Crew of the Astropolis

I finished up a few more crew members of the good ship Astropolis from the recent Kickstarter. I love these figures: big and chunky and full of character, and I'm eagerly awaiting the release of the next batch in the upcoming Kickstarter sequel.

Cold Wars 2017

I managed to get to Cold Wars for a day of wargaming. While only played a few games, I did manage to scope out a number of great tables, chat with gamers and raid the vendor hall. Check out my photo dump:

Fighters, Lancers and Layabouts

This post originally appeared on the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge.

Like many of you, I jump from project to project and this week's entries represent miniatures from three of my current projects.

Star Wars Armada

One of my goals for the Challenge was to get my Star Wars Armada ships finished off. I play Armada regularly, and we're gearing up to try a campaign this Spring. I couldn't field unpainted forces, so I've steadily been adding paint to these tiny ships as a break from 28mm figures.

These E-Wings were recently added to the pool of Rebel forces, while the brown Moldy Crow is an older release that I've finally managed to paint up. I enjoyed adding paint to the Armada scale X-Wings, Y-Wings and other squadrons seen in the films, but these E-Wings (designed for the comic books) lack the character and detail of the classic ships.

I don't tend to play Imperials, but for those rare occasions that I do I'll bring these bounty hunter vessels since they are sporting fresh paint jobs. Bossk's Hound's Tooth is a big garbage truck of a ship that gets deadlier as it receives damage, while Dengar's Punishing One has proven annoying when I've faced it in enemy fleets.

Blood and Plunder

I've recently returned from a family vacation to Disney World, and a visit to "Pirates of the Caribbean" has fired my enthusiasm to complete my Spanish forces from the recent "Blood and Plunder" kickstarter. Hoping to get all of these figures done so I can get cracking on their ships and some terrain.

Astropolis

Finally, I completed just two figures from the Astropolis kickstarter. I have a dozen, primed and ready to go, but each is so unique and full of character that I wind up spending far more time on each individual which has slowed my progress. Unlike the weak sculpts and soft detail of the "Blood and Plunder" figures, these detailed Astropolis figs are a joy to paint. I can easily picture these two slack jawed wrench monkeys banging on the innards of some huge, decrepit space freighter.

I'm hoping to sneak in a few more figures before the deadline, but with the Cold Wars convention approaching, that may be too optimistic.

Blood and Plunder Pirates: Indios y Lanceros

This post originally appeared on the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge.

Just a handful of figures this week as I make the first dent into the Blood and Plunder Kickstarter package I received a few weeks ago.

After visiting the fort at St. Augustine and watching the first season of Black Sails, I decided to go with a Spanish crew to face off against my opponent's English sea dogs. I'm excited to get in some games of Blood and Plunder (their example game videos convinced me to back the project), and I was thrilled with the ships, dice, coins, cards and rulebook I got from the Kickstarter. The figures on the other hand aren't quite up to snuff.

From a distance I think they'll look great. I appreciate the variety of poses and ethnicities, but there's just something off about them. I'm chalking it up to the conversion of 3D renders to physical metal minis. I love chunky models like Mark Copplestone's, and I've even had some success with model's that were either created as 3 ups or 3D rendered (the Perry and Fireforge plastic figures for example), but these Blood and Plunder figures are both overly large and have a lack of detail. Features are indistinct, hands are tiny, and clothing ripples and wrinkles react strangely to washes. They're just... odd. Not terrible, but different from what I'm used to.

Lanceros, spear armed Spanish troops

Indios, native islanders put to work
defending Spanish outposts in the New World.

Despite my reservations about the figures, I did have some unexpected success with some Vallejo paints. Using the paints and instructions from the Vallejo Leather and Wood paint set, the deck planking of the bases came out better than I'd hoped.

I also did a quick paint up of an Imperial Assault figure as we're sharing the burden of getting our game master's set finished up.

All told that's 8 pirates and 1 medical droid for 45 points by my calculations.