Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter

While I've mentioned Kickstarter projects in the past this is the first time I write an entire post dedicated to one. I've been wary of backing any and have, as more and more projects sprang up, felt a bit of a "Kickstarter fatigue". There have simply been sooo many launched during the past year! That is not to say there has been a lot of awesome stuff coming out of this new kind of venture; things like Sedition Wars, Mutant Chronicles and Zombicide certainly looks impressive! Still, besides helping fund FATE Core and Mutant: År Noll (a Swedish postapoc rpg) I've stayed away from the whole thing.

Then the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter launched and I simply couldn't help myself. It's kind of weird since I've never actually seen the whole series, in fact I only saw a couple of episodes when I was a kid, as well as the Macross movie as a teenager. Still those Veritechs (together with Robotech Defenders - different thing, same name) cemented my love for giant mecha and I think it's that love that made me pull the trigger more than anything else. While I've got a fledgling Northern Guard force for Heavy Gear and there are games like Battletech still around, the idea of a quick playing, less niche, miniature game that focus on classic anime mecha appeals to me enormously!

I had seen some previews of the models before and they looked good! Among others, the classic Veritech Valkyrie in all three forms, the Tomahawk, the Zaentradi walkers and most recently... the MAC II Monster! So I hurried and got one of the early bird pledges saving me a little bit of cash, thinking I could always change my pledge later. The $140 level is where you get access to free unlocks, but so far I'm not quite sure it's worth it. Then again, give it a few weeks for more stretch goals to be achieved and it might be a different matter entirely. We'll see...

Of course, I'm a gamer at heart and although I love myself some great looking models I'm very curious about the actual gameplay. Luckily Ninja Division put together a quick video about the basics of the game and I think it looks fairly interesting:



Now these are of course only the rule fundamentals, and a work in progress at that, but the basic dice mechanics appeals to me. I like that each unit has a defence stat, something that is missing in most miniature games, and the fact that a single roll of the dice is enough to determine the outcome of an attack unless your opponent spend command points to dodge etc.

I have some concerns about the game bogging down when you play larger battles as there seems to be a decent level of detail, but that might be counteracted by the limitations on command points. If you don't have enough points to spend you simply don't get to try and dodge or use your anti-missile systems. However this also means that even smaller games will likely prove interesting as there are a quite a few special attacks and things like flanking and massed fire are in.

The command point system in general seems like an interesting mechanic. Robotech features an otherwise conventional I-go-you-go system with alternating activations but the command points, that seems similar to the command points of Space Hulk, allow you to use special kind of attacks and maneuvers as well as protecting your troops in the opponents turn. Perhaps similar to the special orders of Dust Warfare but available all the time. Hmm...

Well, those are my initial thoughts on Robotech RPG Tactics. It's been very successfull so far and was funded in less than three hours. As of this writing there are another 27 days to go and the funding is at $311,561 (meaning less than $15,000 to go for the MAC II!) which should mean a number of more stretch goals being unlocked.

Read More

40 comments

Sci Fi on the Screen

I was going to write about the upcoming Elysium by Neill Blomkamp, but with some other movie/tv sci fi turning up I decided to simply expand this post. For me District 9 is one of the best sci fi movies of the past ten years. Granted, that might not be such a great feat considering the competition - the Transformers and the Avatars might be somewhat entertaining here and there, but great movies they are not.

There have been a few other great sci fi films (Moon, Children of Men, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) as well as some good ones (Dredd, Contagion, Source Code) but I think District 9 stands out the most as something completely different to what we've seen before. Neill Blomkamp has a visual sense of concept that I would liken to a young Ridley Scott. While Star Wars introduced the idea of the lived-in future Scott perfected it in Alien and Blade Runner. I get a similar feel when watching both District 9 and the new trailer for Elysium, except Blomkamp has updated the lived-in future to fit better with the 21st century.

