A detailed account of my various commission/hobby projects.
Board Games – Tang Garden has several expansions, in this batch I’ve painted up Ghost Stories and Golden Age. Both expansions introduce new characters and gameplay mechanics to make the garden building game even more interesting.
Super Dungeon Explore – Chibi Ninjas are just amazing. Several years ago Sodapop/Ninja Division released Ninja All-Stars the game was beautifully designed with amazing miniatures and had a ton of potential. There was even a pretty decent campaign system that would allow you to run a league of ninjas competing for the top prize.
Read MoreBoard Games – The Build-A-Robot expansion for Starcadia Quest brings a unique version of pets to the space based board game. By swapping around the heads you can create a little droid specific to your needs. The expansion also includes a few new heroes and a bunch of new villains.
Read MoreBoard Games – In space no one can hear you SQUEEEE!
Read MoreBoard Games – The 8-Bit video game lineage of Super Dungeon Explore is really obvious when you look at the Caverns of Roxor box set, almost all that characters had striking similarities to Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda.
Read MoreBoard Games – Clan Ijin are invading Super Dungeon Explore in the new starter set Super Dungeon Explore: Devil Island.
Read MoreBoard Games – Super Dungeon Explore is coming back next month. Hopefully the Devil Island starter set will be the push Ninja Division needs to clear up their backlog of Kickstarters and move forward with a great game/property.
Read MoreBoard Games – Have you ever wondered how a monster manual was created, is this something you need a formal education for? Well Dungeonology by Ludus Magnus Studio seeks to answer that question. You play the role of a teacher at an exclusive academy that needs to complete a thesis on a local monster. Taking a gaggle of students with you questing through a perilous dungeon hoping to glean enough information to right that award winning paper.
It’s a clever concept that is even more clever in its execution. I don’t have a ton of time to play board games like this but after watching the play throughs and painting up the models I really want to add it to my collection. I won’t droan on about the amazing components masterful box organization or beautiful miniatures you can see that by checking of the games official page.
The character models are comically detailed to perfectly match the art on their cards. I really liked the molded bases that give the impression of actually exploring a dungeon. These were really fun to paint. In addition to the amazing characters you get a ton on student pawns. These are really cute in their simple sculpts and by putting some paint on them I think it really added to the look. Because these are just resource cubes they need to look really similar to remain functional. I guess the expansions might add additional colors of “bad” students so I kept the colors simple. For variety I tried to have a variety of skin tones on the students to make them look unique. I think the effect is really nice.
Board Games – As a kid my mom worked two jobs and waitressing on the weekends meant we got to spend a lot of time with my grandparents. Living in the country I never had cable so those weekends with my grandparents meant I could binge on all the TV I never had a chance to watch at home. Because my mom would pick us up really late at night I could usually stay up late watching garbage on basic cable.
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Board Games – Mythic Battles continues to trickle across my desk I Imagine the core box will eventually make its way here and I’ll have a significantly longer post about that project. As it stands this is an expansion for the game by Monolith Games.
With the boxes I’ve painted so far I’m impressed with the quality of the sculpts, particularly the larger monsters.
Board Games – Sometimes a game comes around that just fits with the times. Maximum Apocalypse is most definitely one of those games. This set of twelve survivor figures upgrades the core game to give you some nicely detailed miniature to battle through the current crisis.
Here’s a brief description from the manufacturer:
Maximum Apocalypse is a cooperative roguelike adventure game for 1-6 players. In Maximum Apocalypse, civilization has already fallen. The players are survivors of the apocalypse whose mission is to survive the hostile landscape.
The game map is randomly generated and different every time that you play. On each turn, a player can use up to four actions to explore the map, play cards, equip weapons, scavenge for resources, draw cards or battle off monsters.
