From JamieM - Kings of War Ice Naiads (160 points)

In a rarely seen (for me anyway) feat of focus, I’ve kept cracking on with my Northern Alliance for Kings of War. I herewith present a Horde of Ice Naiads.

These are a mixed kit from Mantic where they reuse their Sea Naiad figures and add resin (and now 3d printed) parts to change them into Ice Naiads.

Fairly simple paint jobs, I decided that I wanted them to be wearing leather outfits a bit like the outfits in the Dune films.

Cheeky bit of multibasing and I quite like the way the blue hair/tentacles flow across the unit.

In game these units are annoying as they hinder others attacking them and regenerate and so they hang around whilst their more "hitty" friends pile in to smash up the entangled unit.

And I thought people might be amused at the fact that these are only ready as I had to go for a day to my kids’ swimming gala which meant I only watched when they raced, which gave me plenty of spare time. So I took a paint station and the paints and brushes and got some "Carhammer" painting in whilst catching up on some downloaded series.

Simple for the scoring - 30 x 28mm figures for 150 points.

***

Focusing consistently on one project? I would suspect this had been some kind of hack, right up until the whole part about "Carhammer", which was the best and most hilarious part of this submission! I've been known to obsess about painting, but this level of commitment is tremendous, and should be applauded. 

Oh, and I hope the whole swimming gala went well. :-)

Lovely work on the Naiads - sounds like they are real pests on the battlefield! I have tossed in bonus points in order to acknowledge the effort on the hobby side even with 1-to-1 scale life events getting in the way!

GregB 

From JamieM - Northern Alliance for Kings of War (95 points)

This weeks submission is for some troops and a character for my steadily growing Northern Alliance army for Kings of War. Whilst spring is tentatively raising its head early in the UK (after approximately 93 days of rain), it is still winter and so a good time to paint snowy figures.

This first set are Pack Hunters. Much like my previous entry, these are humans living in the frozen North and they carry bows to hunt. In packs, one assumes.

I went for bone bows for the most part because there is a lot of brown on their furs and so it’s a nice spot colour.

I went for red for the arrow feather as it seemed like it would pop and perhaps there’s something to having feathers the colour of blood?

This forms a regiment for Kings of war and are a unit of troops allowing fun stuff to also be taken. Like this fella.

A chimera with a rider. I swapped the axe they carried for a spear - I mean, how on earth are you going to get close enough to hit someone with an axe when you’re on top of this thing?!?!?

From the back you can see it’s a delightful mix of creatures. And there are two things that struck me as especially brilliant about this model. The first is that one of the heads is a goat. Not a bird of prey or wolf or anything, a goat. I should imagine it’s quite a handy head to have whilst not eating your enemies in battle as it increases the range of food the beast can eat a hundredfold!

The second thing is the entirely practical saddle harness. It was only whilst painting this model that I realised that as the sculptors of mythical beast riders don’t have reality to stymie them, they can sculpt entirely inadequate harnesses and nobody can tell them they’re wrong. Not so the sculptor of this bad boy - this is the kind of harness I’d want if I were to ride a three headed mythical creature into battle! There’s no way those straps are coming loose.

Photo of them together. For points I was going to go with 15x5 for the 28mm pack hunters and claim 20 points for a vehicle for the chimera and rider?

***

Brilliant work Jamie! While I maintain a sort of vestigial addiction to the classic Warhammer style "one-base-per-model", I think "Kings of War" is tremendous and the multi-based figures make a whole ton of sense. Your archers highlight all of the charm one imagines that comes with life in the high arctic - colourful furs, lovely bows etc. Bone-coloured bows make sense, as one imagines bone might be the primary material available to them to construct the bows in the first place! 

But the Chimera steals the show! What a lovely beastie - and the commentary about both the goat-head and the totally safe harness is spot-on. I'm sure he is just lovely to ride, be that into battle, or into town for a quick latte at the cafe. "Can I pet the goat?" "No, dear..."

