K9 Gun Dogs

Another quickie: K9 Gun Dogs for the Wild West Exodus game. I have zero interest in this game (I simply don't get these type of settings and 'game worlds' ... ), but the miniatures were provided as a free giveaway with Miniature Wargames. We can probably use them as robodogs in our Antares Scifi campaign.

A conversion project (2)

I did some more work on my conversion of mounting a space marine onto an alien mount, to be used in our ongoing scifi campaign. This figure will depict "Bacchus Mahoney", commander of SpecOps.

I mounted the figure on the lizardlike alien, and added some bits and bobs. I opted for an arm with a powerfist, rather than the one holding a pistol, since I felt that gave the figure a more believable pose. It also allowed me to attach a pistol on his left leg.

I might still attach some reins, to be decided later.

The photos were taken with flash setting on, but anyway, they give a good impression of the composition of the figure.

I painted something!

Due to various reasons - some personal, some professional - hobby time as been very low during the past couple of months. Nevertheless, I managed to paint something, 2 gun towers from the old Scotia Grendel/Kryomek/FantasyForge range, which I first reported on in a blogpost dating back to December 2017 ...

Anyway, here's the picture, with a classic 80s space marine shown for size comparison.

Work in progress

Recently, I acquired some 90s era miniatures from an old gaming buddy (see also this blogpost). The items below were once part of the Kryomek range, and are still in production by Scotia Grendel.

Two Automated Sentinel Towers (I also have some buidings in these range, see here):

 A bipedal warwalker (Goliath Storm Rider):

2 Tanks (full range):

... which are a nice addition to the ones I already had in my collection:

Scifi buildings from Fantasy Forge

In 1992, on a trip to European Gencon in Camber Sands, England, I bought a new ruleset for Scifi skirmish games called Kryomek. It seemed like the next big thing to me, and so I eagerly bought a number of figures, and from the same company (Fantasy Forge) also a resin sci building - a dome with a heavy cannon.

Needless to say, we never played Kryomek, but the dome-shaped building featured frequently in many scifi games we played during the past 25 years. It was always my intention to buy more of these buildingsdue to their nice modular design, but that plan never materialized.

A few months ago, at the Bring&Buy at  CRISIS, there was a fellow wargamer selling a few more of these building modules. Of course, I needed to have them.

So, here they are. I tried to paint them in the same shade of green as I did the original 25 years ago, but that was more difficult than I thought. Probably also because the original colours have faded over the years.

More vintage science fiction figures

I recently acquired a batch of old SF miniatures, shown below.

I haven't managed to identify them all, but I've tracked some of them down to the Ral Partha Galactic Grenadier range, and some others to Citadel's Star Trek range. So that makes these late 70s figures.

In any case an interesting addition to my growing collection of vintage scifi figures (see here and here and here).

Simple scifi buildings (6)

I finished my simple cardboard building. It is a cardboard packaging shape. I added a cardboard tube, and put a polystyrene ball on top. I also delved in the bits box and added some smaller items to give it some more detail.

The whole was quickly spraypainted. The dome was gridded using the layout of a D20. I painted in some of the details with Boltgun Metal, and added yellow/green tape for an industrial look. The whole should serve as a communications station ...

It is a simple and crude building, but it goes together well with my other scifi cardboard buildings. Moreover, it has a nasty old-school feel to it, not unlike the old modeling projects for "Oldhammer 40K" or Rogue Trader.

For size comparison, I dug out a few old Rogue Trader era miniatures. An Ogryn is defending the comms station against an attack by a pair of Ambulls. And yes, I know Ambulls are supposed to dig underground ...

Epic Armageddon game @ Bart's

After the inaugural game at Koen's place, Koen schlepped his collection over to my place and we set up a city fight game, where the Eldar would continue the conquest of the city of Ziterna'n'og, then still occupied by Blood Angel Space Marines.

Rules used this time were Epic Armageddon, which are apparently the fourth version of the Epic rules, which resulted in a much more manoeuvrable game. Units zipping across the entire width of the table were no exception.

The game was played over three turns and resulted in what we decided was an Eldar victory, with the sole surviving unit of the Space Marines -- their monster of a Titan -- squatting near a victory condition location, surrounded by the might of the Eldar army which still included sufficient firepower to deal with the Titan (I was told :)) .

