Diana Stanley 'The Reformed Cultist' for Mansions of Madness

Hi All,

As I've been away for the past week I thought I'd get my eye in with a small entry for Sarah's Balloon. Here's Diana Stanley 'The Reformed Cultist' from 'Mansions of Madness'. 

'Reformed Cultist'. Such a great tagline. Really, who wouldn't want that on their CV for 'past work experience'? 

Diana's special ability allows her to tangle with particularly nasty monsters with minimal sanity loss. All this being said, her strength stat is fairly low, so she needs a heavy-hitting spell or a spiffy magic item to really make her tick along. She's best run by an experienced player who knows how to finesse her abilities, otherwise she'll be more of a burden than a benefit to the party.

Not learning from past experience, I just picked her up and started painting without really looking at the character card. The results weren't as bad as before, as I at least got her auburn hair right, and besides, I reason she'll still be pretty distinctive on the tabletop with her long hooded robe and howitzer shell-sized candle. 

Next Up: Sander's Sand Dunes! 

Marie Lambeau 'The Entertainer' from Mansions of Madness

I think I'll take in the sun and the surf at 'Douglas' Shallows' next, so here's my fare for Sarah's Balloon: Marie Lambeau 'The Entertainer' from 'Mansions of Madness'.

Marie is a creole jazz singer, originally from The Big Easy, but now based in Arkham. In the game she benefits from a very solid stat line paired with an awesome special ability, one which allows her to cast a spell at the start of her turn without having to spend an action. This is huge in a game where players are always nibbling their fingernails deciding on how to spend their two actions per turn. Matched with the right spell(s) Marie can be an invaluable addition to the party.

Again, I've tried to follow the art on the character card. For a bit of additional colour I gave her a pair of Dorothy-Red pumps. Oddly, the basing was a bit of a swine this time around, with me having to go through three of the blighters to finally get it right. More a lack of patience on my part than anything else. 

Next up: Douglas' Shallows!

-Curt

Amanda Sharpe 'The Student' from 'Mansions of Madness'

Hi All!

As I need to book balloon fare to Awdry's Atoll, I present to you another resolute heroine from 'Mansions of Madness'.

This is Amanda Sharpe, 'The Student'. 

Amanda's a bit of a miss in MoM as her special ability is focused purely on solving puzzles. This is not bad per se, in fact it can be quite handy at times, but unfortunately it's an activity that only plays a very small part of the game so she often ends up not pulling her weight. 

Like many of the MoM characters, Amanda is also featured in other Cthulhuesque games from Fantasy Flight, and her other renditions are often far more powerful (in 'Elder Sign' she is perhaps one of the most kickass characters in that game). Oh well, you can't be the belle of the ball all the time. 

This all being said, here she is, bespectacled, fresh-faced, in a green jacket and grey skirt. Clutched to her chest is a red-bound book - maybe a university textbook, a novel perchance? But perhaps it is something entirely more significant and sinister...

It can easily be deduced that I am irredeemably slothful as I've not yet traveled a single step on any of the island roads, having taken the balloon for each journey. This is probably for the best, as with Lady Sarah's in-flight stores of champagne I'd be too smashed to attempt to stagger down any of these foreboding paths. :)

-Curt

Trish Scarborough 'The Spy' for Sarah's Balloon

Well, after a short hiatus I'm back to featuring the femme fatales from 'Mansions of Madness'. Sorry folks, but this game is chock full of great pulpy gals so you're just going to have to grin and bear it. 

Okay, so today we have Trish Scarborough, 'The Spy'.

At first glance, Trish Scarborough is simply a middling employee for a nondescript company. Nonetheless, in reality she is a spy for the shadowy organisation, 'The Black Chamber', travelling the world, thwarting occult plots and generally being a heroic badass.

In the game, Trish is a great all-rounder. She has a solid stat line (as long as she keeps away from magic), but her real strong suit is investigating for clues and getting into and out of scrapes.

I had a bit of gaff when working on Trish. I first painted her from memory (ALWAYS a bad idea for me), thinking that her trenchcoat was a classic camel colour. Well, I pulled out the character card to do the pictures and discovered that, no, she actually wears a dark indigo coloured trench. 

F*ck. 

So, it was back to the desk for a quick costume adjustment. Now she is sartorially conforming to MoM canon. A huge sigh of relief from all you viewers, I'm sure.

