I’ve painted some of them in the Partisan camo pattern to match some earlier figures that I’ve done so them look like a cohesive military team on the table top. The figure with the grenade launcher is a white metal casting, the rest are 3d prints.
The non camo figures in Black will be used as urban terrorists, whilst the figure in the EOD suit with a belt fed PKM is a great representation of the PC game trope.
These are the first figures I’ve got from Spectre Miniatures, I’d seen some of Joe’s at the last game of Zona Alfa I had with him so thought I’d try some out. They are great imo. Fine castings with only a bit of flash to clean up. Very nice real scale detail. I went for an assortment of terrorist/ Covert types to use as bandits in Zone Alfa. However, I was so taken with them I started thinking of using them for 28mm modern counter terrorism games played on floor plans so I ordered some more metal figures and got some of their 3d printed files through Patreon too so they will be painted up soon.
These are the 3d printed figures that I had done by Joe’s friend for me.
My good friend Bill, boss of Under Fire Miniatures, asked me to do some painting for him, specificially his latest release. I tried my best at them, blending and everything. I’m quite pleased at how they turned out so I’m going to show them off here before the pictures get uploaded to the Under Fire Website.
These KAR men are ideal for any Great War games set in East Africa– the campaign there is rather interesting. A small German force moved around the area for four years evading all British attempts to catch then and eneded the war unbeaten. Well worth looking up. The figures are multipart so you get a choice of weapons and I believe they’ll be sold with different heads so you can make up figures representing the different Imperial regiments from that era.
I used Vallejo paints for these- Khaki for the uniform and Canvas for the webbing, Pale Sand was added to highlight the previous steps. A wash of Army Painter strong tome helped too. Many thanks to Bill for letting me use his pictures too.
My home town of Huddersfield has a fairly big gaming scene. It recently got bigger with the arrival of Powder Monkey Gaming located just outside the town centre it is within a short walk of mine. There are loads of great tables set up for Sci Fi, fantasy, and historical gaming as well as a growing selection of games, figures and paint.
I’ve been for a few games there already, it is a pleasure to play on their terrain.
A quick game of Kill Team.
Nicola and I tried out the Ravenfeast Viking Skirmish rules. I lost.
We also had a WW3 game of Fistful of Lead… which I also lost.
It is great to see a game shop so close and with the increasingly popular tornaments and events there I only hope that they grow from strength to strength.
In the past threee months I have painted 36 28mm miniatures and 71 20mm miniatures. I have painted 1 1/72nd scale kit and read 19 books.
My ill health sadly continues… will be looking at some different treatment options this month hopefully.
The 3d printer seems to have given up the ghost too… it had sat broken for a while until I had the time to try and repair it. I swapped out what I thought was the broken part but it still doesn’t work- although the part I did replace works OK. I’m not keen to chuick more money at it though. I’m pretty sure if I knew what I was doing with a multimeter and a soldering iron I could fix it, as I’m mostly sure it is a broken wire. The downside is that I’ve not used a multimeter since the mid 1990s and I don’t have the time with uni work to be messing with it too much. This does leave me wondering what to do with it now….?
Kill Team 2 – my Death Guard aganistEvan’s Tau. The rather nice terrain is all his work.
Been getting the odd game in- Kill Team 2 and 40k against Nicola plus some interesting online stuff too. Hope to do a bit more.
As I had the lightbox set up I thought I’d take a few pictures…
First up is some of the old 90s Necxromunda Orlock figures.
I also painted up a box of the objectives that came out around the launch of 9th ed.
I do like bits like this as they can act as inspirastion for a scenario… tempted to make an Imperial archeological dig for them like when the Necrons were first introduced to 40k, also back in the 90s.
I wanted to paint up some Stalkers in a specific camo pattern, namely the Russian ‘Partizan’ scheme… that was all the excuse I needed to get a set from Pig Iron Productions that I had been coverting.
Here they are again in threes. I went for a sniper rifle a light machine gun and three AK style assault rifle, the dog is so I can try out some of the optional rules I got from facebook.
I also had a few more Cold War figures from Under Fire Miniatures that I converted- again using Pig Iron parts.
