May the Fourth be with quick wit and nimble fingers

As is tradition, May the Fourth brings a Star Wars themed post:

An Alliance Smuggler from Imperial Assault. Last year I’d originally planned to paint a pair of trusty droids, as that was what was missing from my classic trilogy rebels, but with Stargrave on my mind and a vague plan to run a Star Wars campaign using those rules I fancied painting something that could be used for that.

I was going to treat myself to a nice Diehard mini, but unfortunately they didn’t bring any of the things I wanted to Salute, so I had a dig in my backlog and pulled out this chap instead.

He’ll make a nice rebel operative when the time comes to pull jobs against the Empire I’m sure. He’s come out a little duller than I’d originally intended, but the good thing about painting to a deadline is that there comes a point where you just have to call a paint job done.

The Tally has also taken hits in the opposite direction, as the ongoing Age of Sigmar partwork magazine has had Skaven on it a few times, and the new Clanrats are pretty nice. Do I need more clanrats? No. Did I buy 20 because they’re much more animatedly posed than the old ones, even though that means that they might be tricky getting onto 20mm square bases? Yes.

(I actually bought two issues to get both halves of the sprue, but didn’t take a second picture)

All in, the Tally now stands at:

21 vs 180 = -159

What’s next? I have some enemies for my Firefly Stargrave campaign half finished on my painting tile, which I could probably polish off if I gave them about an evening’s worth of focus. Then again, the family game of D&D hasn’t run since the start of the year, and I have some minis for that half finished too that I need for a future session. Although, apparently I started watching the Third Doctor’s adventures exactly a year ago while doing the washing up, and this morning, while doing the washing up I was also watching the Third Doctor (odd, with it being Star Wars day I guess), and I have a half painted mini of him in the queue…

May the Fourth be with you…

So, my original plan for this year’s Star Wars themed miniature for May the Fourth was to grab another Jedi youngling from Hasslefree at Salute, and paint it over the next couple of weeks inspired by my son (much like I did 8 years ago for his sister), but unfortunately they ended up not going to Salute, leaving me painting this figure that I’d previously prepped just in case:

It’s Jon Odan, one of the player characters from Imperial Assault, a board game that if I continue painting at my current pace I’ll have a fully painted set by the time I’m 90.

She was painted mostly following the Sorastro tutorial on YouTube, although a lot of the time it was with the sound off while I was doing other things, so it might not be the most faithful paint job! 

Painting her brings the Tally to:

13 vs 41 = -28

As I’m off work this week, I also grabbed a magazine with some horses on the front to take on a coffee date with my wife. I guess as it’s a miniature accessory rather than a whole mini they don’t count towards the Tally? It’s not the most scientific count, truth be told…

Something something Tosche Station something something power converters

As is tradition, I have painted my annual Star Wars miniature for May the Fourth:

Luke Skywalker from Imperial Assault, as I didn’t have a painted version of him yet. Don’t look too closely, when adding the finishing touches I managed to dip my paintbrush in my cup of tea, and while reeling from that he ended up incredibly cross-eyed. Perfect is the enemy of done though, as they say!

He’s a little chunky compared to some of the other miniatures in my Star Wars collection, but not so much as to be unusable I don’t think:

While I’d only planned to paint a single Star Wars mini this year, as is my way I find my plans expanding - I could do with painting R2D2 and C3P0 to round out the core gang from the original trilogy, and of course after watching a couple of actual plays on YouTube I’m now thinking about painting the rest of my Imperial Assault core set, but one thing at a time…

I’ve had a couple of mail drops since my last post too. First of all, a couple of eBay wins - some Hobbit goblins to use as ghouls in Frostgrave and Rangers of Shadow Deep, as my gnolls are goblins so it fits thematically having ghouls be messed up looking versions of those, and some old plastic dwarfs, as the lot included the Warhammer Quest Dwarf and a plastic Slayer that was missing from my collection:

They’ve since had a bath and are awaiting being prepped:

Also, I received a parcel from Joe of Zabadak’s Zombie World that requires some backstory. A few years back, one of the pillars of the blogging community was Vampifan, whose prodigious output was only matched by his enthusiasm for miniatures. Check out Vampifan’s world of the undead if you haven’t before, and marvel at the blog that was long an inspiration for many of us.

