Let’s Get Small: The Little World of Small Party’s Tabletop Miniatures

By Cameron Kunzelman | August 21, 2025 | 11:21am

Photos courtesy of Small Party

Let’s Get Small: The Little World of Small Party’s Tabletop Miniatures

One of the best parts about playing a tabletop role playing game is imagining yourself in a world. You have a new context: you’re a fantastical wizard of Zoop, or you’re a vampire suckin’ in Baltimore, or you’re on the outer rim in your ship catching the rings of some far-flung planet. Anyone who has played with a battle map, or with terrain, or just needed to represent their characters also knows: it’s fun to have a little figure. It’s fun to have a little guy to move around on a grid. Small Party might be my favorite way to get that little figure going.

I originally encountered the miniatures of Small Party during 2024’s PAX Unplugged (catch me there again this year). I sat down for a game of Vast Grimm and was told to pick a character. What sat in front of me were several small, wooden game pieces with character images on two sides, like a meeple on performance enhancing drugs what make them more interesting instead of bigger. There was a cyborg, a weird guy with a gun, and some other stuff. I played my game, and I had a good time, but I also thought: where the hell did these things come from?

Later, I was walking around and I found the Severed Books booth and realized that those little miniatures were part of the (much larger) Small Party series and that I had been playing with the Born To Lose Crew of 28 to 33mm tall figures. I was enchanted by these little wooden things. I bought a lot of them. They’re right here beside me.

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Small Party isn’t just neat because I like it. It is a great concept because it solves a real problem within TTRPG play, especially if you’re playing a pickup game or just getting something quick in. As I said above, having a little figure to move around is great, and players can get really caught up in getting the “correct” figure that represents them. Hero Forge has made an entire business around the proper representation of little guys, and everyone who has played a TTRPG with miniatures has had, at some point, to hear about how a miniature is not quite right to represent someone’s character.

Small Party tabletop miniatures

Small Party sort of blows all of that out the airlock. By giving you a bunch of prepainted figures, sort of generic in their representation but all really gripping their specific vibe and tone, it gives you a much lower stakes version of a random miniature. For whatever reason, it feels to me like getting a little 2D wooden figure that rhymes with what you want to do is just as good as anything that is accurate to whatever mental image I have of a character. Evlyn Moreau’s Scrappy AF Survivors, delightfully working-class space folks, bring a pleasant gravitas with them, even if my character is more of a space marine than a deck scrubber.

It’s also just great that there sets that are clusters of monsters and other creatures. A Goblin Horde of 20 goblins is legitimately helpful if you’re trying to represent an absolute boatload of goblins in your game, or if you just want to throw them all on a table to demonstrate a point. Mark Riddick’s Dark Dungeon Dweller set is similarly evocative, what with their skeletons and monstrous figures, and it would be extremely easy to use them in a “theatre of the mind” game where you placed them on the table to evoke a particular image or context in the way that you might have previously turned to a specific page of a Monster Manual to show an image.

The current moment that we live in is assailed by many different, monetizable forms of accessory for your TTRPG experience, and I find a lot of them lacking. I like to walk around with a minimum viable product in my backpack. Small Party fits that kind of form factor and aesthetic, giving you a really clear visual tool that can wander around a photorealistic map or a hand-drawn whiteboard image of a dungeon. They just fit into a TTRPG life, and they’re high enough quality that it’s possible to ding them up and toss them around without being worried about them.

If you’re a backpack player, or you want some minis for a camping trip, or you just like the idea of being the person who pops up at the game with some great minis, I think Small Party is built in a lab for you, and if you’re like me, they’ll fill a real hole in your collection.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.