Bot Reviews: Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Dicelings Owlbear

Well, this is a Hasbro-created Transforming Action Figure, so I’m counting this as a normal review, even if it relates to a totally different franchise. So, how ’bout those Dungeons and Dragons? I’d be lying if I said I’ve played much of it, outside of the occasional one-shot thing, and a couple abortive Pathfinder games, but I’m loosely familiar with the whole shtick (who isn’t?). More importantly, I saw the new movie, and while I wasn’t immediately enraptured with it the way a lot of people were, I look back on it pretty fondly. On the merchandise side of things, the movie was part of a general Hasbro effort to go all-in on turning the role-playing game into a full-on Toy Franchise, mostly through the medium of standard 6-inch action figures and their accompaniments. Outside of those, there’s this interesting other little sub-line: Transforming figures called the Dicelings. They’re a menagerie of standard Dungeons and Dragons monsters, with the gimmick that they each transform into a D20 dice, the standard implement for deciding rolls in the game. There’s about three waves of them out so far, and while a lot of them are monsters I’m not familiar with (a lot of really specifically-colored dragons, which probably means more to the actual players), there’s a few monsters I recognize from the movie. This one’s the Owlbear, a bear-sized owl-like creature (hence the name), who the movie’s Tiefling character (a shapeshifter species, from what I gather) assumes the form of a couple times to wreck shop.

It’s one I recognized, so I decided to give that one a whirl (and at $20.99 Canadian, in a time when Deluxe Transformers are about 35, the price felt right).

Dice Mode

This creature comes to you in its dice form, and funny enough, Hasbro Pulse’s product copy tells you not to use it in an actual game. Why, I don’t know, because that’s exactly what I’m inclined to do. This is an oversized dice, about the size of a clementine, if I had to gauge it. Big, but not so big that you couldn’t roll it.

In terms of sculpt, it’s got the proper numbers along each surface, but with a fancy logo that sort of looks like a dragon breathing fire in place of the 20. There’s also a sort of fancy etching around the edges of each side, which could pass as a fantasy language (it might even be, I’ve got no idea). Of course, because of the transformation, this thing’s riddled with seams and joints, and even a screw hole or two, enough that no one is being fooled into thinking this is a normal dice.

In terms of deco, there’s not much of it in this form, the whole thing’s a single shade of light gray, with just a bit of gold paint picking out the dragon logo that makes up the 20.

My fiancee wanted me to note here, too, that she was expecting it to be white, and was disappointed in the color. Me, I think it works well enough. And since the dice is made up of so many panels, the big question is how stable it is. The answer: Impressively stable, but not unbreakably so.

Picking it up, the dice holds its shape, and nothing comes undone while you hold it, but if you squeeze hard or handle it roughly, you can pop some panels out. The “2” and “14” panels are the trouble spots, squeezing on the dice can make them fold away inwards. Also, there’s a big ugly seam bisecting the “11.”

Still, I gave this thing some test rolls on a soft surface, and it seems to work as a proper dice, giving me random numbers, with nothing feeling unfairly weighted. It was when I tried rolling it on a hard floor that panels started to come undone from the impact, so I guess if you want to use it in an actual game, be careful where you throw it.

Transformation

All Dicelings are, by reality of design, shellformers, so the challenge seems to have been to make it fun, and not frustrating. And this is a fun transformation to pull off, mostly because it feels a bit like doing origami. Basically, you’re unpegging and folding all the panels back, exposing the owl in the middle, doing a single torso-rotation, and reshaping the whole thing correctly. There’s a lot of neat little flips and rotations involved.

Of course, the difficult transformation is always going the other way, compressing it back into a dice, and I’m pleased to report that they once again managed to make it as painless an experience as possible. I think what makes it work is that each panel really only moves in one direction, so as you re-fold them, it quickly becomes clear what way they all connect with each other. There’s still a final step of “pop, squeeze and massage everything into place,” but there’s a ton of bespoke tabs and holes across each panel, so it’s always clear exactly how every piece fits together.

Owlbear Mode

At the end of it all, we have a stylized approximation of the beast from the movie, a giant owl-like creature without wings, that instead stands two legs, with a pair of long arms that it can go quadruped with.

And in this figure’s case, the arms are really, really large, bigger than they were portrayed as being onscreen thanks to all the Dice Parts in them. When standing up straight, the Owlbear’s a tiny bit shorter than a Core-class Transformer, but of course, much, much wider. Again, the sculpt isn’t fooling anyone that this is Just an Owlbear, there’s more than enough dice parts hanging off of her to shatter that illusion, mostly in the arms. It looks like there was an attempt to pass them off as feathers, and it’s semi-successful.

I’m reminded of Beastbox/Megabox, 52 Toys’s similar toyline of cubeformers (I reviewed their take on the Ridley Scott Alien here), and how they justified the altmode parts by sculpting the whole thing as “a robotic version of the creature” instead of “the actual creature,” and part of me wonders how that would have turned out here.

Not saying that would be better, though, because the sculptwork that’s here is excellent. There’s an expressive, slightly annoyed-looking Owl Face, feathers all up and down her torso and arms, a nasty set of claws on the end of those arms, and a smaller set on her feet.

This form’s also where all the paintwork went, too, with some very nice gray gradients and spots all across his body, and a ton of paintwork on her face, including blue eyes, and a pink tongue inside her beak. It really communicates a good sense of personality, and that personality is “I’m just annoyed enough that I might start hurting you, think about that.”

For build quality, her arms are surprisingly stable on friction alone, which is impressive given how they’re just a ton of folded panels that aren’t pegged. It’s the panel hanging off of her back that’s my big bugbear (owlbear?). It doesn’t peg in, and likes to flop around when I pick her up.

Impressively, while you can keep her as a quadruped, she’s stable enough to stay standing on her two tiny feet.

Her articulation is a bit odd. Down below, She’s got ball joint hips and ankles, and these swivel joints that are either really, really low knees, or extra ankle movement. Her head’s also on a ball joint with a lot of motion, which benefits her as an owl, and means she can easily look forwards while going four-legged. Her arms are…complicated.

She’s got ball joints at her elbows and shoulders, and two swivels behind her head. At the front of the arms, her claws can open and shut, and her transformation joints give her a wrist swivel. The complicatedness comes from the fact that no images I find can seem to really agree on what the “correct” configuration for her arms are, thanks to most of those joints (especially the ball ones) being at kind of odd angles due to the transformation.

Still, I’ve been able to pose her in a pretty good arrangement of “about to tear things up” poses.

Overall

I’m pretty fond of this odd little thing. Like I mentioned earlier, this gives me Megabox/Beastbox energy, in that it’s “a shape that becomes a creature,” but those are typically costly, boutique toys, meanwhile this costs less than a Deluxe Transformer.

The whole concept of the Dicelings feels like a tough mission statement to pull off, especially on that budget, when you consider the multi-sided shape it has to become, but they managed to pull it off well, and produce a fun little desk-toy of a creature, one that I think I could even use in an actual Dungeons and Dragons game. I’d say it’s worth checking one of these out, on the strength of this release, and honestly, I might grab a couple more of the Movie Creatures if I see them (they did a Displacer Beast, aka the Panther with Tentacles, and are doing a Mimic, aka the Chomping Treasure Chest).

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