After years of multiple posts a week, Bryan/Vampifan suddenly stopped posting midway through December 2019. After a month, it turned out he’s been in hospital but was looking to be on the road to recovery, but unfortunately his next and final post revealed that he was unfortunately critically ill in a hospice, and said goodbye to us all.

I don’t know the full story of what happened, but Joe/Zabadak posted earlier this year that he’d saved a fraction of Bryan’s collection, and started a series of blog posts showing it off, including a number of things that I don’t remember ever having seen on the blog originally, as well as offering it up to anyone that could give them a good home. I expressed my interest in a  couple of items, and here’s what came:

As well as some Mordheim scenery, a selection of miniatures:

There’s also a zombie in there, that I want to get or make a small display for to keep as a memorial/memento, as it was Bryan’s (huge!) zombie collection that originally brought me to his blog.

Also, this graveyard piece, that will be perfect for fighting over once I’ve finished my current Skaven painting project:

Adding everything up, the new total for the Tally is:

14 vs 46 = -32

Next time: there’s a single figure that’s almost finished, then it’s back to batch painting a regiment of Skaven! They’re all base coated now, so it’s time to crack out the washes and dirty them up…

It's a good bet the Empire knows we're here...

Painted up the pack of Probe Droids from Star Wars Imperial Assault. They were painted vaguely following the tutorial Sorastro put up on Youtube - vaguely in that I watched it a couple of months before starting painting, and then watched it again once I was too far into the painting process to change anything.

I went for a fairly dark scheme, with some bright nicks of weathering. The bases took some more doing than usual, as since the models are so flimsy there was a lot of careful glueing involved to get them to bond to their new bases, which seemed to disagree with the sand staying where I wanted it. Two were glued using tiny contact points, whereas the third I managed to trim down the base without the legs all snapping off and so smoothed the edges down with filler before applying grit and sand.

To make the Elite figure stand out, I decided to give it red lenses and some markings - cue some frantic digging through every Star Wars reference book in my house looking for a reference chart of Aurebesh (the Star Wars alphabet) only to discover that it's in the Star Wars Miniature Battles rulebook, which is Uncle Johnny's, so I googled it:

If you peer at it, you can just about make out AB172 on the side of the Elite probe droid (chosen for the same reason my Fallout survivor is from Vault 172), as well as very carefully painting an Aurek on top of the droid. I then looked at it at arm's length and figured that the small red symbol wasn't obvious enough to differentiate between the different droids, so I repainted the entire panel red and repainted the Aurek in white. Then, as per the Sorastro video, I gave all of the lenses a coat of GW 'Ardcoat to give them a glossy, reflective finish.

Tally:

24 vs 40 = -16

In other news, I spent part of my afternoon sieving bits of shell out of Wilkos £1 bird sand. After explaining to our local Labour MP that that was what one of the two tea strainers my daughter was holding was for when she asked. As you do.

Imperial Assault Goals

As one of the challenges featured in the Challenge involved replacing all of the tokens in the Star Wars Imperial Assault core set with miniatures, and another involved painting all the miniatures from said set, I thought I'd come up with a list of what I needed to complete (and links to what I have already previously completed proxies of):

Core set:

Stormtrooper x6

Elite stormtrooper x3

Imperial Officer x2

ELITE imperial Officer

Probe Droid x2

Elite Probe Droid

E-web Engineer

Elite E-web Engineer

Trandoshan Hunters x2

Elite Trandoshan hunters x2

aT-ST

Royal Guard x2

Elite Royal Guard x2

Nexu

Elite nexu

Tokens:

General Weiss

Luke

Darth Vader

IG-88

Royal Guard Champion

Han Solo

Chewie

Rebel Trooper x3

Rebel Saboteur x2

Optional extras:

General Weiss on foot

Wookiee Warriors

Hired Guns

Grand Inquisitor

Alliance Smuggler

Obi-Wan Kenobi

Greedo

Salute 2017

So, today was the annual jaunt to Salute! Early morning coaches make for manic gamers, it seems:

Westminster is always my favourite stop on the journey up, as you feel like you're in a weird hybrid of Necromunda and The Crystal Maze:

The journey up was fairly uneventful; the station we normally get off is apparently closed for the rest of the year, but it turns out the stop after actually drops you off closer to Salute, so it's swings and roundabouts really! Well, on the way there, the way out was a bit of a nightmare with huge crowds that would normally be split over two stops funnelled onto one...