It's a nicely posed mini, and I kept it fairly simple for the paintjob - dark indigo raincoat (ahem), black turtleneck and brown slacks. The only embellishment I gave her is a nice pearl-handled revolver (really, it compliments her hair).

Trish will serve as my fare for my next journey: to Burch's Bluff!

Kate Winthrop 'The Scientist' from 'Mansions of Madness' - Entry #6 to AHPCX

Continuing on my riff of heroines from 'Mansions of Madness' I present to you Kate Winthrop, 'The Scientist'.

In the game's background, Kate witnessed one of her fellow scientists being ripped apart by a strange being from anther dimension. From that horrific experience she was determined to create a device to combat these terrible creatures - thus the 'Flux Stabilizer' was born. In game terms, this allows her to disrupt the placement and movement of monsters on the board, which can come in very, very handy.

This being said, Kate's a bit of a hot-n-cold character. In monster-heavy scenarios her Flux Stabilizer can be an absolute game winner, but if the setting is more investigative then her special ability will not be as on-point and she may struggle a bit.  

A somewhat rough and quick paintjob, I found the figure for Kate to be a little soft in detail, so I tried to amp it up by layering in some high contrast on her lab coat and giving her a touch of vibrant blue as a counterpoint. 

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Next destination for me: Piper's Peak!

A Trio of Baddies for Star Wars: Imperial Assault

Continuing on my Star Wars riff, here's a trio of Imperial baddies to help make our our heroes, well, more heroic.

I found these to be quite nice miniatures on the whole. Great animation and while they're a bit softly cast in a few places, they usually have fairly well-defined detail.  My only real caveat is that each set only offers one pose. So, in an effort not to bore you with a bunch of duplicates, here are a few single samples from three separate sets: an Imperial officer, a stormtrooper, equipped in desert gear, and a snowtrooper (or a 'cold assault stormtrooper' to the SW anoraks out there).

The officer is depicted in a 'commanding pose' which seems straight out of Central Casting: an outstretched hand pointing to some impossible objective which will probably get both him and his minions ignominiously ventilated. Come to think of it, he does look a bit of a dick.

I painted him in the classic olive green of the Imperial Navy. His two colleagues (apparently off camera, polishing their boots or practicing getting force-choked by Sith Lords) are done in black for the Stormtrooper Corps and white for the Intelligence Bureau.

Next up, I found the snowtrooper a doodle to paint: brilliant white armour with cream for the fabricy bits, then apply a diluted wash and finish up with a quick highlight using the original colours = done. 

I've always had a soft spot for snowtroopers. Not because they're necessarily that interesting design-wise, but because they're intrinsically linked to 'The Empire Strikes Back' - arguably the best movie of the whole franchise - cool in both setting and association.

The last figure is my favourite of the batch, a stormtrooper equipped for desert operations. I weathered him up a bit so he looks like he's been scrabbling around Tatooine for the past few days looking for droids. Definitely one of the iconic figures from the first movie.

I like how he's tucked right into his blaster rifle, ready to miss everything that's put in front of him. Really, you almost feel sorry for these hapless gits. They sweat their bollocks off galloping around the desert on huge lizards in scorching heat wearing armour that probably chafes like a sonofabitch, then they get completely played by a dusty old hermit, miss all the action at the cantina, only to get humiliatingly drilled by some small-time smuggler and his walking rug of a co-pilot. 

Good gravy, what a bunch of pathetic mutts.  

Nonetheless, even in light of all of this, they're still the cat's pajamas in my books - so go figure.

Next Up: Something for the Renaissance collection.

Entry #2 to AHPC VIII: Four Heroes from 'Mansions of Madness'

Just a small entry (sorry, still no Ortona yet). This time it's four investigator/heroes from 'Mansions of Madness'. 

The 2nd edition of Fantasy Flight Games' 'Mansions of Madness' has become a well-enjoyed staple within our group since it was released almost two years ago. The first edition used a One-Against-Many game mechanic, where one player played the nasties of the 'Mansion', while the rest of the players worked cooperatively to uncover the mysteries and survive. This mechanism has worked well with many other FFG games (Descent, Imperial Assault, etc.) but its implementation was flawed in MoM to the extent that whoever played the 'Mansion' could quite easily overwhelm the investigators in fairly quick order. 

