I’ve been playing the wonderful 02 Hundred Hours from Grey for Now games recently. As thoroughly expected from one of the creators of the equally fantastic Test of Honour, 0200hrs is full of slick, tense, cinematic and critically, fun reasons to push toy soldiers around.
Filed under: Game Rules, Games in Progress, Group Project, Miniatures | Tagged: 02 Hundred Hours, 2025, Grey for Now, Rebel Alliance, Sci-fi, Skirmish, Star Wars, Star Wars Legion, The Empire | 8 Comments »
I prepped and painted some hi-tech/lowlife Deadzone 3rd edition terrain.
Filed under: After Action Report, Games in Progress, Miniatures, Terrain | Tagged: Deadzone, Mantic, Marauders, Orks, Sci-fi, science-fiction, Skirmish, Warpath | 13 Comments »
Four Stargrave “Troopers” from North Star Miniatures
I love the aesthetic and modular design of the Stargrave range from North Star Miniatures. Modular design allows an almost Lego like approach to assembling figures, a very deep hole that I can easily fall down, so I assembled these guys with minimal add-ons, and entirely from the contents of the Stargrave Troopers box IIRC.
The plan is to add to this four to play both Stargrave and Five Parsecs From Home, but even with such a bright colour scheme, they are still very suitable for all sorts of other settings and games.
I won’t go into the details about the “Laser Squad” video game, and why it relates to these toy soldiers until a later date.
Thanks for looking!
Filed under: Miniatures | Tagged: 2024, Amiga 500, Bug Hunt, Five Parsecs From Home, Laser Squad, Modiphius, Osprey Games, Sci-fi, Stargrave, Video Game | 17 Comments »
I got home from a fun few days of playing Warcry last weekend, and found a copy of The Doomed waiting for me.
The Doomed is a miniatures agnostic, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi, tabletop miniatures game with maximum, massive monsters and minimal, miserly measuring.
The game belongs in the “groups of non-conformist, monster-hunter types take umbrage with other bohemians/dropouts/misfits with whom they share low value, monster-haunted real-estate” sub-genre of heavily-hyphenated miniature games. Things like Necromunda, Mordheim and Stargrave share a lot with The Doomed, but there are significant differences.
The design diary for The Doomed on the Osprey website explains all of the design philosophy, if that sort of thing interests you.
There is a heavy push towards kitbashing miniatures in The Doomed book, although it isnt a rule or anything like that. This is absolutley fine, and potentially loads of fun. I may even kitbash a set of figures specifically for this game at some future point (like I did for Forbidden Psalm/Mörk Borg), but for my test game I decided to draft miniatures that I already had painted.
They were all prepped with precisely this sort of gaming in mind anyway.
Similarly, many (all?) of the the various types of sci-fi gaming terrain that I have prepped over the years suit the dilapidated aesthetic being pushed in the book.
That said, if you wanted to play The Doomed in a more comic book, primary colour driven, raygun-gothic sort of Futurama-esque setting or a Star Trek utopia suddenly awash with monsters, then you could do that too without making any rules changes. The game is designed with broad strokes and archetypes, rather than specific ranges in mind.
After that test game I’m looking forward to playing through a few fast and fun monster bashing games in the near future.
Credits
The game mat comes from gamemat.eu.
The ruins come from Citadel and Mantic.
Chompers, Verhoeven and Glo-stik are all old Citadel Miniatures.
The Scavengers are from Ramshackle Games.
Devourer/Marjory is an old Leviathan miniature, available from Scotia Grendel I think.
The Nexus items came from a Valquiria Studios.
The Doomed is published by Osprey.
Filed under: After Action Report, Game Rules, Games in Progress | Tagged: 2023, Horror, Miniature Agnostic, Post Apocalyptic, Sci-fi, Skirmish, The Doomed | 16 Comments »
I decided that I needed some “beat cops”, some “thin blue line” for my upcoming games.