Here's some pics from the game:

The city of Ziterna'n'og

Eldar tanks prowl the outskirts

A Space Marine Company under fire

The Titan rumbles into the game

The Space Marine left wing prepares to advance

The Eldar heavies: scout titans and heavy tanks

The space marine left wing under air attack

Main Eldar infantry host disembarks and is ambushed by a Space Marine company dropping on their position

The end of the game: the Titan is being surrounded by the Eldar

Simple scifi buildings (5)

A few months back I reported on how I made some simple scifi buildings using cardboard packaging for our scifi skirmish campaign.

I happened to come in the possession of another cardboard shape last week, and my creative juices took over to create another building. The bits box came in handy. The plan is to transform this into a communications station, with the disc and the sphere acting as futuristic comms devices.

Inaugural game - 6mm Scifi

Last Friday we had an inaugural game at Koen D. wargaming mansion (i.e. his living room). Since Koen is known for his fondness of 6mm science fiction, he had chosen a golden oldie for us to play: Space Marine 2nd edition, published by Games Workshop during the early nineties. Koen is a SpaceMarine/Epic afficionado, so it was quite natural he selected Space Marine as the first game to be hosted at his place.

We used a few rules modifications, such as using hexes to count for movement and ranges. The scenario involved an Eldar force attacking an urban area defended by Space Marines.

The game went well, although we were a bit surprised by the special powers of some of the units. Eldar wave serpents seem brutal!

Nevertheless, the game was a lot of fun, although it also reminded us also why we moved away from GW rules in a distant past. But it might serve as a good basis to start developing our own 6mm scifi house rules.

Zarquins

And here are some more old-school aliens I finished over the weekend.

These are 5 figures from the "Zarquin" range, produced by Minifigs (see list on lostminiswiki, and they are still available here). I acquired these particular figures from a wargaming buddy who did away with some of his old minifigs figures. Since there were only 5, they probably must have come in a single pack.

I always feel old-school figures need an old-school painting job, so I went for a brighter colour palette than usual. It's always hard to pick good colours for aliens due to a lack of reference material, so I always try to imagine what sort of planet they would live on, and then try to come up with colours that match that theme. In case of the Zarquins, I imagined they would live on a very hot lava-like planet, and so their colour schemes would be mostly red/orange/yellow. So that's what I did.

Large Green Aliens

I finished a batch of "Large Green Aliens" from Peter Pig this weekend. I've had these miniatures for over 15 years, but only now did I finish them. I painted up the infantry figures 15 years ago, but only came around doing the cavalry now. They have a certain old-school charm to them. I even had to provide my own spears (simply steel wire), so that's definitely old-school!

They are intended as 15mm, but since they are "large" aliens, they can as well serve for 25mm. They'll probably appear in our Antares campaign.

These aliens have 4 arms each, ride 6-legged steeds, and are modeled after the Tharks from the John Carter novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I am usually not concerned about canon colour schemes for aliens, but I kept them green anyway. I have no idea what the "official" colour for their steeds would be.

The base is kept simple (some texture applied), and painted a reddish-orange as is appropriate for Mars.

Cataloguing the Collection (11)

This time 2 drawers with assorted 25/28mm scifi miniatures.

Since these figures have mostly been used for skirmish games (our ongoing Antares campaign), it's a ragtag collection of all sorts of manufacturers, ranging from classic GW to cheap plastic toys. Some of them I bought in the nineties, but some others only very recently. I do remember the origin of most of them (or can recognize them), but some of the obscure ones are hard to trace several years or even a decade after acquiring them.

Full Thrust Boxed Set

In Miniature Wargames with Battlegames, issue 399, I read that there is now a 25th Anniversary boxed set of Full Thrust.

Wow, 25 years?

I remember I first played Full Thrust back in 1992 at GenCon UK, which was then held in Camber Sands. It was a gaming mecca for me at the time, and I was discovering a lot of new games that were not available on the continent back then (pre-internet days for the masses, so the discerning gamer-geek had to cross the channel to get the good stuff). Full Thrust was one of the games I discovered, playing in one of the demo games. I bought a rulebook, and I have played countless games of Full Thrust since then.

I always admired the apparant simplicity of the rules, which allow for some clever manoeuvring your starship around the table. Especially the elegant rule of "half turn in the beginning, half turn in the middle" of your movement always seemed very clever to me. The damage system was an eye-opener for me as well.

I enthusiastically bought plastic Star Trek and Star Wars micromachines for my first games, and modeled asteroids and planets. Moving asteroids always were a favourite, since there was always a player who steered his ship right into one. Later on I upgraded to proper metal models, of which most are still in my collection.

