The dregs of 2013

Before I total up the scores for 2013 here are the last few things I painted up before the year drew to a close.

Here is the completed Xenomorph force including face huggers and nests. I'm not sure if I will ever come up with a scenario which involves all three queens!



And here are the colonial marines.


And showing up late for the battle are the Corporation Marines complete with acid suits.


If anyone is interested here are some close ups with a 1p piece for scale.







Now lets see what the damage is.

Me and my squad of ultimate bad-asses will protect you!

And the Colonial Marines are now painted. Painting 10mm models sure is quicker than 28mm ones.



Here's a bit of a closer shot.



And here's a squad deploying from the APC.



And of course they'll need some opposition too. The Aliens are almost complete - just the egg clusters to go.



And our final shot of the day are two colour scheme testers for the Wayland-Yutani corporation force.



The game itself is coming on nicely. Dan came over last night and we gave the rules a first shakedown. Noty only was the game quite playable but it also fun too. It still has plenty of rough edges and the balance needs a lot of work but it is a promising start.

Xenomorph project.

I have mentioned many times that I, just like may other wargamers, tend to flit between projects instead of seeing things to completion. I was suffering froma complete lack on inspiration to complete any of the projects on my workbench so I ended up starting a new one ... or more precisely digging out an old one to work on again.

Several years ago I had some ideas for coming up with my own board game based on the Aliens films. After mulling things over for a while I eventually took the plunge and bought a load of 10mm miniatures from the Pendraken Sci-Fi range in 2007. I then spent ages gathering images from the films for painting inspiration, textures for the tiles etc etc and then promptly put everything in a box and left it to gather dust.

One of the reasons for giving up was that I couldn't come up with a suitable way of basing the miniatures economically. I wanted to base them individually but nowhere seemed to produce bases small enough. thin enough or cheap enough for what I had planned. I experimented with washers but realised that it might cost more to base the miniatures than they had cost in the first place.
 
During the 'wilderness years' of the project I had occasionally added little bits here and there like PDFs of tiles etc but it was the recent Prodos AvP Kickstarter which started me thinking about my own project again and the basing problem. A solution finally came to me - tiddly winks would be the right size, shape and are nice and cheap. I checked eBay and bought a pack of 100 of them for a little over £2. With the basing issue resolved I could now make a proper start on the project.

Here are some of the miniatures based on tiddly winks.




I've added bits of aluminium mesh to the bases to make them look a bit nicer.




Here is the current state of the project - just a few more bases to finish.




And these are my colour scheme testers. They paint up pretty quickly so there is a chance I will actually finish this project.



And another look. I don't fancy those marines' chances.



Looks like I have plenty to be getting on with.

You got a killer scene there, man

Yesterday I decided to crack on with something else I have been putting off for a while - the scenery for my wargames table. To be honest I kept forgetting it needed doing until I would dig it out for a game. These are all based on terrain scatter bases from Fenris Games. The nice chap who runs it created these for me but you can also buy the from their store here and here.

I added some polyfilla, rocks and sand (sealed with PVA for for durability).




Here's a close up.



For practicality the trees are removable during play and are attached to the bases with magnets. Here is a wood base with the trees removed.



And lastly here is a quick bones mini I knocked up for inclusion in our D&D party. He is playing the part of Aaron Tallbow in the Dragonlance Classics campaign I am running at the moment.



And in other news I have finally made a start on those ghouls I have been putting off for a while.

Like a boss

And carrying on with the work bench clean up I have four Orc Bosses to lead some of my units.



There is now very little left on the workbench.

Being adventurous

A bit more desk tidying. These have been sitting around half painted for a while so I decided to get them finished.



There's now more room on my workbench but there are still some miniatures on there begging to be finished.

Ello ello Elohi

And the winner is ... The last unit of Elohi.



Well that's the last of them done.