As for the more futuristic aspects of Blomkamps movies I get a strong feel of Chris Foss and Syd Mead. Their work during the seventies and eighties had a great impact on me as a kid and Blomkamp just being a year younger than me probably grew up with these images as well. I'm very happy for it as I think a lot of today sci fi designs have become... almost standardized. The same design elements pop up again and again in tv, film and games and while they might look cool they soon get lost in a sea of similar designs. I think bringing back some of the concepts from the seventies and eighties is a great way to bring something new to the table. Especially since technological limitations during that time meant they could rarely be represented well when they were created. This has of course changed since then.

Anyway, what about Elysium? Well, the story is basically that Earth has succumbed to our misshandling of it and has become hot, dirty and over-crowded. The rich people have simply fled the planet and are living in a space station called Elysium - which is a beutifully realized Stanford Torus, yet another nod to the seventies - where they frollick in the artificial gravity and enjoy privileges like machines that can instantly detect (and cure!) cancer. Back on Earth Max De Costa (Matt Damon) has just been told he's got a terminal disease and don't have long to live, so he decides to try and get into Elysium. Jodie Foster plays the government official on Elysium who try to keep him out with the help of a bounty hunter named Kruger, played by Sharlto Copley - the lead of District 9. And that's the basic premise of the movie, but don't listen to me... watch the trailer:

Yepp... looks pretty neat, right? Looking forward to August are we? So that's Elysium. Definitely the movie to look forward to for me personally. 

What I also wanted to mention was SyFy's new series Defiance. It's a science fiction melange mixing Firefly, Mad Max and Babylon 5 with some interesting ideas crammed in. Perhaps I should have put Mad Max first as the show takes place on Earth that was inadvertently ruined by an alien fleet 30 years ago. It's not clear exactly what happened but it seems like there was a big battle that pretty much ensured mutual destruction and now a bunch of different alien races are stranded on a post-apocalyptic or post-terraform (although that's not the correct word since it was alien technology... extraforming?) Earth. 

While the Mad Max angle is obvious with the jury-rigged vehicles, evil raiders and a lack of resources I think SyFy really wants to grab the Firefly fans with this series. Besides the sci fi cowboy style that is fairly prevalent in the pilot it's a lot more than that, the backstory of the main character (a rogueish ex-military man who now make a living through salvage) and the general feel of struggling against the odds certainly make my Firefly bell ring. The city the show takes place in (and the name of the show itself) is even named after that fateful battle and there seems to have been some kind of military unit called yellow jackets. Hmm..

The B5 feel comes from the great mix of aliens and uplifted animals that live in Defiance. The Votans who came with the alien fleet was an alliance of different races and although they're all pretty much of the rubber forehead kind, and fairly stereotypical at that, I enjoyed the variety. I really liked the uplifted (?) orangutans though! Made me want to paint my ape gang for Jude Dredd. Here's a trailer:

In the pilot we get to know the main character, Nolan, and his feisty sidekick/adopted ailen daughter Irisa. They scavenge stuff from the alien spaceships that periodically crash down on Earth (quite often I assume) but after a run-in with raiders they find themselves in Defiance, which is very much a futuristic version of the frontiers town. We get to see the main factions in town and the obvious (at first, but probably more grayscale as the series goes on) bad guy is a scheming alien Castithan who also owns the local bar. His antagonist is a rich human who owns most of the mines in the area. Naturally they both have children and the human girl is in love with the Castithan boy... I see a lot of Capulet/Montague stories in the future, even though they fastforwarded it and changed the ending.

