Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Although it’s rare for me to play tabletop roleplaying games in person anymore due to the geographical restrictions of my player group, there are occasions that I’m able to dust off the physical components and play a game in the flesh. When that happens, I bring out all the goodies—hardcover books, dry erase maps, and cardboard pawns. Paizo makes the latter easy by producing pawn collections for their core line of products, including the Monster Core Pawn Box and the NPC Core Pawn Box. Let’s see how they stack up.
Pathfinder Monster Core Pawn Box Overview
The Pathfinder Monster Core Pawn Box contains all of the monsters from its namesake, the Pathfinder Monster Core book. In total, there are more than 450 pawns ready for play. All you have to do is punch them out of the cardboard sprue and secure them in the appropriately sized plastic base and you’re off to the races.
Of the 450 pawns, there are some duplicates, primarily with the smaller creatures or creatures of lower levels. While the purpose of this is to help facilitate low-level encounters—which are the most frequent, considering parties over level 10 in Pathfinder Second Edition is a fractional subset of total parties played—however I don’t feel like the pawn box supports that well enough. There has to be some rationale going on behind the scenes at Paizo where they’ve pored over the data and found that, yes, four goblin warrior pawns and two giant rat pawns are enough.
However, the action economy of Pathfinder plays a decent role in determining the challenge rating of an encounter. Generally speaking, even a single high level enemy is going to be dismantled by a competent party just by the nature that a standard party of four characters will have four times the number of actions. I have found that even running boss battles with a few low level baddies helps to split the focus and even the playing field. The Pathfinder Monster Core Pawn Box doesn’t really support that with the limited number of duplicates it has. Instead, the GM needs to find a reason why an imp, an eagle, and a cockatrice are in cahoots and haven’t ripped each others’ heads off yet.
One of the main questions that I’ve heard people mention around this box is what if I have an older pawn box? Should I get this? The answer to this is nuanced—as you might expect—because the overlap between the tokens across the original Bestiary and Monster Core isn’t a strict 1:1. There is also updated art on the new box of tokens, and the tokens have the Remastered names on them. If having duplicates of certain monsters is your goal, then picking up this box to fill out those requirements isn’t a terrible idea. I suggest looking through the monster list and determine if there’s a substantial number of monsters here that you absolutely need pawns for.
Pathfinder NPC Core Pawn Box Overview
I love NPCs. It’s one of the main reasons why I find Pathfinder’s NPC Core book to hold so much value. Therefore, I should hold a similar level of elevated love for the Pathfinder NPC Core Pawn Box, right? Right?
Not necessarily.
Just like the Monster Core Pawn Box, the NPC Core Pawn Box contains droves of pawns perfect for those humanoid-style characters in your campaigns. The most notable inclusions are pawns for Troops, a mechanic that I was happily introduced to during our Sky King’s Tomb Adventure Path playthrough recently. Apart from that, however, I don’t see a great need for rushing out to get this box of pawns.
Much of the exploration mode play in Pathfinder Second Edition is handled through theater of the mind as opposed to having a battlemap in front of the players. There might be some instances where Gamemasters will have a giant city-map that they populate with NPC pawns to help players remember who lives where, but that really seems like a lot of unnecessary work when it’s battle time. Who has enough space for two simultaneous maps?
One potential use for the pawns in the NPC Core Pawn box would be as a visual token for social encounters. Many GMs will clip names on the top of their GM screen during combat to indicate turn order, but I’d take it a step further to clip notable NPCs to the top of the screen when players are talking to the respective character.
The other good use for these pawns would be for players to use in lieu of a miniature. They’re a cheap alternative, and certainly a way to get use of the Avuncular Professor or Gnome Conservationist pawns. Those would probably just gather dust otherwise.
If you’re looking for pawns to pad out your battle enemies, stick with the Monster Core Pawn Box, but consider this one for party tokens or social encounters unless you are planning a lot of content with Troops.
Pawn Box Organization
Organizing your pawn collection is an easy task. What I have done in the past is take a 2-inch binder and fill it with the protective, slotted sheets that you might normally use for collecting trading cards. Each slot can hold a pawn or two—depending on size—and it keeps them situated in a nice, alphabetical order. When you’re ready to use a pawn, slide it out, attach it to a base, and you’re good to go.
Another alternative to the trading card sheets is to just use a sheet protector that’s one giant pocket. In this instance, keep the cardboard sprues so that you can situate the individual pawns within their space on the sprue. A benefit to this is that you can slide out the entire sprue when you want to use a pawn and they won’t shift around. They also won’t fall out the top of the sheet as often. The downside is that if you’ve popped out a bunch of pawns on a sheet, then sliding out the sheet will probably cause a bunch of them to fall through the bottom.
However you decide to store them, the Pathfinder NPC Core Pawn Box and the Pathfinder Monster Core Pawn Box have a different set of use cases. Use them to flesh out your existing pawn collection, or use them as a solid starting point for running Pathfinder encounters.
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