We made pretty good time, and so ended up quite close to the front of the queue:

After a mad initial dash over to Troll Trader to scope their bargains and snaffle a goody bag, I made the usual rounds, picking up the preorders I had organizedly placed, and not at all pinballing willy-nilly around flailing wildly at things as they caught my eye (just in case my wife asks).

And so, I present the usual assortment of pictures that are really only the barest of fractions of the number of awesome things that were on display:

A Discworld broom racing game with a nice Unseen University

Some dungeon tiles! I forget who makes them, but I'm fairly sure I have a card of theirs in the stack of paperwork and fliers I've accrued over the course of the day

Anvil Industries had the most eye-catching demo board - they were running games on the bonnet and in the back of this vehicle!

A Mantic Walking Dead demo board. I'm not going to start another project. Even though I found out I can get the core game at massive discount through work. No more projects. None.

A nice Horus Heresy board, with about a billion points and pounds worth of miniatures on it.

My favourite part of the whole board though was a little spinning radar dish.

Crooked Dice's London and Underground demo board - having followed the build over on the LAF a while back, it was great to see it in the flesh!

Warlord were showing off the new Doctor Who game - I'm still not sure if it's a board game or a wargame at this point... (side note - no Judge Dredd minis anywhere this year, boo)

Osprey were previewing their new dwarf sculpts.

I also managed to find the nice man from Westfalia (after last year's difficulties in hunting him down) who was offering preview minis of his lovely range.

Another Doctor Who board game, whose pieces look to paint up very nicely!

This Chewbacca was pretty good - about 7 foot tall, with a recorded roar!

Saga. I've never really gotten into Saga. Maybe I should.

I managed to miss the Blogger meet-up again, as in the excitement of the day I lost track of time and before I knew it it was quarter to two! This year's Salute seemed like it went by the fastest of the ones I've attended...

And five hours later, it was time to make the journey back, and time to dig through other people's blogs to find the things that I'd managed to miss. I also wondered why there were some people missing from previous years, like Amera, Brother Vinni and EM4 - whilst Salute seemed to be pretty busy and fly past for me, is it not worth it for some companies who have stayed away? It's a shame if that's the case...

Also, I found myself in someones Instagram video, something which never normally happens! Well, I found the back of my head, but that still counts.

And so, the meat of this post - the loot!

• A box of Frostgrave barbarians, as well as a couple of blisters from the same range
• A pair of giant scorpions from Heresy
• Not Rey, post apoc Raider type and a not Captain Hammer from Hasslefree
• A handful of lovely preview minis from Westfalia
• The Walking Dead scenery pack
• A trio of sample Mantic Walking Dead miniatures
• A pair of Infinity miniatures, because they were crazily reduced and also buy one get one free
• Not Brienne and not Flashman (and the promo mini!) from Wargames Illustrated
• Alliance Smuggler and Grand Inquisitor packs for Imperial Assault
• Dogs, heads and crates from Crooked Dice
• A not-tiny Lady Mormont pack from Bad Squiddo games - I was hoping to get a few more bits from them, but by the time I was able to get there when their stand wasn't thronged with people the majority of the bits I was after had sold out!
• Freebie Wild West Exodus Legendary Captain Nimue
• Dice, because I roll bad.
• A copy of the last edition of the Skaven army book that I didn't own, as I regretted not buying it last year and it was still sat in the same box on the same stall a year later! I may well go to my bookshelf to file it and find that I've gotten mixed up between what editions I have though... While writing this list I've just discovered that the book's previous owner had apparently torn out the last page with the rules reference on and used it as a bookmark...
• The Salute promo mini
• A goody bag from Troll Trader containing a variety of bits - a couple of old edition rulebooks (Deadzone & Carnevale), a painting DVD, a hexagon stencil, a cardboard house, assorted other bits and bobs, as well as a preview mini for the new Rumbleslam game and a Goblin Shaman miniature
• Free beer mats, which I was genuinely excited about

Tally

9 vs 40 = -31

Not the worst hole I've been in after a Salute!

So, just need to finish off a few more miniatures to tick off a couple more challenges, prep and paint something for May the Fourth, and knock out a Westfalia promo after that, before I can start any of the number of new miniatures clamouring for my attention - easy!

[note - some additional stuff has been added to this post Sunday morning that I managed to miss last night!]