There's a betrayal and the towns energy shield is sabotaged just as they learn that an army of Volge are Theo Jansens's Strandbeest. It looks like the town is going to get wiped out, but luckily Nolan saves the bacon with some kind of alien power source that he scavenged in the beginning of the episode. He becomes the new town sheriff (I bet noone saw that one coming!) and at the end we get to see who the real bad guys are, including a bearded guy with some seriously silly looking glasses.
marching their way. I kind of liked the Volge although they pretty much looked like more cybered up locust from Gears of War. They had some neat walkers though, including one that reminded me of

The pilot was very much that, a pilot. And in my experience sci fi or fantasy tv pilots are rarely good in and of themselves as they have too much stuff to cover and get the audience hooked on. Neither plot nor character development is given enough time as there is an entire world to establish. This lends itself to one-dimensional characters and a very cliché script, but this is not anything I hold against Defiance. While some series, like Firefly, succeeds brilliantly in making an actual good pilot I think that is the exception rather than the norm.

All in all I think Defiance has potential, as long as SyFy actually dares to do something new. Right now the show is dangerously close to the cliché cliff but there are still enough interesting things in it for it to be able to break new ground. It'll be interesting to see the next few episodes.

Oh, and the series also ties in to a new MMO by the same name and apparently the tv show will affect what happens in the game and vice versa. Yepp. Here's another (live-action) trailer that shows more of the gaming side of the setting. Big bugs etc.

There we go.... some of my ramblings regarding sci fi on the screen. See ya!

EDIT: Well then... look what just popped up! AMC is apparently developing Ballistic City, described as Blade Runner meets Battlestar Galactica, taking place on a generation ship and being about crime. It sounds absolutely spectacular!

Read More

9 comments

Bios: Megafauna - First Impressions

Most of you probably already know that I'm a great fan of Phil Eklund's space exploration/exploitation game High Frontier, and when I started looking into more games of his Bios: Megafauna immediately caught my attention. In it you take control of a group of animals and try to guide their evolution and behaviour through the Triassic all the way to the Tertiary period of pre-historic Earth.

In true Eklund fashion the science of it all is in the centre - instead of coming up with an interesting game mechanic and then coming up with a theme that fits, Phil has obviously gone to the evolutionary biology and figured out how to represent it all in a board game setting. Although Bios: Megafauna has made some sacrifices in the name of playability compared to its predecessor American Megafauna, make no mistake; this is a highly thematic game that stays with you even after you've stopped playing!

I first got to try it out at my friend Micke's house where I met up with him and Claes (who's a budding marine biologist!) and started teaching the game. As I hadn't played it before I kind of started backwards and started explaining about biomes and DNA codes before the objective of the game was clear. Bios: Megafauna is not a difficult game, but there are a lot of moving parts and things to keep in mind as you play and can seem dense at first look. However, we got through it and started playing.

I took control of the dinosaurian Dino-crocs (red), Micke played as the mammalian Dog-face (orange) and Claes took the mammalian Two-tusker (white). The starting selection of biomes featured a lot of Marine (M) areas so Micke quickly grabbed the Blubber mutation for his Dog-face and I took the Salt-excreting Tube Nose meaning our two species were now amphibians. Claes on the other hand didn't manage to snag any M DNA so was limited in how he could migrate his creatures.

Setup. Blue biomes are seas, green are land and orange are highlands.

A biome in Bios: Megafauna comes with a certain code of DNA letters that works as a requirement for the animals who want to feed from it. For example, to be able to surive in an IM biome the animal need to have the Insectivore and Marine DNA. Of course, you could simply ignore the biome requirements and instead look at the DNA of the animals feeding off it to see if maybe your animal could hunt it for prey! In that case you check the prey animals "Roadrunner DNA" and if the predator has the same or better the hunt is on.

At first I tried my hand as a herbivore, but Micke's Dog-faces were better adapted to it and slowly started pushing me out of available biomes. So I decided to embrace my inner predator and began hunting the Dog-faces instead. This worked much better and my Dino-crocs prospered! They evolved Switchblade claws and Placental reproduction and lost their Digging Claws just in time to survive when the first major extinction event occured!

Claes had created a decent Browser and Grazer herbivore but it went extinct when the X-ray burster hit the Earth! His next try was a fire bearing (AAA), Grazing Two-tusker that was able to spread fairly well in the new land biomes that started turning up. It was too little too late though, and since I had been able to win the first three scoring rounds (although by a small margin only) we decided to call it to make time to play Powergrid: The First Sparks.