However, as the games and the years progressed, I started to feel there was a certain "sameness" to all the games. Tactics revolved not so much around manoeuvre - once most players mastered the intricacies of writing down orders - but who did get to shoot first with what at what target. Given the ranges, many games became a straight shoot-out, which called for more complicated scenarios. I also bought the expansion More Thrust, but somehow I lost touch when the Fleet Books were published.

In our gaming group, we launched a few efforts of setting up Full Thrust story campaigns, but they always petered out after a two or three games at most. Although I guess those campaigns never officially stopped, so they can always be revived!

For a number of reasons, I didn't play many games of Full Thrust during the past 10 years or so, but perhaps I should revisit this old favourite. However, this is always dangerous. Actual gameplay when replaying fondly remembered games often is disappointment compared to the memories :-)

Here's a picture from one or our last Full Thrust games, in 2006.

Eddy Sterckx, Phil Dutré, Frank Vleugels, Koen Devroey, all playing Full THrust during a hot summernight in 2006.

I painted something!

After a long hiatus, I finally managed to paint something!

I did not paint the space station - which came prepainted - but I painted the flying stand black, and put some white stars on the base.

That must count for something, right?

Cataloguing the Collection (10)

The next drawer to be indexed is my small collection of spaceships. These all date back to the nineties, and I haven't back-identified (i.e. identifying the original manufacturer) yet for all models.

This collection is very much a retro-collection for me. I first played a game of Full Thrust in 1992 (IIRC), at EuroGencon in Camber Sands. I have been a Full Thrust fan ever since, although it has been many years since I played a decent game. We played most games during the mid-nineties, in the gameshop in my hometown Leuven.

At one point I also had a large collection of plastic MicroMachines of various Star Trek and Star Wars ships, but I sold them at one point. The current collection are all metal models acquired during the nineties, with a significant presence by Games Workshop (Space Fleet), GDW (Traveller New Era) and FASA (Star Trek). The fighter stands are scratch-built, with counters printed and then mounted on a flight stand.

The purple shapes you see in the top-right corner are my attempt at scratch-building a space-floating alien, modeled after the planet killer in Star Trek.

Still unidentified;

•  all the green ships on the left-hand side.
• the red ships in the middle. They are Tholian ships (Star Trek), but haven't been to identify them properly. Probably FASA?
• the round and solid starbase (with 3 red griffons) in the top-right corner.

Beyond the Gates of Antares visual look

Last week I received my copy of the Beyond the Gates of Antares rulebook. As most of you probably know, this is the new scifi game developed by Rick Priestly, and published by Warlord Games.

The rulebook is a pleasant surprise. A lot of the scenery used in the photographs is stunning, the miniatures are superbly painted, and the whole atmosphere just blew me away. Mind you, I haven't read all of the rules yet, but the whole lay-out, the imagery, the spirit the book embodies is something that woke up into me the same excitement I felt when I first read the WH40K Rogue Trader book back in the late eighties.

One of the images of the original WH40K book that appealed to me tremendously, was one in which a modern looking cityscape with brightly coloured skyscrapers served as the scenery for a game. It wasa photograph in the back of the book, in the "Modeling and Painting" section, but it was exactly the visual look of a scifi universe I wanted to play games in.

Later on, the WH40K look-and-feel became more and more gothic and dark, and that didn't appeal to me at all. I guess I am more a hard scifi fan rather than a gothic scifi fan. More Traveller and StarGrunt than WH40K.

Anyway, I see the same visuals for scenery and setting in the photographs in the Antares rulebook. Bright figures, in brightly coloured settings. For some reason, such a setting is much more inviting to play a game in.

(warlordgames.com)

(warlordgames.com)

(warlordgames.com)

Now for the crucial question ... will I ever play Gates of Antares? Probably not. We have developed our own scifi skirmish tactical rules over the years (also called Antares - pure coincidence - and using a lot of original WH40K miniatures - probably also no coincidence), but I might steal a lot of clever ideas!

Antares Mission 9: Pictures

Yesterday we played the 9th mission in our ongoing narrative scifi campaign, Antares 2401.

Here are some preliminary pictures ...

Most of the figures are old Citadel (Space Marines and some space pirates), others are more recent from Mantic games (Warpath).
The bigger buildings are scratch-built (see blogpost here and here).