Undersea Boat

The Nautilus
scale unknown

“I am not what you call a civilised man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not, therefore, obey its laws, and I desire you never to allude to them before me again!”

This unusual model is actually a game piece from the board game "Nemo's War", painted for a friend.  She requested I follow the box art as closely as possible, and I think the resulting deep aqua turned out quite well.  This is a small piece, under 50mm long, but with very good detail for a board game token.

Looks like fun!

A sucker born every minute

"Kraken" game piece
no scale

I'm happy to say I finished the "Abyss" Kraken game piece in record time!  It helps that it's only three colours, all based on the same blue shade to tie it together... but still.  That's a lot of suckers!  I wanted a murky but richly-colored deep-sea look so I tried to avoid my usual near-white highlights here.  It's a bit shiny; I gave it a durable (I hope) satin clear coat to keep it looking good for many plays.  Fun, and a bit different :)

By His Noodly Appendage

So I went to a New Year's party at a friend's, and received an impromptu request.  She recently got a copy of the board game "Abyss".  The game includes a marker for the Kraken, a game token which, she explains "follows the most unscrupulous player around the board".

So yes, obviously I'm painting this thing!  Looks like a good first project for 2019...

"Raise your hand if you think that was a Russian water tentacle."

Bored? Games!

One of the things the missus and I do to avoid becoming TV zombies is try new board games.  We don't have a big budget or a games library nearby, but fortunately we have interesting friends, who have their own collections of interesting titles.  We regularly play the ever-popular Carcassonne, Zombies!!!, and Settlers of Catan, but recently we've had a chance to try a few interesting new ones:

Candamir: the First Settlers

(not my photo)

Designed by "Settlers" maker Klaus Teuber, this Norse-flavoured game revolves around resource collecting quests and building items for victory points.  Each player plays as a different character, with a few unique strengths and bonuses, so it's a little like a "canned" RPG.  During each turn you venture forth from town towards an objective square, drawing cards to see if each square you pass through allows free travel, or requires you to fight an enemy or perform a risky task to proceed.  Resources gained from quests are used to brew potions to help your character, or build items for different merchants in town, and the first player to make 10 items wins.  There's an "XP" system too so your character can buff their abilities over the course of the game (unless you suck at it, like I did).  Lots of fun, and not too hard to learn either.

Ticket to Ride

(definitely not my photo)

This is a railway building game that can require you to be pretty sneaky in plain sight of your opponents.  You collect same-coloured train car cards in your hand to build stretches of track between cities across a map of Europe and Russia (there are, of course, different geographical sets).  Each player has secret objective cards ("Destination Tickets") for long multi-track stretches that they can complete for extra points, while trying to discern their competitors' objectives and disrupt them.  At the end whoever completes the most objectives and has the longest tracks wins.  This is by far the easiest of these three games to learn, but it has some intense play mechanics and a good balance of skill and luck.

Tzolk'in: the Mayan Calendar

Holy crap.

My wife bought this for herself as a birthday gift.  Wow.  I'm pretty sure this is the most complicated board game ever made.  The board consists of six interlocking gears, based on the cyclical Mayan/Aztec calendar.  Briefly, you place and remove worker pieces on the gears, paying corn to place them and collecting benefits when you remove them.  The thing is, the gears MOVE every turn, so where you place your worker is not where they end up a few turns later. There's a "buy low, sell high" dynamic in how/when workers are placed/removed, but where the game gets really nuts is how this interacts with the temple tracks (points for pleasing the gods), technology tracks (bonuses and multipliers to boost your resources), and buildings and monuments (a bunch of other stuff).  We haven't even played a full game yet, and it took me 40 minutes just to set up the board (probably incorrectly) so I won't even pretend to say I understand it.  But it looks challenging and fun once you learn it.

Star Grunt

Alien Trooper
15 mm

Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs but to do and die.
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

A quick fun paint job on a 15mm.co.uk figure, before I start work on a slightly more elaborate project.  Cute little guy, and my classic "green fatigues" scheme seemed very clever until I noticed that it's very similar to the way Spacejacker painted this guy.

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Carcassone Scoring Markers
28 mm

I did another set of these for some Carcassone-playing friends.  Thanks to the (now-defunct) Mega Miniatures' impressive selection of medievals, they're a slightly different set of characters: Abbess, King, Constable, Warrior Lady, and Knight.

Something a little different

Carcassone Scoring Markers
28 mm

I thought our copy of the tile-laying strategy game Carcassone could do with an improvement - namely giving the players personas in the form of figures matching the colours of the "meeples" used as game pieces.  These will go on the scoring track rather than being used in the game itself:

So now when you play our game, you're not just picking a colour you like, you can play as a character... do you want to be the Abbess, the Burgher, the Warrior Lord, the Noblewoman, or the Warrior Lady?  My original plan was to do proper paint jobs with the respective colours as themes, but "ain't nobody got time for that" and this way I won't feel as bad when the paint gets all banged up :P (hopefully the thick gloss varnish will protect them somewhat)

Thief of Catan
28 mm

And another board-game-related project: a tabletop quality paint job on a nice Werner Klocke sculpt.  This figure is destined for a friend's copy of the addictive game Settlers of Catan, where one of the pieces is a thief who can steal players' resources.