In this inital game we did play a few things incorrectly, like forgetting that giving a species MM would kill of any members of that species that is still on land, as well as the -1 to migration range for amphibians. Still, we all learned how to play the game and had a great time doing it! The game stayed with me for the coming week and I kept considering different possibilities and looking forward to the next match.

Final round. A crushing victory for the Dino-crocs!

Which wouldn't take too long! Yesterday me and Claes met up with Anders for our second game. This time I took the Dog-faces (orange), Claes took the Dino-crocs (red) and Anders took the Chisel-lizards (green). This time I think I could explain the game better to Anders and go through it in the right order. I think he got to grips with the basics fairly quickly.

Setup. You can see how bare the lands were! 

In the initial placement of biomes I just kept drawing Immigrants (invading species from across the world) who got discarded and I also drew an Orogeny biome that raised the greenhouse level, making some already established biomes extinct. This meant that the starting board was very barren, with only the arctic and horse latitudes remotely livable. Still there were no M or B DNA available for quite some time so during the first million years our respective species were very limited in their migration. Claes and I both expanded into a second species and had it hunting our original species (or the other way around) as a means to at least expand a little.

Still early...

Anders held off on getting a second species and instead piled on DNA on his original Chisel-lizard making it very capable but... comet bait (over-specialized animals with lots of DNA run a great risk of going extinct during a catastrophe!). Me and Claes simply decided to wait the lizards out as they was inevitable doomed. However Anders got Male Contest culture meaning that he could give as much DNA as he wanted from the parent when he created a new species. This way he could tailor the new species for very specific tasks which would prove scary towards the end of the game.

Claes won the first scoring round and with all the points accumulated in the tarpits he took a hefty lead! However he did have some bad luck(?) during the game and had several colonies of animals killed off by changes in environment. Mid-game I got the Projectile Hunting and Tool Use cultures for my original Dog-faces (I had expanded into a new Nocturnal Browser as well) and this made a huge difference! Up until now Anders' Chisel-lizards had been off-limites thanks to their defensive Tail Club (A), but projectile hunting allows you to ignore one of the prey animals Roadrunner DNA codes.

With the right tools my Dog-faces could spread and hunt.

Suddenly my bow and arrow wielding Dog-faces could hunt the Chisel-lizards from a safe distance and I could expand rapidly and won the two following rounds. Towards the end of the game our score was close enough that we all had the chance of ultimate victory. Anders gamble of stacking lots of DNA paid off as the damocles meteorite never came. Instead his second species (a flightless, Blubberous bird) started competing with my bow and arrow Dog-faces and with PPP it was simply the better predator! I knew time was of the essence and did what I could to end the game (by buying and discarding mutations) while hoping for that big catastrophe that would wipe the Chisel-lizards off the face of the Earth!

My winning species. I could have claimed the Bone Cracker culture as well, but there simply wasn't time!

It never came, but the end of the game did and the scoring was very, very close! We had seen three distinct animal dynasties rise and fall in the game: during the Triassic and Jurassic it was the Dino-crocs, followed by the tool using Dog-faces during the Cretaceous and finally the Chisel-lizards grew strong during Tertiary. Very cool! Anders won the last scoring round, but as he had had the least points up until then it was all up in the air until we started counting population and culture points. In the end Anders and Claes got 21 points each while I barely edged them out at 22 points!

The board after the final turn. Notice how most of my predators have been culled!

Compared to our first game the second was much tighter and more cut-throat, even with Anders being new to it. So far we haven't used the optional Roadrunner Club rule from the living rulebook (or the additional DNA display), but it might be worth trying out in our next game.


