Tales of the Dragon Kings: Part 2

A bit of a delayed update for me, I haven't managed to paint much this last week. For some reason it seemed as most of the spare time I had was taken up with online gaming playing either Dead Island, Dawn of War or World of Warcraft. I don't usually computer game that much so I can't really complain about a week now and again

Non computer gaming wise, I played a couple of missions in Zombicide at Wells last week and a team game of Magic the Gathering last night. The Zombicide games were OK, I would say the missions didn't feel as though they had been tested much though. Although, the other ones I've played previously have been much more challenging, so an easier game was welcome. My Kickstarter copy of the game arrived last week, I'm not going to start the painting yet, if I do then nothing else will get done...

Whilst I'm mentioning it, I'm also going in for the Mantic sci-fi sports game, Dreadball. It has the look of an old Amiga game I used to play called Speedball so I just couldn't resist :)

On the painting front I have managed to paint a couple more of the Chinese mythology figures. These are the monk Triptaka from the Journey to the West/Monkey pack plus a vampire hunter from another pack. More to definitely follow soon!

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Tales of the Dragon Kings: Part 1

Two or three years ago I bought heavily into the Tales of the Dragon Kings range of 28mm Chinese mythology figures that Black Hat Miniatures released. I planned on assembling enough figures and scenery to run a series of games based in the vein of Monkey, The Water Margin and such films. Unfortunately, as many of my projects seem to happen, I never really got off the ground with it

Forward a couple of years to Colours and one of the few things I treated myself to was a new pack from this range. The panda adventurers contains two giant pandas and two red pandas (I mistakenly thought they were foxes until I checked)

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I used the same colour schemes as the ones on the Black Hat website, no idea what else to use so it seemed to make sense to borrow the 'official' ideas

Now this has made me consider whether I should dig out more of them & apply some paint. I'll ponder the decision and see what happens. Of course then I need to think about a rules set to use, maybe Song of Blades & Heroes from Ganesha Games? 

These were the only other figures I actually painted when I bought them originally, a pair of ghosts plus Monkey on his flying cloud

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Gun Turrets

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I bought these turrets from Scotia Grendel a while ago but for some reason they sat gathering dust. Over the weekend I grabbed them and decided to paint them up at last. They were originally designed for use with he Kryomek game but will be useful in anything from modern 7TV games onwards seeing as they are armed with machine guns

The gun turrets themselves are loose and tend to fall off rather easily so I used some 3mm magnets to make them more stable and to allow them to turn and be removed if required

They were mainly painted with several of the old Games Workshop Foundation paint colours. I really liked those paints, I must buy one of the new 'base' ones and see how it compares. It's funny, I usually use Vallejo paints but for block painting those Foundation paints were really good

Next on the table, not sure, getting easily distracted at the moment :/

Colours 2012 & Firestorm Invasion

On Sunday I made my way along the M4 to Newbury racecourse where the annual Colours wargame show was held. This year I was also going to help support some of the Wells club members who work at Spartan Games and were there demonstrating their new 10mm sci-fi game, Firestorm Invasion: Planetfall

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I managed to get my first game of the new system around lunchtime (it was that popular I couldn't get at the table) The basic learning game pitted the Terran Alliance against the Dindrenzi Federation forces (a splinter human faction)

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The system works with alternating squadrons activating by the order you set the cards in a force stack. The firing uses three different coloured dice to represent weapon types/ranges etc. A 6 on a black d6 = 1 hit, a 6 on a blue d6 = 2 hits, a six on red d6 = 2 hits and a reroll exploding dice. This actually makes for an interesting game as you can improve your dice type in various ways but that might leave your own force open to retaliation. Add in to this, a hand of cards that you can use to do things like call an airstrike, immediately move a second squadron and advance d6 additional inches then it brings in lots of additional tactics and fun

Anyway, enough rambling, here are some more photos from the game 

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The plan is to produce the same vehicles in 15mm scale and then 28mm for the two follow on systems that link to Firestorm Invasion: Planetfall. The 15mm game will include infantry whereas the 28mm game will be more squad based

I also grabbed a few snaps of some of the forthcoming Dystopian Legions 28mm figures if anyone is interested. That robot looks sweet!

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At this point I went on a walk around the show but completely forgot to take my camera with me so didn't take any other pictures. It wasn't until I was driving home that I realised this

Anyway, swag for the day was minimal (a deliberate plan) I picked up some resin mesa hills from Critical Mass Games, a new oni dog for Bushido and, on a whim, a pack of kung-fu pandas from Black Hat Miniatures

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Clowning About

Digging through the pile of figures that still need painting, I came across a set of armed clowns I got from Black Cat Bases a while ago. These will be destined for use in 7TV games, one of the sample scenarios in the Summer Special supplement is based in a carnival with clowns involved

These clowns aren't your usual family friendly ones but seem more reminiscent of Pennywise the clown from the Stephen King story/film It. Picking the first one from the set that I liked the look of, I went for the first colour scheme that came to mind. Suitably scary I think...

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Whilst I was waiting for him to dry, I quickly painted up these power units from Fenris Games. They are designed for use with the Incursion weird WW2 boardgame but will be useful in tabletop miniature games as well

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Finally, if anyone is going to Colours at Newbury Racecourse this weekend, I'll be there on the Sunday. I'm helping out on the Spartan Games demo table, just look for the confused looking person :)

A Week In Paint

Despite no new posts for the last week, I have been busy with the brush & paints. Even though I have had the week off work I didn't really get to do any real painting until late on Tuesday

My real aim this week was to paint the remaining Bushido figures I have left. This was somewhat successful, with the six Bakemono goblins from the starter set plus one additional character Bakemono completed

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I have another group of three of these to paint, those are the ones that can be summoned in a game to increase the horde size. These really are lovely figures, full of character in their evil looking faces. The miniatures are a bit fiddly to put together, with separate arms, heads and add-on bits. Nothing some good adhesive can't deal with though

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This Bakemono is the only character one I have at the moment, Tra-Peng the hunter. You can just make out a man-trap that he has slung over his shoulder

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I have quite a bit of Games Workshop Lord of the Rings range, both painted & unpainted. Even though I haven't played a game in a few years I got the urge to paint some of them. These Gondor Fountain Guard are lovely figures and I wanted some when they were first released. On reading they are being replaced with Finecast  I decided to pick up these metal ones cheap off of eBay. I'll have to watch the films again now though!

Finally, I wanted to clear some scenery bits that needed doing. The Ainsty checkpoint was in need of painting as I glued it together previously. The wooden shed was something I added to the Warbases order a while back and went together quickly and some card tiles on the roof finished it off nicely. Finally, the shop I got from PMC on eBay. It comes prepainted with a cream brick colour that I gave a quick red drybrush to make it match my other UK buildings. The windows and sign were also painted to lift it ready for use