Pricepoint
As with my previous review of Krautcover's Tale of Grimdark, this is a 140ml tub at £7.50 at the retailer I used; slightly more than their Basecover and several pounds more than their Groundcover, owing to the more complex materials and additional basing bits (more on these later). The sand is a fine grit, so you get quite a dense tub of material.
What Do You Get?
So What Do I Think?
The one sticking point you're going to see throughout this review is the bits included - here's a close-up shot of them.
While the shapes are nice, and apart from the chunky fish skeletons are less fantasy-coded than you'd think, the colours are very "candy bracelet", and while the bottle being cast in clear green is a nice touch it's again quite bright & looks more plastic than glass to the naked eye.
The natural debris, on the other hand, is a lot more convincing. There's what appears to be at least two kinds of wood (or a mixture of bark and fibre) in the mix for visual variety, and tiny chips of rock in a complimentary colour to the sand. This could pass for either natural Tidewrack (those lines of debris that form as waves push debris onto shore) or the wreckage of the pirate ship your minis are fighting over.
How Does It Apply?
So right out of the tub there are two problems with getting this material to look good. Firstly, sand like this doesn't react well to white basing glue. From asking people with a better understanding of the science involved, it's because the glue soaks inbetween and coats the particles of sand and cancels out each grain's natural refraction of light.
In the picture below, a thin layer of white glue has been applied to the base, the model dipped in and then the excess shaken off while drying. Notice how the sand has gone dark in places as the (in retrospect too dark) shade of yellow underneath is showing through?
Thankfully using clear PVA avoids this issue; the below picture is a single layer of clear craft glue using the same method as above.
Secondly, notice how the basing bits are just sitting on top of the sand and not buried? Even after a second layer, making the rest of the sand over ankle-deep on your minis, the bits are more than half exposed. While the shape of some of them doesn't help (especially the fish skeleton, as you can see), this is largely due to there simply not being enough depth on most models' bases to submerge the bit the way it would sink into a natural beach. In theory one could cut each bit in half and manually glue it to the base before applying the sand, but that's a lot of extra effort for bits that, again, don't look amazing to begin with.
In the end none of the models I used looked right after a first application with the methods above. The bits, both natural and artificial, didn't stick to the base in more than 1 or 2 places, leaving most of the base as just a mixture of sand and the smallest flecks of bark and fibre. The effect just looks like... well, slightly dirty sand, with the occasional plastic trinket sat as the models' feet because that's where they found enough purchase to stick. Much like when you go to the aquarium, the starfish turn out to be one of the secretly best bits. They stuck down, didn't poke up in awkward places, and while they're a little pale they at least fit in with the sand.
The only way I can see to deal with this issue is to pick out the bits you want, gluing some to the base - possibly with a little trimming to make them seem buried - and then applying the sand on top. Which is a lot of effort for a premium mix that's meant to look good straight out of the tub.
QA
No issues this time! It's possible you might run into a broken basing trinket amongst the sand, but with the robust shapes they've gone with it's unlikely. If you see one on your base while the glue is still drying, then just rearrange the bit or pick it off the base before the glue dries.
Does it Sieve?
Sieving this is pretty straightforward, and takes out all but the smallest bits of bark. While this is a good idea if you're wanting to adjust the ratio of bits to sand, I otherwise wouldn't recommend you do this. As mentioned earlier, this is just their Tropical Lagoon sand, which is available separately at a lower pricepoint if that's what you want, and without the tiny specks of bark left over after the sieve.
Does It Scale?
Obviously the main issue affecting scalability is the trinkets. These could potentially work as far up as 32mm, although the bottles might look more like bottles of Yakult than Grog, and smaller minis may have the fight of their lives trying to fend off the now gigantic crabs and undead fish. Pick these out however and the rocks and bark will look alright at either end, and the sand will look like grains of sand as opposed to rocks at even small scale. ...Even though sand is rock... and there are rock rocks in this mix, too... you know what I mean.
Final Score - 2 out of 5 - Fallow Soil
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Honestly it's a shame to mark this product down so much for what's meant to be its main attraction, but the basing bits just don't look good on their own and require too much extra work to either make them look natural, or to pick them out and remove them altogether. Even as a tie-in to Freebooter's Fate these seem to be a less than ideal choice, as the official miniatures come with sculpted bases.
What Do I Recommend Instead?
This is an addendum I'm going to be adding to low-rating reviews, as a way of suggesting alternatives to achieve the same effect. As pointed out earlier, Krautcover's own Tropical Lagoon beach sand is one of their cheaper mixtures, and Geek Gaming Scenics' Tropical Beach looks much the same, so taking either one and mixing in a smattering of wood flakes, chips of a pale-coloured stone and maybe some bits from your bits box will give your pirates a beach worthy of plundering.
You'll have to source your own tiny crabs.
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