Some Thoughts

It seems like people who don't like Bios: Megafauna finds it either too random/chaotic or too slow. I'm
guessing that the ones who find it too chaotic are used to traditional euro games that allows, or demands, a lot of planning and forethought. While Bios of course rewards planning the core of the game is to adapt to an ever changing environment - the one who builds the best species or the most redundancies will likely win. Also, many times you can avoid detrimental events by avoiding low climax biomes, not over specialising your animals and stay in the highlands. I have no trouble at all with the apparent chaotic nature of the game, in fact I enjoy the dynamic board!

Claes ran with a comet-bait as well, towards the end.

As for being too slow... I can understand that somewhat. The game is not slow in and of itself, but if the right combination of biome and DNA simply isn't available it can stall a bit. Kind of how our second game started out - you try to cycle cards waiting for that specific DNA that would allow you to migrate. However, I think this is not the normal state of the game, but rather something that happens once every other game and certainly not anything that should discourage you from playing.

Bios: Megafauna is not a Euro game, neither is it Ameritrash. It's simply... Phil Eklund. Just like High Frontier we have an extremely thematic experience that also works as a highly competetive and clever game. Adapting to the environment at the same time as you try to outsmart and evolve past your opponents is great fun and having it all making sense from a scientific standpoint is awesome! Claes who's a biology student kept nodding at all the little details and how they correlate with reality.

I personally also find great enjoyement in imagining the different creatures that are created during the game. Just look at this combination of DNA possessed by Anders' original Chisel-lizard:

What we have here is something similar to an apatosaurus. It weighs around 9-10 tons and has a long neck but a shorter tail that ends with a club. It protects its young and males engage in a contests to impress the females. Although the card says headbutting, with the long necks I imagine it being more like how Giraffes fight it out. Altogether quite an interesting creature!

Hmm... this has grown quite long for just being a first impressions post. Hehe! Well, as you've probably gathered by now I really like Bios: Megafauna. It has some of those Eklund quirks, like the dry, reference manual-like rulebook and the graphic design is not to everyones taste, but it is nonetheless a very interesting game both from a theme and a gameplay standpoint. Just like with High Frontier I find myself really sucked into the game and it stays with me for a few days as I mull over what happened and other ways it could have played out.

It also inspired me to rewatch Planet Earth, Blue Planet and to hunt down some of my old books on natural history, and for that alone the game is worth playing! I'm looking forward to a full four player game next time, but I think before that another game of High Frontier, this time including the advanced rules, is in order...

Read More

2 comments

March Releases for Infinity!

Well then!,I was expecting the new releases to be revealed tomorrow... but here we are on a Thursday. Lucky! Let's have a look...

First off we have a new character model for ALEPH; Penthesilea! I'm a great fan of the Yu Jing Aragoto bikes so I'm glad to see more more motorcycles in the game. Especially I like that the bike is fairly similar to the Yu Jing version, except with a bit more of a Tron feel to it. Of course, an ALEPH bike don't have a dashboard as the rider probably can control it remotely anyway. Great looking bike and great looking rider! Kind of Asura looking but with a bit more humanity injected in her features. Her face reminds me of some actress whose name escapes me... someone with a similar haircut. Stupid brain! In game she's kind of like a more badass version of an Aragoto: ODD and i-Khol L2 means she'll be very hard to hit and if you does get hit she has No Wound Incapacitation. A combirifle, a contender (for those nasty ARO shots!) and a Nanopulser makes her a formidable opponent, well worth her 46 points I think.

From high tech lightcycles to machinegun toting scotsman! Yepp, the Caledonian Volunteers finally have their HMG operator! A solid sculpt but not very spectacular, basically it does the job. Line infantry like this guy usually have a more modest look so this is not surprising. A HMG is a HMG so can be dangerous in anyones hands, but to get the most out of this model you'd most likely want to put him in a link team. On the other hand he's cheap both in points and SWC so you could several of them!

