Female representation in wargaming

When properly armored, you should not be able to tell whether a model is male or female.

Our post about sexism in Kingdom Death prompted a reasonable amount of discussion, and made us realize that there was more that could be said about how women are represented in miniature gaming. When seeing a game which objectifies women as much as Kingdom Death does, it is easy to look at other games which don’t portray women as egregiously, and give them a pass. In reality, all of the popular miniature companies today have issues with female representation.

Kingdom Death multi-part kits: their place alongside the other KD models and miniature gaming as a whole

In addition to creating the single-pose starting survivors and the monsters for them to battle, one of the main drives of the Kingdom Death Kickstarter was to design multi-part plastic kits for creating new survivor models. After defeating each of the different monsters in the game, your survivors are able to craft new weapons and equipment with the remains of their slain foes. To represent this in model form, they created a range of different multi-part sets with different weapon options and armor types that could be crafted in the game (Rawhide armor, Leather armor, Lantern armor, White Lion armor, Phoenix armor, Unarmored). This system was designed to allow players to continually build new models of their survivors as they progress in the campaign.

Kingdom Death: Marred by Misogyny?

Miniature-based wargaming has long been a male-dominated hobby, one that has partially been kept that way by the portrayal of women in many of the games (well-endowed and often scantily clad women in provocative poses, etc...). Anyone who has had any involvement with the hobby can doubtlessly come up with plenty of examples of this, but today I want to touch on one of the newer offenders, Kingdom Death. After over 2.5 years since being successfully funded on Kickstarter, the base game for Kingdom Death: Monster is finally in the hands of the over 5000 project backers. For those unaware, Kingdom Death: Monster is a survival horror boardgame which puts you in control of a band of human survivors awakening in a nightmarish realm of endless night, beset on all sides by cohorts of horrid creatures. The imaginative and unsettling creatures that populate the game take heavy inspiration from Kentaro Miura's fantasy-horror epic, Berserk (Bruticus over at Ex Profundis has an excellent compilation of artwork from  the manga if you are interested). To complement this unique theme, all of the survivors and monsters have been skillfully realized in game terms as finely detailed miniatures. The theme and accompanying miniatures would have been enough to support a successful Kickstarter campaign (back in late 2012, Kickstarter was not as inundated with miniature games). However, one of the primary things used to promote the game were "pin-up' versions of many of the human survivors. All of these pin-ups are female, generally very sparsely clothed, and often in suggestive poses. Just a glance at some of the concept art for these pin-ups should give you a good idea of what I am referring to: