Nick Lund Orcs - Steppes orc band - Leviathan

One of those many "pity purchases" I'm prone to, thanks to ebay. These sculpts cost very little in the auction. Once they were in my hands they looked clumsy and unattractive and have stayed unpainted for more years than I care to recall. 

Lumped in alongside all of these other fantasy figures from my pile of shame I think they look great once completed - like a lot of old-school minis they were a joy to paint.

afaik, these are still on sale via Scotia Grendel. 

 

December Backlog - fetch the paint hose

 

There's a lot of partial or new projects here: Alternative Armies Fomorian orcs and giants ; Some Nick Lund orcs from yesteryear. Lots of Northumbrian Tin Soldier sculpts - gnomes and gobbos ; sculpts from "Battle Havoc" and extra dwarfs I had lying around ; Copplestone barbarians and chaos warriors ; rando heroes and villians.

My plan is to get them all painted before Christmas....

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.

Star Saga - painting miniatures and scenery. Mantic games stuff

As I've been playing through "Five Parsecs from Home" second edition, a pdf I've had for ages, I realised that I wanted some generic sci-fi grunters and that my un-played Star Saga box might be perfect for some scenarios

Mantic Games were selling it off a while back and and I bought two copies ostensibly for the scenery. I sold the other one off when I looked at the unpainted pile....

Mantic are all over the place with their quality. These 'board game plastic' figures, that softer PVC, are actually nicer sculpts that much of their ranges for Deadzone or what-have-you. And even with the slightly lower detail they painted up quite nicely. I'm pretty sure that they have changed sculptors quite often and mostly I think it's for the worse, even while their casting improves. In fairness though, their games are mostly superb. I love Deadzone for instance, it's everything I thought Kill Team would be but better. Very slick game. These Star Saga figures are a playable faction too!  

As I'd painted these, I actually got around to playing Star Saga and it's pretty great - solo plays well and a slick reinterpretation of that "Heroquest"-style crawler. Lots of clever variety in the missions and characters. Much, much better than any of the similar games I've bought over the years. ie, Descent(ok, but really a "race" game.) or "Shadows over Brimstone" (Frankly, it's dogshit.).

It's a shame then that Star Saga didn't catch on and ended up on clearance, good for me, mind.