The publishers, to their credit, addressed this with their 2nd edition by using an app to run the Mansion, thereby allowing the players to work together as a cohesive team. It's been an unqualified success with our group, with us being able to enjoy not only all the old expansions, but the new content as well. I've even used it at work as a team building exercise (nothing like avoiding being eaten by a Shoggoth to bring a group of people together)!

The base game comes with a load of plastic miniatures to represent both the investigators and the various eldritch horrors they encounter. The minis are roughly 28mm in scale and for the most part are rendered quite well. My main criticism is with the quality of the plastic  itself, as the early releases were a somewhat soft, making them an absolute swine to remove mold lines and clean-up flash. Thankfully, the more recent models use a harder plastic which is much easier to work with.

Anyway, until now I've been using other miniatures from my collection to represent the heroes, but thought it'd be fun I'd try to get a bunch of the stock ones done-up during the Challenge. So, here are four heroes from the core set: Mandy Thompson, Ashcan Pete  and his K9 companion 'Duke' and Gloria Goldberg. 

Fairly basic paintjobs on the whole. I tried to keep the colours punchy and as close to the game art as possible. After the hassle of preparing the figures they were actually pretty fun to paint.

I trimmed away the original plastic bases and replaced them with clear acrylic ones. I quite like the look of them, especially with tile-based games. 

I'll see if I can get a few more done over the Challenge and perhaps I'll try to do-up one or two of the beasties as well. 

Thanks for dropping in folks. I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas!

Curt

Product Review: Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures Game by Fantasy Flight Games

'Shrrreeee! Pweww! Pweww, Pweww!!' ...Hey man, you gotta make the noise...

I was a boy when Start Wars was released in 1977 and I, like many young lads around the world, was absolutely crazy about the movie. For several years I lived and breathed for anything that even obliquely mentioned Han, Vader, Stormtroopers, light sabers, etc. My poor mother, bless her soul, had to struggle through heaps of Star Wars paraphernalia to hazard entering my room. Like some hapless adventurer, she navigated through a geologic nerd strata composed of layers of collectible cards, magazines, models, action figures and comic books.

Anyway, with this in mind you can imagine how stoked I was to try out the new 'X-Wing Miniatures Game' which was released this past summer.  So a few weeks ago, Stacy and I picked up a copy of the game, along with a few extra models and, and with Peter serving as an R2 Unit, gave it a whirl.

The game has a passing similarity with 'Wings of War' but I found that I liked the overall mechanics much more. All of the spaceships utilize the same manoeuvre templates, so there is no model-specific decks of movement cards that you have to keep organized, which keeps the game clean and fairly simple to administrate. The movement phase for each spacecraft is pre-plotted using a selector dial, and firing is conducted at the end of the turn through competitive die rolls, which keeps everyone engaged in the action. 

The discs are the the movement orders which are flipped over simultaneously to display everyone's flight plots.

The game is true to the movies in that you typically need more Imperial TIE fighters to face-off with the X-Wings, but each class of ship has its strengths and weaknesses. The Y-Wing (my favourite) is a bit of a pig, but can both soak-up damage and dish it out. If you wish, you can have heroes of the movies serving as your pilots. Luke is definitely powerful, but Vader is particularly brutal, especially if he's matched up with his iconic Advanced TIE fighter. All good fun.

Maneuver dials revealed (along with chits for 'Lock On' and 'Focus')

Gameplay rattles along at a good pace. We managed to get in two good-sized games in about 3 hours with lots of snacking and kibitzing.

A ewok-sized furball.

The models themselves are quite nice. They are single piece, hard plastic and come pre-painted. The paint jobs are actually fairly decent, but if you have the time and inclination I think they'd benefit from a bit of highlighting. I'll probably replace the pegs with magnetic gimbal mounts so the fighters can be positioned to indicate banking, climbing and diving (as if these things really matter in space, but it looks cool).

Its a bit of a hog in the game, but I really have a soft spot for the old Y-Wing.

So there you have it. If this is a game you and a friend may be interested in I'd strongly suggest picking up two of the core boxed sets as they will give you better value than buying the fighters separately. I understand that there is a host of new spacecraft due over the coming months including the Millennium Falcon ('It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs [!?]), an A-Wing and Bobba Fett's 'Slave I'.

But, really, the nagging question I have is this: 

Will they come out with a pilot card for Porkins?

'Stay on target.' (nom, nom, nom...)