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.

Lego flight stands (from the archives!)

Another one from the digital archives: flight stands using round Lego bricks.

Quite some years ago (around 2009? 2010?) we played a series of games with the Check Your Six rules. Tracking altitude in air wargames is always a bit of hassle. Most of us prefer something visual (changing the height of the model), but that's not always easy to achieve. The result is too often an ugly contraption obscuring the model itself.

Frank came up with this idea. If I remember correctly, he custom-ordered round transparent Lego bricks, mounted a magnet on the top one such that the model could bank, and presto! Inserting additional bricks for altitude changes is trivial. Let the pictures speak for themselves ...

Warhammer Quest Silver Tower painted miniatures (3)

Earlier this week I tried the new Warhammer Quest with my boardgame/roleplaying crowd.

I must admit we embarked on this game more out of nostalgic feelings than anything else. After all, most of us were GW junkies during the early nineties (the good days! :-)).

As reported before, I made a small effort of mono-chrome-painting the various figures in the box.

The actual gameplay was a bit underwhelming: lots of die rolling, saving them, another save, ... to end up with no hits in most cases. Our feeling was (albeit after only one game), it's more a skill-puzzle game rather than dungeon-combat, let alone dungeon exploration.

None of us really felt immersed in the dungeon setting, a rather important issue when playing this type of game.

Anyway, we'll play it again (after all, it is an expensive game), so our opinions might still change. We'll probably have one player manage the monsters and skip the behaviour tables (let the GM decide what the monsters do), such that there's some more challenge to it.

A few scenery items

I finished 2 scenery items today. Small, but useful to decorate the battlefield. The Oldhammer figure is only shown for size comparisons.

That should be enough

This was delivered on my driveway this morning.

That should be enough pebbles to decorate my wargaming bases for the rest of my life.

Another one from the digital archives ...

Another image from the digital archives, dated November 2006, and titled "Frank's average dice rolling."

Nostalgia: Heroclix

When cleaning up some digital archives, I came across some old pictures of one of my Heroclix games. This particular game took place in 2005, in my previous house, and when looking at the pictures, it seems as if it took place in a completely different era.

The pictures are not that good (I guess taken with a smartphone at the time), but show more or less the setup we had. I built a couple of buildings out of styrofoam blocks, and placed them on top of the map sheets that came with the Heroclix game.

The players are not my regular miniature wargaming gang, but the boardgame/roleplaying group I still play with regularly. Actually, we are in the process of redesigning our (Dutch-language) roleplaying game Schimmen & Schaduwen. More info about that on this blog.

I always liked Heroclix as a gaming system. The idea of having all the stats on a clickable base was novel at the time. I still have a huge box full of figures, but haven't played the game for years.

Dirk and Wout pondering about their next move.

I guess this movie was playing in 2005.

Wout moving a figure in Smallville.

Wout, Kurt, and Wim.

A little inside joke.

More wooden blocks

In Belgium there are shops called "Kringwinkels". You donate your stuff you no longer have a use for, and they sell it again at relatively cheap prices, possibly after some repairs or cleaning up. I guess the concept does exist in many other countries as well.

There are two such stores relatively close-by, so I regularly pop in to see whether they have anything that can be useful for gaming. Last week I bought a wooden block set, priced at 3 euro. Could be a handy additional set for my vintage wooden block set I described earlier.

The brand is VERO, and apparantly was a toy company from former East Germany.

Imaginations in 42mm (6)

It was a hot summer day today, so I took the opportunity (in between some time for real work :-)) to finish the 2nd side for my Imaginations in 42mm project. Figures are from the Balkan range from Irregular miniatures.

As with the 1st side (earlier blog and blog), I haven't decided on names for countries, let alone names for regiments and such. The only thing I needed for painting was a dominant colour for each army (Blue and Green), a colour for each regiment, and a flag design. This still leaves me plenty of imaginative room. After all, historic armies have lots of examples where the "1st Regiment" was officially the "3rd Royal Battalion", but was known as "The Jabberwockies", has a blue standard, but wore red on the cuffs, except after 4 o'clock, when they wore yellow.

General overview of the "Green Army"

1st Infantry regiment, regimental colour black. General commander of the army shown in front.

2nd Infantry regiment, regimental colour red.

3rd Infantry regiment, regimental colour blue.

Artillery, battery colour brown.

1st Cavalry - green.