The Shasvaastii have always appealed to me and this guy has become one of my new favourites! The Caliban looks like a regular Shasvaastii crossed with a Gremlin! Actually... he looks like an overgrown Gremlin, full stop. Haha! I like the armour he's wearing and that he's just gutted a poor Karakuri (I guess the Caliban survived the Explosion!). The more greeblie look, compared to regular Shasvaastii, suits the model well and I hope we'll see more like this. The Feuerback this model brings provides the Combined Army with some heavy firepower - only two shots but armour piercing and double action really makes them hit hard! He comes with an automedikit as well which might allow him to stay in the game even after having gone unconscious. A little odd that they went with the Feuerbach as the first released weapon option as I think most players will want his Engineer version... unless there's a four model box in the pipeline of course.

Another support box, this time for Pan Oceania. Nothing really exciting in here as we've seen all the models before, but a good box to get for PanO players (especially if you want to play the Paradiso campaign). I see a lot of people ragging on both the Machinist and the Trauma-Doc, but I quite like both of them myself.

Finally we get some Nomad love! A whole box of space-nuns! The old Reverend Moiras sculpts have been almost  infamous for their cheesecake factor (besides simply showing their age) so having them updated comes as no surprise. And what a nice update! I think CB has managed to retain the sexy vibe, but moving away from the cheesecake. Actually I think if you painted the skin areas in a different colour you could remove the combat swimsuit issue entirely. The poses are good, although I can certainly understand people who find them a bit static. What I'm most interest in are the weapons! They all look substantially different from the regular Nomad guns and I think they look better overall. It's weird that other new Nomad miniatures like the Riot Grrls and the recent Moderator sniper all use the old weapon designs (although re-scaled). This makes me wonder if this is what Nomad guns will actually look like from now on (yay!) or if they are simply Observance special issue (booh!). Only time will tell I suppose.

Although there is nothing new for the StateEmpire this month I'm a happy Mayanaut. The New Moiras look great, I really like the space gremlin and there's another biker to skid around the battlefield! I think Penthesilea is my favourite release this month, although the Moiras aren't far behind... :)

Read More

3 comments

More Wooden Cubes, Please!

It's something I'm fairly used to by now but it's still interesting to see my interests shift after a period of intensive ameritrash filled gaming. This time the trigger was two six player games of Twilight Imperium played in close succession - it's one of my all time favourite games but it's quite a big undertaking to get going. After the kind of sprawling, over-produced, random space-spectacle that is TI (and I mean all that in a good way!) I felt the need for something more modest. 

It is during these times that I usually discover new games outside my usual hunting grounds. Since my board game collection is still made up of predominantly FFG/ameritrash titles I tend to try and find something different. Combined with a feeling of needing more gateway games to introduce the hobby to non-gamer friends and family I ended up playing Ticket to Ride Europe, doing a solo run of Power Grid: The First Sparks and (finally) teaching myself Bios Megafauna.

I was black. Would have won if blue hadn't blocked the track from Moskva...

 

I played Ticket to Ride Europe with my wife and a couple of friends and it was a HUGE success! Sure, I'd read many times that it's one of the best (or simply the best) gateway game out there, but even so I was surprised by the great response. Even my wife who has always struggled to understand what joy I could find in "simple games" had a lot of fun with it and wanted to play again. This has pretty much never happened before so... neat! I've heard the 1912 expansion is very good but I think we'll have some more fun with the base game first.

My personal first choice for that "non-gamers gaming" evening was The First Sparks by Friedemann Friese. As you probably know it's a re-themed version of Power Grid where you try to gather food and spread your tribe of cavemen rather than building powerplants. It's been slimmed down a bit with some of the heavier elements removed meaning it plays in about an hour instead of two. In retrospect I realize my friends wouldn't have had any trouble grasping the mechanics, but I wanted to play it safe so brought Ticket to Ride instead. However, yesterday I set up a three player solo game of The First Sparks just to get the mechanics down and damn... that's a fun little game! I was only going to play through a couple of turns but ended up finishing it because it was so much fun. Looking forward to trying it for real!