Picking a unique survivor class within the group, players must plan their strategy and work together while leaning on their survivor’s strengths in order to defeat monsters and avoid starvation. For example, the Fireman is deadly up close with his ax and can easily chop down monsters; meanwhile the stealthy Hunter is great at scouting the map and avoiding traps — but roaming monsters are gathering quickly and time is running out. If you are overwhelmed by monsters or die of starvation, the players lose. If they can find enough gas and get it back to their van to escape, they all win and live to play another scenario.
Marvel Comics – During the lock-down my family watched all the Marvel movies in chronological order, it was really fun to see how they tied everything together and had minimal inconsistencies that are easy to ignore. So it was pretty cool when I was sent these models to paint up for Marvel Crisis Protocol.
I’ve heard the game is really fun and might need to look into picking it up at some point, I just saw that they’ll be releasing the Johnny Blaze version of Ghost Rider which is pretty sweet. The models are a little larger scale which helps make painting a bit easier so my client painted up the first batch himself using the contrast paints. After that he got the painting bug out of his system and sent these over.
Starlord, Valkyire and Rocket are really cool models that will look nice on the shelf and the tabletop.
Board Games – Another Kickstarter Exclusive that really should be made available to the general public the scenery pack adds working doors, gun turrets and console screens to take the game to another level.
I tried dressing up the screens a bit with loose interpretations of some classic video game screens. I’m not 100% happy with the final results but I think they serve their purpose.
Board Games – I watched Kung Fu Panda for the first time while flying to Aruba with my wife, for that reason it holds a special place in my heart. My kids enjoyed the series but it’s not their favorite so I was surprised at how excited they were to see me painting these models.
Contrast paint laid the foundation of these and I picked out the details with some traditional highlighting to bring out the detail.
Board Games – CMON loves their kickstarters and they love parody stretch goals so much so that it’s become expected anytime they launch a new project. Nostalgia and Fandom are big motivators and for people that pass or miss the initial offering it can be super annoying trying to collect everything for a game they decide they love.
Read MoreBoard Games – Earlier this year I painted up a good portion of the Arcadia Quest heroes and in the process of painting them I started to develop an interest in the game but was holding out for various reasons. Arcadia Quest has been a very popular property for CMON so it only makes sense that they’d rehash the content in SPAAAACE!
Read MoreBoard Games – Resource management games typically use plastic or wooden cubes in various colors because they’re cheap and easy to produce. This is fine however when a game includes sculpted versions of these resources it takes the game to a new level. Cosmic Colonies is one such game.
From the manufacturer:
Asteroids blast through the cosmos, each one packed with possibilities. One may be your perfect new home, but it takes a stellar team to build a cosmic colony...
Cosmic Colonies is an orbit-drafting game of building a home in the stars. Players must leverage their workers' unique abilities to gather resources and construct new buildings while cleverly expanding their colonies. Each round brings new opportunities — and new talent. Your old workers will blast off to other players, while their workers orbit around to join your team!
Also in this group I painted up the various resource tokens for Alien Frontiers Factions. Three little power plants and a rover look much better with a little paint.
Board Games – Everybody loves a huge dragon model. It’s a staple of any successful fantasy property to have at least one giant dragon for the heroes to battle against.
Read MoreBoard Games – Arcadia Quest is another chibi-style board game that has a ridiculous amount of expansions. When it first came out I assumed it was just CMON’s response to breaking ties with Sodapop Miniatures after the Relic Knights fiasco, and dismissed it because I didn’t think I needed another game with a similar theme. Sadly I was wrong Arcadia quest is much different than Super Dungeon Explore and if you’re a fan of the style you should probably make room for both games on your shelf.
Read MoreBoard Games – Shadows of Brimstone reminds me an awful lot of RIFTS or GURPS, as a kid going into the comic shop/game store I’d see entire shelves dedicated to the myriad of expansions these open ended games systems offered up. Shadows of Brimstone has the same feel, in the course of painting the various sets I’ve painted cowboys, astronauts, mutant snakes, Native Americans, aliens, robots, and a variety of other monsters.
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