Your scoring proposal finds merit with me - 95 points for you!

GregB

From JamieM - Kings of War Northern Alliance (110 points)

I thought I painted some figures for this army in the last challenge, but a quick scan of previous posts tells me it was two years ago that I last worked on this army!

My how times flies when new games appear and projects are rudely cast aside….. anyway, there’s a new version of Kings of War that’s just been released so I decided that I should get on with it. First - some troops, tribesmen style.  

These are the foot troops of the army, hardy tribesmen from the frozen North.

They’re pretty standard stats wise in the game and I do like a good multibase, so on one they went.

A mix of leathers and fur for their garb.

Next up, some snow trolls. I painted a unit a couple of challenges ago and now they have some friends.

Nice and simple paint scheme and they’re ready to hide under a frozen bridge and bother some billy goats.

Multibased again and some weapon swaps as they only come as one pose with a choice of two heads and two arms (rock and club)

And the family photo:

As for the scoring, I make it 15x28mm figures for 75 points and 5x 40mm figures for 35 to give me 110 total.

Jamie, I do love me some rank-and-flank fantasy battles and these models look great. It seems you rarely see snow bases on fantasy figures but you've done a super job here. I really dig the Tribesmen and the Snow Trolls look suitably tough!

One-hundred-ten for your tally!

Dallas

RhysH - Fantasy, super heroes and Sci-Fi in several scales (49 points)

 This week is a group of models from four different sources.

First off are two 32mm entries from AMG's Star Wars Legion Empire line. They are the customizable Officer and Operative.

These are a new addition to the game. The box lets you build two characters with a ton of options to customize them as you assemble them, but also as you add them to your army.

Rhys did some reflected glow off of the lava bases on the uniforms.

The character on the left is melee focused while the one on the right is a ranged support character.

Next up is a birthday present from Rhys' cousin, who also likes D&D. It's a cloaker, a nasty monster that inhabits dungeons and kills low level players.

It's mottled gray coloring helps it blend into the roofs of caverns where it hides.

This is a large model, easily twice as big as the Empire heroes above.

Next up are two Kings of War models from Mantic Games. The barbarian on the war-goat is for the Northern Alliance while the panther is from Basilea.

Rhys is finally ready to start learning to paint faces.

The models are fighting in the snowy north, where the Northern Alliance is from.

The panther is bendy soft plastic and was very difficult to get based, but he persevered and got it to stick.

Last up are two models for Crisis Protocol, AMG's super hero game. These are Beast and Mystique.

These are 40mm, with Beast coming in quite a bit bigger.

These models can be quite fiddly to assemble. AMG apparently thinks that bigger scale enables smaller attachment points. They are not correct. Rhys said the hardest part of Beast was figuring out that he had to attach the beam to the base first, then put Beast on it.

The heroes use character cards in game and Rhys was able to use those as painting guides for these figures.

This is 3 x 28-32mm figures for 15 points

1 x 28mm cavalry for 10 points

1 x 40mm monster for 7 points

1 x 40mm Mystique for 7 points

1 x 54mm Beast for 10 points

The two Empire characters are Rhys' entry for the first bonus round, EMPIRE.

Total points are 49 points, plus the bonus round when it comes up.

***

Hello Rhys - and Happy New Year! Thank you for sharing this interesting assortment of figures with us. 

Now I must confess - I'm not one for the super-hero genre from Marvel, so those are not figures I would be near myself, but it sure sounds like they were a pain in the rear end to get put together. I'm sure many Challengers sympathize with your experience, managing figures designed by people who don't ever actually put them together, much less game with them...

But congrats on sticking with it! You have some fine results here. I also salute your efforts to work on reflected-glow-effects...that is something I will NEVER have the courage to try myself! Well done!

That's 49 points for you - cheers!