You may have noticed that I didn’t take these pictures outside on my backdoor step… I got a light box for xmas and this has made taking the photos much easier, especially in these wetter and darker months. I did print out a stone texture picture from google to use as a backdrop which I think works quite well.
Following on from my recent Zona Alfa interest I’ve finished up a small batch of the Eureka Miniatures NBC Soviets. They are great figures, only slightly smaller than the Under Fire ones I’ve been using, they are a good fit with the Copplestone ones though.
I went for the tank crew and a few individual soldiers as a sample of the range.
The tank crew in NBC masks look great- rather heavily armed too really.
Three riflemen in the pea green rubber oversuit.
I’ll be getting enough later on for at least a full squad and possibly the AAHMG too as it looks a good set. Eureka Miniatures can be bought in the UK from here.
I tend to work better to a deadline so was more than happy to run a game of Zona Alfa for friends with a week’s notice, even though I still had nearly 30 models to paint in that time. Firstly I needed to finish off the various zone hostiles that I had collected, these are the various monster/ fauna that inhabit the zone and make life difficult for the players. I had a mix of zombies from Mantic, Copplestone and Pig Iron. All were painted in a similar muted palette and complement each other. The Mantic and Copplestone ones go well together as they look like the reanimated corpses of previous expiditions to the zone….
The horde of zombies.
Pig Iron Production zombies
Mantic zombies
Copplestone zombie troopers.
I also had a small selection of Reaper Bones models to represent the mutants, both large and standard size, that can also appear in the game. Nicola very kindly painted these three for me.
Reaper Bones used as mutants.
I also wanted to round out my collection of military types witha few more figures. I got some of the Under Fire Miniatures cold war camo suited Soviets and added Pig Iron Productions gas mask heads and backpacks to give them more of a STALKER vibe. Whilst the hardness of the metal that both companies used made drilling them tough on the fingers I’m really pleased with how they turned out.
The converted Under Fire miniatures Soviets.
For the game at the club I wrote a brief intro to the game (which I can post if people want) and made up four forces for the players to use: two military, one scientist and one bandit. After a quick run through of the rules they teams set off to revover the protyped weapon left cached by a previous expedition into the zone. I purposely ignored the Allies and Enemies rules for this game, mainly as it was a one off zero sum mission it would added more combat to get the players better used to the rules.
My Zona Alfa collection in it storage box.
Set in a level one zone I placed the two hot spots so that the players would be able to interact with at least one lot of zone hostiles each.
The game table, the objective was in the cached ammo crate, the skulls are hotspots. Most of the terrain was from my 3D printer.
In the end the Scientist and the Military player ended up trading shots and finding out how bloody the combat syestem can be whilst the Bandits crept forward clearining a hotspot and then cunningly used electric juice to speed forward to snatch the mission objective, after the Military team had dispatched the rats it had spawned the previous turn. The scientist cleared the hotspot closesst to them, again hiding a rat swarm before finding an anomily there and getting a rare artifact. At the point the Bandits were attracting a lot of attention so began to take a lot of fire as the other two teams attempted to snatch the weapon for themselves… at the expense of most of their team they did manage to get it off the table. However, I did point out to the players that in a campaign game they’d need to watch their casualties more and that finding a rare artifact could mean that whilst you don’t win the game the money it earns your team may be more beneficial in the long run.
The Bandits emerge from the edge of the woods.
The Military team pinned down behind the ruins.
The game went down really well and there are a couple more players who wish to try it so hopefully there will be enough interest to get a campaign going. I’m sure I did some of the rules wrong but it has been a long time since I ran the game, pre COVID19 infact. As always I enjoy running the game and seeing how the players interact as much as I do playing.
I picked up a further four of these monopose plastic models from ebay. Given that the game that they are from is out of production they are getting a little bit more expensive and rarer so I decided to get them sooner rather than later.
I painted then to match the previous pair that I did- I used a mixture of GW’s Nihlak Oxide and some homemade glazes so they were a really quick job.
I plan to mostly use them as mutant for my Zona Alfa games but they’ve already been on the gaming table in Nicola’s Drukhari force.
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