Folorn Hope - 28mm Miniatures - Scavengers, Wreckers and Savages - Sculpted by Mark Copplestone

These miniatures were so much more enjoyable to paint than that last lot. Copplestone has such character to his stuff and I'm grateful that it's a: still so readily available and b: cheap! 

There's a large emphasis of post-apocalyptic/frontier aesthetics to Five Parsecs, at least in it's published form, that make characters like this ideally suited. I kept the paintjobs into two fairly defined groups, but part of the appeal will be to throw everythin together as it suits me.

 

Battle for Zycanthus - First batch baked

I thought I would paint up the more generic "grunt" type units of the boxset.

This will leave the more interesting droid and alien units to paint up at some later date. I did this entirely contrary to my original intentions, which were to plug those big robots into some ruleset or other. That is still some vague intention down the road...

For anyone that was on the fence over this game I have to say I don't think you missed much. Construction was a pain, and the overall look is "chonky" in the extreme. Maybe I can use these chaps as some sort of "space engineers", technicians of some sort or another - that's the look they capture for me.

I far prefer these characters - they're a little more lithe and throw some more interesting silhouettes than the other 'team'. Fine for some hi-tech random-son-of-a-bitch baddies in Five Parsecs. 

Alternative Armies - Firefight - Charity Shop find ruleset

 

Sometimes when leaving a charity shop it's with a sense of having been beguiled, I know that there was something great in the place and I just couldn't find it. On other occasions, such as this one, I spot something straight away. It's an old ruleset from "Alternative Armies" that predates the internet, and as such might as well be filed alongside court tennis or bear-baiting as far as online presence is concerned.

It was also intact, intriguing and dirt cheap.

I was old enough to have bought the game when new - however I was really only interested in Warhammer back then. So it's new to me as a ruleset.

The game is designed to be played from the ruleset and inserts, merely by cutting out the gridded terrains and character cards, etc. I just can't bring myself to do that with a rulebook that's survived 30 yrs or so. So I improvise.

I'm using the various room tiles from Mantic's "Star Saga" and some of their Deadzone figures which I had at hand. I'll use pencils to indicate walls and doors and the various bits of scenery replicate those on the drawings pretty well.

The ruleset is structured quite nicely; breaking up each further resolution in rules by subsequent chapters and scenarios. Not quite the "kicking you out of the back of the van, in the middle of nowhere, with only a compass." that some games have felt like.

If you think that it looks ugly, I can point you to the original artwork which, at best, is perfunctory. I still like the design and rules being self-contained and playable from the book as an idea. It's a slightly larger scale than the original tile set, as that probably only had to accommodate pre-slotta metal bases.

It's allowed me to play with the ruleset at least.

The game is really very interesting. It uses the dice to assign different actions, between fighting, blocking and moving. There are risk/reward actions on a 'good' roll, and a large enough variety in the weapons and units to create a very tactical game.

Beyond the point where I've mucked about with it there is a campaign system; negotiating a run through hostile territory or something like that. Only having played it solo it's hard to talk about the depth of the game, but as it reminds me of my time with Deadzone - a much more recent title, I think that there is probably a lot of depth here, for such a concise rulebook. I wonder if Deadzone's designer ever played it?

It turns out that A.A. still sell the game(and all of the figures), in a revised 2.0 edition but as that is 10x the amount I paid for this charity shop find and that the game is still only a curiosity to me at present, I don't really need it.

 

Maelstrom's Edge: Battle for Zycanthus: miniatures assembled.

 This is another of those ebay "rescues" that I've become prone to.

It was the full game and had been languishing for some time on the site at a very low price. Given that it contains a fair amount of miniatures

and that I like and need generic sci-fi chaps for games like "Five Parsec from Home" it had to be worth a punt for 40-odd miniatures.

The game itself had been a project of some of the "dakka-dakka" site members - but I knew nothing of it before spotting it for auction. I think if it picked up a following anywhere that it might be in the US, there's precious little on UK sites. I did ask and was told by a forum goer that it felt like "a game that had been designed by someone that had only ever played 40k." Can't say that that is very enticing.

It is safe to say that the miniature assembly is arduous. Even biceps and forearms need gluing on certain models, and even those with a monopose as the end result. Some very odd choices made over all of the models that turned a couple of days gluing into the best part of a week's work.

Very little cleanup for once though. That's good.

I quite like the end results. The "alien dude" faction especially have some good poses. The other faction have solid mechs/drones and pretty fighters, looking to me something like high end site security teams. Frankly, painting them will be less of a chore than putting them together. There's something very 'off' about the proportions of  some units, but for less than EM4 money I'm not whining.

There are just one of each type of mini pictured, the actual full teams contain multiple figures of the grunt type characters. I'd recommend it if you could find it cheaply, perhaps? Especially if pre-built. There is a great variety there, for the kind of purposes I have lined up for it.