Playing and enjoying Ticket to Ride Europe and The First Sparks would have made a great board gaming weekend, but reading through and learning Bios Megafauna might be what I take the most satisfaction from. It's designed by Phil Eklund who has made another favourite game of mine: High Frontier (session reports here and here) so I knew what to expect. Phil writes rules like technical manuals so that when you need to reference something during actualy gameplay it's great, but when you are reading it through for the first time it can be a bit confusing and... minimalistic. Having conquered the High Frontier the rulebook for Bios Megafauna wasn't all that difficult. In fact, I think it's an easier game to understand overall.

Anyway, you play as either mammals or dinosaurs (up to four players) and start out during the Mesozoic era and basically try to create creatures that are better adapted than your opponents so they can spread as wide as possible. As always in Phil Eklund's games the science is at the very core of the game so I'm looking forward to playing this with my biologist friends! I get the same feeling from Bios as I do from High Frontier - that the theme and mechanics are so well integrated that I really would have a hard time seeing how they could be separated. Awesome! Will play it soon and write a proper first impressions post.

Browsing through BGG and looking through my board game wishlist two games have risen as my (probable) next investments: CO₂ and Archipelago. I've mentioned CO₂ before but I don't think I've talked about Archipelago. It's what a traditional euro looks like after having gone through the filter that is Christophe Boelinger's mind. If his name sounds familiar it might be because I've been going on about his last game, Earth Reborn, quite a bit (here and here for example). Earth Reborn took a unique approach to skirmish board gaming and I think it's the best in that (admittedly small) genre. Archipelago seems to do to Puerto Rico what Eearth Reborn did to Space Hulk and from what I can tell it looks like huge amounts of fun! 

So yeah... don't worry though. I'll get cured of my ameritrash fatigue eventually and go back to the mountains of plastic. I just need a break to push some wooden cubes around. :)

In other news I've bowed out of the Infinity Paradiso campaign that I participated in. I did manage to make it through the first chapter but had to call it quits after that. The reason mainly being a simple lack of time but also me not being very much into playing games at a store. I'll see if I can scrape together enough friends to play a smaller campaign at a more leasurely pace in the comfort of our own homes. I am painting though! 

More on that later...

Read More

4 comments

Infinity Painting Update!

Hello my fellow Mayanauts! It's been a while since I had any painting updates on the blog so I thought I'd show you a couple of models I actually finished in June last year. In preparation for the Paradiso campaign I decided to paint a Doctor, an Engineer, two Yaozao servant remotes and two Pangguling baggage remotes. Actually, I think I mentioned as much in this old post.

Anyway, I haven't really finished as much as I wanted but things are slowly progressing. Up top you can see the Yisheng doctor and Goncheng engineer. They are both part of the older Infinity sculpts but I they still hold up well I think, the only thing looking a bit off is the very large combirifle the doctor is holding. I tried to experiment with some OSL around the doctor's eyepiece and the engineer's googles and although it could be better I think it comes across reasonably well.

The reason I've waited with posting these guys is because I wanted to show the finished Yaozao servant remotes at the same time, but they're still not finished and I think I've been holding off for too long already. I've finished the bases but have yet to paint the actual miniatures (which is a shame considering how quick they would be!). Anyway, here's the state they are in now:

You should see these guys all painted up fairly soon I hope! Neat little models although I think I should have played around with their poses a bit before gluing them down. Oh well.

I've also assembled and magnetized my two Pangguling baggage remotes as that's something you definitely want to bring to the table if you play the campaign! Although I prefer the Yaoxie/Lu Duan a bit more the Pangguling are still pretty cool looking little robots. Normally I would have painted the base before mounting them, but I think there's enough space to get a paintbrush in underneath them. I magnetized the combirifles and the EVO repeater antennas so I'd be able to field them as the minesweeper variant as well if I wanted. It works really well!

For my next purchase I'm debating whether to get some Shaolin monks or the new Bao troops. Hmm... decisions decisions...

Read More

4 comments