Continue readingFiled under: Miniatures | Tagged: 40K, 40K Skirmish, Arbites, Citadel Miniatures, Copplestone Castings, Cops, Cyberpunk, EM4 Miniatures, Enforcers, Forlorn Hope Games, KillSampleProcess, Mark Copplestone, Militia, Mirliton Miniatures, Post Apocalyptic, Resistance, Sci-fi, Terminator, Terminator Genisys Miniatures Game, Zona Alfa | 14 Comments »
After finishing the Castle Grayskull Wasteland terrain from the Masters of the Universe: Battleground set, it was time for one of the figures.
I reckoned that Trap Jaw was one of the grooviest MotU character designs back in the mid-eighties.
It turns out that over 35 years of life experience hasn’t changed how I feel about blue/green cyborgs with modular weapon arms, grotesque facial bionics and vague pirate themes one iota, so I figured that I would start with TJ.
Like a lot of similar media, the MotU franchise tends to have various different takes on the origins of the characters, and Trap Jaw has a few. My favourite is the one above.
In summary, Skeletor hit “Kronis” so hard that parts of him still havent landed, and Tri-Klops built Trap Jaw out of the bits that did.
Those illustrations – from the – Icons of Evil: Trap Jaw comic from 2003 – tell the story better than I ever could.
Anyway, like Morten Harket and your mum, Trap Jaw has had a few different visual iterations since “We Built This City” was number one.
Initially the 1980s Trap Jaw toy was pretty much what I was interested in referencing. The thing is, many of the physical details on the original toy were lost back then, due to the minimal paint deco.
As I wasn’t going to slavishly ignore details that would make for a better figure on the table, simply to match a mass produced toy run from almost forty years ago, I looked at the toy that the Archon sculpt referenced.
As “Masters of the Universe: Battleground is a fantasy miniature game based on the beloved ‘Classics’ toy series” it made sense to paint TJ to match that rendition of the character. As the “Classics” series was an adult collector range supposed to take the memory that you have of the character and update it, without taking away what you liked about it back then, it made sense.
Giving some extra attention to the physical details on the sculpt that are in some cases not even present on the original toy but were added in the Classics version was the obvious way to go.
So thats what I did, ending up with the finished verion of the miniature shown in the iffy photo at the top of this post, looking a fair bit like the beautiful illustration above.
I didn’t record the paints that I used, I just looked at various images of the character and decided what paints I had that I thought best represented him and got stuck in… and I loved every minute of it.
Until next time!
Filed under: Boardgame, Miniatures | Tagged: Archon Studio, Boardgame, Eighties, Evil Warriors, Fantasy, He-Man, Masters of the Universe, Mattel, Miniatures, MotU, MotU Battleground, Post Apocalyptic, Sci-fi, Terrain | Tagged: 2022 | 15 Comments »
Do you have it?
Well do you? What do you have?
Say it. You know what I’m talking about.
Say it. Nobody is listening, and you will be glad that you did, I promise.
Filed under: Boardgame, Miniatures, Terrain | Tagged: 2022, Archon Studio, Eighties, Fantasy, He-Man, Masters of the Universe, Mattel, MotU, MotU Battleground, Post Apocalyptic, Sci-fi | 28 Comments »
I painted some lovely pieces of Fogou post-apocalyptic terrain, and took some photos.
Continue readingFiled under: Commission, Terrain | Tagged: 2021, Fogou, Post Apocalyptic, Sci-fi | 13 Comments »
The science-fiction variant of Frostgrave was officially released yesterday, so I played a game.
Filed under: After Action Report, Games in Progress | Tagged: Bounty Hunters, Orks, Osprey Games, Sci-fi, Stargrave, Venators | 19 Comments »
I’m excited about the upcoming release of Stargrave, so I dropped everything else that I was working on for a while, struck while enthusiasm was high, and put my own spin on a bucket list set of terrain.
Filed under: Influences, Terrain | Tagged: 2021, Mos Xcellent, Rogue Trader, Sci-fi, Stargrave | 26 Comments »
sho3box 