow’s nest.
The amazing detail on the ship’s wheel, which you can place wherever you wish on the ship.
Now let’s pull out the ship itself! So exciting!
It is massive! 33 inches long and 6.4 inches wide!!! It looks gorgeous, with excellent color and detail!
Here is the ship’s stern deck. The railings are a nice height for both medium and large minis.
The bow of the ship. Both the aft and fore raised decks are a nice height and size for interesting combats or siege weapon placement.
The ship’s figurehead is a dragon, and the anchor a dragon’s claw! The anchor does not deploy, but it does look great.
The keel is also awesome, with cool-looking rear and corner windows.
The doors to the aft and bow cabins both open and are nicely detailed with porthole style windows. The doors also make a nice place to hook your finger in to lift the cabin decks.
The decks are double-sided, with and without a 5′ grid. All decks are a thick cardboard which should stand up well to play.
Removing the deck is quick and easy and reveals the floor below. The bow has lines indicating cabins, while the aft is plain (perhaps one large captain’s quarters).
The stairs pull out fully. This can be used if you want a ship with no deck “castles” but is primarily to allow you to flip the main deck to be non-grid. Note the slats in the stairs! These allow a miniature to slide its base in there, so you can position minis on the stairs!
The ship comes with 2 additional decks, meant to represent lower decks. These don’t attach to the ship (they are the same size as the main deck, which is slightly larger than the bottom of the ship. Thus, you won’t generally put the ship over them – you will keep them out of sight and bring them onto the table when needed.
Speaking of the underside, you can see here that it is hollow underneath. You won’t be placing minis under it. Even though the canon ports open (which is cool), you can’t easily put anything behind them. Also, the ladder is cosmetic – those slats won’t hold a mini.
The last step is to add the sails to the masts. The sails have small pegs which fit into the masts. It takes a close look, but the pegs are slightly different and match specific holes. The base of each mast is magnetic, so you can just place them on the ship and they hold up reasonably well during play.
Here is an example of minis on the crow’s nest. It has two possible levels, though the top is not easy for a normal round mini.
As I reviewed previously, the so-so Monster Menagerie III set featured a Kraken as the special mini (see pictures here), and it and its tentacles look amazing next to the ship. You can also see the island, small boat, chest, and dead captain in the foreground. In the middle you can see the ship tiles which were an old DM reward provided by Wizards during the 4E days. Yeah, the Falling Star is much nicer, even though those are great ship tiles.
Here is a closer look at those ship tiles, with the “below-decks” tiles showing and the smaller boat tiles.
You may wonder how the Falling Star compares to old ship maps. There were some amazing maps created by Mike Schley for Dragon/Dungeon magazines, which you can get on his web site, print them out, and laminate them. I color-changed mine for a battle interactive in the Ashes of Athas campaign (making them Silt Skimmers), but here is how the size compares to the Fortune Star ship. It’s the largest ship map I own.
Here is a smaller ship, the Talon of Umberlee (also by Schley). I customized it to add ballistae. It’s cool, but I really like that Falling Star!
And that’s the unboxing! I added it to my shelf of cool minis to display, and loaded it up with a balista and various minis I’m using in our current campaign. This ship is so cool… I should really finish that nautical adventure I’m writing.

If you are curious about the Falling Star, Dragon+ had an article on how the ship was created, using a design first drawn by Chris Perkins when he was a teenager! You can also download the maps of the interior as envisioned by Mike Schley here.

Bonus: Unboxing the Spell Effects: Arcane Fury & Divine Might

I also picked up these finally. Let’s take a look! MSRP is $39.99. There is also a Wall of Fire and Wall of Ice set which I own and enjoy.
Here is the list of contents on the back. There are some great choices, and some strange ones. We get 4 Elemental Weapons, but that spell doesn’t create a floating weapon… it just changes the weapon you are wielding. The Bigby’s Hand variants are cool… though it’s supposed to be a large hand! The Tenser’s Floating Disk is cool – it’s flat so you ca put something on it!
Here are the Bigby’s grasping, interposing/forceful, and clenched fist hands (top row) and the Phantom Steed and Arcane Gate.
And here are cloud of daggers, elemental weapon (axe, cold), Tenser’s floating disk, mage hand, spiritual weapon (warhamer), tall grasping roots, elemental weapon (bow, acid), dancing lights, spiritual weapon (mace), invisible servant, elemental weapon (hammer, lightning), and elemental weapon (sword, fire – also could be a mordenkainen’s sword).
Here are all the minis surrounding a Wizard Tactician mini to show scale. Overall, very cool! Recommended.

In other news, it’s been a long time since I blogged! I was trying to balance my projects and it finally came down to my saying, “I’ll blog when I’m done.” The projects have been announced, and were the Dwarven Forge Dungeon of Doom adventure (which you can download for free here… it may be later offered as a printed product!) and one of two lead authors (along with Shawn Merwin) on the recently announced Acquisitions Incorporated book (a collaboration between Wizards of the Coast and Penny Arcade). Together, these projects were by far the most words I have ever written in a year. 2018 was also the busiest year of my day job I’ve ever had! Something had to give.

I am back at writing, working on the next Dwarven Forge adventure for Caverns Deep, but I do finally have more time to blog.

Now, most unboxings are videos. I like writing. If you made it this far, let me know in the comments if you prefer this as a blog or would prefer minis reviews as videos. Maybe I’ll try it out!

One comment on “Falling Star Sailing Ship – Unboxing!

  1. Richard Green
    March 1, 2019

    I really like the look of that ship! Thanks for posting

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This entry was posted on March 1, 2019 by and tagged , , , , .

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