Last of the mechs!

I finally finished off the three large mechs that I have had sitting on a painting tray for almost a year.

There is nothing really fancy here, just some basic three-tone schemes that match the other units in the army. Below are the various units types I can now choose from. More exciting is that I can now move onto all of the terrain that they came with!

Up next: Some more 25mm and 15mm Star Wars, I hope!

Star Wars Risk (really)

Last fall, I bought a copy of the 2015 game Star Wars Risk entirely because it had a tonne of tiny space ships. I was just going to cage them for painting and toss the game but I read the rules first and it is actually pretty decent (and good for a Risk variant) so I added a few more minis and have been running a few games.

The game board is shaped like Darth Vader's tie-fighter silhouette, has three play spaces (left, right and centre), and lets you fight out the Battle Endor. Action is card driven, which lends a bit of interest and fog of war. Basically, the Space Vietcong have to destroy the Death Star before the Space Americans/Nazis wipe out the Rebel fleet.

The central area sees fighters contest for control of space around the fully operational Death Star while they wait for the ground forces to fight it out and lower the shields (I added minis for the larger ships and the DS). This shot is at the end of a game where the forces are pretty severely depleted and the Empire has managed to wipe out the Rebel fleet before the Death Star was destroyed. In each of the five games I've played, the game came down to the wire so it is well balanced and I don't see any killer strategies you could employ..

The ground game (above) sees the Rebel commandos move closer to the shield generators, slowed but not stopped by the Empire. The game comes with cardboard counters but I had some 15mm troops that I painted and added for colour. The tension here is how many cards does the Empire waste to slow the Rebels? Once the shields are down, the Death Star is very vulnerable.

On the other side of the board is a throne-room duel between Luke, Vader and the Emperor. Again, cardboard counters were replaced with some extra 25mm WEG metals from the 1980s. This duel is very much a sideshow and is less integrated into game play than the shield generator track. It has some nice colour (do you redeem Vader or just kill him--depends on your cards and your planning).

Overall, for a game that is designed for 10-year-olds (and requires no reading to play), it was a hoot. You can easily learn the game and play twice in an hour if you are an experienced gamer. I wouldn't want to play this very often but, as something to have around to haul out and play with non-gamers who like Star Wars, this was way better than expected.

15mm mechas

At some point last year, I bought some 15mm sci-fi figures off of Scott. One of the three armies still needed some painting and I have been chipping away at it since, mostly daunted by not having much experience painting mechs.

I finally decided to suck it up and just do the 12 smaller mechs. There were six with some kind of blast weapon (above) and six with what looked more like gatling guns (below).

Overall, they turned out fine (or, at least good enough for me!). I then tried to make the bases a bit more uniform in terms of colours and posed them with some of the wolf/dog infantry and the battledroids with which I supplemented them.

I still have three large mechs to paint (not sure if they should be done as a unit or done with individual paint jobs). Then I can turn my attention to the huge amount of terrain with which they came.

Terrain painting

Terry kindly gifted me some 3-D prints over the holidays and I quickly painted up three of them over the holidays.

First up is this large stone outcropping. A pretty slap-dash paint job (two dry brushes over black then some green and a wash) yielded a great result.

I used a similar process on this wood pile and it looks fantastic.

And finally there was there was this set of mysterious doors. It could lead to a cellar, a mine, or a crypt.

Super fun painting of super useful terrain items. Thanks Terry!

Scooby and Buffy vs Movie Monsters

Over the winter holidays, I had some friends over and I finally got my horror figures out on the table. We played a two-scenario game of the Scooby gang and the other Scooby gang against various Hammer Horror monsters. The rules were an adaptation of Fistful of Lead's Arena of Death rules that Bruce put together.

Scenario 1 saw the Scoobi approach a graveyard. Inside were Igor, digging around in some graves and The Monster walking slowly towards a little girl while giving the nearby fountain a thoughtful stare. Being no dummies, the original Scooby gang figured that. whatever Igor was doing (fetching a brain, as it turned out), they definitely did not want to let him succeed at and a big barney took place around the open grave.

On the other side of the table, the new Scooby gang mixed it up with The Monster and various lesser baddies and managed to save the girl from being dunked.

A clear win for the Scoobi, aided greatly by some pretty lucky rolling. The girl helpfully told them that there were more monsters in the crypt and we adjourned to the basement, where I had a second table set up.

The good guys started on the far side of the crypt and all of the monsters were off table. Each time the monsters got an activation card, they rolled to see if one appeared. If so, it could appear anywhere and then move normally the next turn,

There were also some traps. Some, like this stone ball than smashed Velma's glasses, were proximity triggered. The bigger trap is being sprung in the photo below: offering the players a choice of two paths which caused them to split up their party. And that was really the story of the second half.

Here we have the new Scooby, gang, going on a walk about and setting off lesser traps.

Meanwhile, the original Scooby gang, which was much less suited to fighting, would up in the soup, battling all sorts of baddies.

More wandering around.

Ruh-roh, here comes Bridezilla, and she is pi-iiiiissed.

Due to some incredibly bad dice rolling, it took the baddies forever to finish off the Scooby gang and The Monster somehow got KIAed in the process. This must have gone down very much like an actual cartoon fight. Yiokes!

As the new Scooby gang finally made their way into the fight, the baddies were able to catch them at a pinch point,

In the end, it came down to Willow versus Dracula and The Bride and the Monsters rolled boxcars for a convincing win.

Overall, a pretty fun game and thanks to everyone being a good sport about it.

Random fantasy painting

With some colder weather, I've spent more time at the painting table these past few weeks and a mixed bag of figures have been finished up.

First up is this beauty. It is a huge figure and, despite my best efforts, turned out darker than expected.

I also made some progress on these five cultists from a box of fantasy that Chen kindly traded me ages ago. I still have a bunch to go but stalled out on these guys for some reason. Hopefully, I'm back on track.

In prepping for a holiday game (maybe that is next week's post?), I needed some flying creatures. Bats would have worked (and I may still get some) but I quite liked these crows (3-D prints).

These were dead simply to paint: black primer, drybrush (blue, brown and grey respectively), then yellow detail and wash.

 Up next: Probably a holiday battle report.

Battle of Hoth Campaign 1

In late November, Bruce and I gave the first mini-campaign for the Battle of Hoth a go. This is one of two programmed tree campaigns that the game comes with. Including a brief instruction, we managed to get through three games in 70 minutes and had a dramatic finale (I suspect the campaign likely goes on one or two more steps but three games in a row was lots for one day).

Game one (above) was basically an encounter and introduction to unit types. The rebels won this one handily thanks to incredibly lucky dice.

Game 2 went to the imperials who quickly killed a rebel laser cannon and grabbed the key victory location.

Game 3 saw the rebels defending shield generators. The Imperials could win if they took out both generators. The rebels could win through attriting the attacker. 

Bruce thrust up the left flank and quickly destroyed the first generator and I figured the game was over. The Rebels were able to successfully defend the second generator long enough to attrit the Imperials. There was quite a lot of drama, much like you'd expect.

Overall, we thought this was a fun, light game that was more like the simplicity of Battle Cry than the more chromed up later CCA variants we've played. The campaign included primary and secondary victory conditions and just enough carry over effects to incentivize the players. Overall, this was good fun and emphasized movement and tactics. Super happy with this game.