Greg

(On behalf of) RhysH - Mantic Dragon Lord and Thegn on Frostfang (20 Points)

I'm posting this entry for Rhys. He's going with a snow theme for his Mantic army for Kings of War.

This first entry is an elf lord on a dragon. The elf is metal and the dragon is PVC plastic, pretty wretched stuff, really.

White dragon with blue frost on it on a snow base.

Blue scales on the spine and the spans of the wings.

Side view with more blue.

Rhys informs us that of course white dragons have red eyes.

His next entry is a Northern Alliance Thegn on a Frostfang. This is a really cool model, which Rhys loved working on.

Face on, you can almost smell the bad breath.

The skull on the Thegn is red so he'll stand out from the rank and file of the army.

Rear view, running across the ice.

Side view. That's a very large axe.

This is two 28mm mounted figures for 10 points each = 20pts.

________________________________________

Welcome back to the Challenge, Rhys!

What a magnificent set of beasts and riders! Of course, it only tracks that frost dragons would have red eyes, but the crimson skull on the Thegn rider is quite bold indeed. As you say, he'll definitely stand our in the ranks (only helped by the monstrous beast he's riding!). I also like the armour and barding. As a suggestion for a future model, perhaps you can try some bronze accents to pull-out the edging and rivets. I find it makes the metalwork a little more interesting and varied. Give it a whirl! 

Terrific work Rhys! 20 points in the bag towards your Challenge goal. Well done.

- Curt

From JamieM - Kings of War Northern Alliance (188 points)

Just in under the wire….. the silly thing is that these should have been about my third entry. I had a plan for the bases and it didn’t work out like I had thought it would and so I shoved them to the back of the painting table, approximately 97% done, and left them there until now.

As you can see, they’re literally still on the painting tray. They’re multi based up for the Kings War game by Mantic. The game started as a derivative of Warhammer fantasy battle, with all of the classic races, but this is one of Mantic’s own, a mixture of men, elves, trolls, monsters and animals who live in the frozen north.

Cavern dweller (a horrible monster)

Thane and wolf

Elf hero and human skald

Lots of wolves

Elven heroes - all three are ladies so I shall claim lady Sarah’s library cart for one of them!

Snow trolls

A different angle to show the weapon swaps - mantic only produce one body with two slightly different heads and one separate arm holding either a rock or a club, so I swapped in some weapons from a Games Workshop giant to make them more interesting.

Snow Troll hero and elf ice bolt thrower

And some ice elementals.

Some great sculpts by mantic and nice to see them striking up their own armies. I picked them all up as a job lot by someone who had made something of a mess of them and so they took a lot of paint stripping, but I find that reclamation projects are one of the parts of the hobby that I really enjoy.

Some other angles

I’m pleased to get these done as my painting table is now fairly clear - at one point during the challenge I had my painting desk and dining table covered in miniatures in various stages of building/painting.

A big thank you from me to Curt for running it back again, Greg for being a cracking minion with some great comments and also a big thank you to the serial commenters who comment on most posts, irrespective of genre, as you do much better than I do at keeping up with posts and encouraging people, which is the whole point of the challenge after all.

For scoring then:

10 wolves, 6 heroes and 2 crew all at 5 points (28mm) each for 90 points.

One (38mm) crew served weapon for 10 points

6 trolls, 3 elementals and 1 cavern dweller each at 7 points (40mm) for 70 points.

Lady Sarah’s cart for 20 points.

Knock off a couple for a couple of bases not finished (two wolves didn’t fit on the multi bases) and that’s 188 points to just put me over the 1,000 points mark!

_______________________________

Wonderful work Jamie! This force looks terrific and very chilly (great job on the winter bases)! I especially like the Skald and the Ice Elementals. I quite like it when the Challenge causes household mayhem with hobby projects spreading from room to room - a success story if I every heard one. :)

Well done Jamie and wonderful job in blowing past your points target.  I look forward to seeing you in the lists next time we roll out.

- Curt