One of the longest journeys during Meenakshi Temple development was to find the best way to present Deity statues in the game. There are 115 of them in the game and players use most of this number in every game for constructing towers.
Firstly I decided to make detailed plastic statues for the game as you can see in the photo. I came to Punga Miniatures (https://pungaminiatures.com/) to help us create 3d models. I can truly recommend Rim and his whole team as super professionals. They created marvelous models that we still admire.
But after calculating the price with a Chinese manufacturer for 115 plastic statues with 6 separate molds it surprised us a lot. The problem is that we have statues of 6 different colors and for mass production the manufacturer needs to make 6 molds with a total price of over 10 000$ + the price for statues production. It appeared that we need to set SRP around 100$. It was much higher than our goal 50-60$ in the stores.
Meenakshi Temple is not a big strategy game full of miniatures for geeks. We created it as a game that can be played in 60 min up to 5 players. And we decided to look into wooden statues for it.
After searching for different forms we stopped on 2D meeple style wooden statues but more detailed to show some Deity features. And after playtesting with samples we liked them a lot. Wood feels good to interact with and some members of our team even liked wooden statues more than plastic.
This year we decided to launch Meenakshi Temple on Kickstarter and returned to the idea of plastic statues. Backers will have the opportunity to choose between the retail edition of the game with wooden statues at a discount of 39$ (SRP 59$) and a deluxe edition with plastic statues for 59$ (SRP 100$). Soon we'll find out what option our customers will choose most.