Sketchy D&D Advent Calendar ads. Anyone else seeing these?

[Scubasteve0209]

My Facebook feed has been lousy with nerdy advent calendars like this:


At first blush it looks like a reasonable product: $40 ("down" from $65) for an advent calendar full of dice and plastic minis. Given how inexpensive those products can be to mass produce it seems like a feasible value. Full disclosure, I did order one before I started paying close attention to the ad. I used PayPal though, so I didn't give them my card directly, and can get a refund if they don't pull through on their end.

Once I did start paying attention the sketchier it seems:

• The minis they give as examples are clearly just photoshopped in place without any particular rhyme, reason, or accurate sizing.
• There are multiple sources for the different images (Descent into Avernus, Loot Crate, Monster Hunter?)
• The art is just scanned directly from the book cover, text & all.
• I can't imagine the dragon minis would fit in the spaces provided.

The website says the dimensions are approx. 23"x17"x2" (converted from cm), which means the individual spots would be about 3"x4"x2" which could reasonably fit a large size monster depending on how spread out it was (possibly larger if it wasn't assembled).

Either way, I guess we'll see what comes of this. Anyone else seeing these, or have experience buying them?

[Scubasteve0209]

Here's the actual size comparisons for the Descent into Avernus minis. The minotaur & manticore are both on large bases, so they'd be pretty cramped in the space provided.


and the Monster Hunter art in the background.

[Imbalance]

There have been scads of shady pop culture products flooding the markets lately, doubtful that any of them are legitimately licensed by the owners of the respective IPs.

[Xervous]

Big red flag, that bit.ly link there.

[Anonymouswizard]

There have been scads of shady pop culture products flooding the markets lately, doubtful that any of them are legitimately licensed by the owners of the respective IPs.

Yeah, while it might be a legitimate product that provides what it advertises (although I'm doubtful of that', it's almost certainly not an officially licenced product.

A brief Googling only helped me find this as a reference to it, and that to me just screams scam. Now I didn't clear my search history but I do search for quite a bit of RPG related stuff, so an official D&D advent calendar should turn up.

A Reaper Bones calendar is £50 for twenty four minis, so the price is certainly in the right ballpark. I did also find a site seeking a D&D advent calendar, although it was clearly not this one (it included dice, door, frog, and condition tokens, and stone of things including paper 'loot scrolls'). But again, if there was a legitimately licenced advent calendar here I'd expect most of the first page to be stories about it.

[Jophiel]

I saw the ad (mine had Tasha's on the cover) and my immediate, pre-scam, concern was that they would probably stick an individual die behind half the doors. If you count up the shown minis and die, you get around 28 pieces so it might be What You See Is What You Get. Considering that you can buy those dice sets off AliExpress for $3 a pop shipped, that's not a great use of $45-$60.

For all I know, these are "legit" but stuffed full of one-a-day cheap dice and a handful of bulk minis taken from the board games or otherwise acquired for cheap. I still wouldn't want to take the chance on "scam or just disappointing?" though.

[The Glyphstone]

Based on all the other clues unearthed in the linked thread, thats not so much sketchy as it is a screaming hot pink neon SCAM sign.

[Tarmor]

The compartment numbers don't line up with the "boxes" that they are in - another sign that the whole box image is created, not a photo of a real product. The link Annonwiz (above) found doesn't match up with this add either... it's the PH cover presented from a different angle, but with the text inside the open compartment reversed.