In Space No One Can Hear You Scream - AVP Second Edition
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Board Games – Prodos Games has a pretty solid property. Aliens vs Predator remains a popular property regardless of the quality of the sequels, prequels and reboots. This year is the 40th anniversary of that lovable chest-bursting monster making it’s big screen debut, although with the current shake-up of Disney buying Fox, I wonder if they’ll make a big deal about the anniversary. Sadly it looks like the House of Mouse has killed all existing licensing deals so AVP goes out of print on May 1, if you’re a fan tracking down anything you don’t have now would be safer than waiting on clearance pricing to hit rock bottom.
This is the second or third set of AvP minis I’ve painted. The minis are pretty decent quality for board game pieces. My only complaint would be with the material they’re made out of, it’s a very brittle plastic that acts like a poor quality resin. Combined with the thin nature of the models and the accurate scaling this makes for some easily breakable parts. Luckily the second edition introduced a custom foam insert for the core game. It also introduced textured bases that were part of the preassembled minis. Both very cool elements but if you want to mix them up with the expansions they look a little odd as the expansions all have the round lipped bases. To help remedy this problem I used some space deck looking resin bases that seem to match up well enough.
For the Xenomorphs I started with a metallic green base coat. After two coats of black wash it looks just about right. Having a bug-like sheen on them brings out the detail. I have previously experimented with metallic black or just painting them black with highlights and I didn’t like the results. when they’re that dark all the detail disappears and it diminishes the quality of the miniature. Especially when they’re small and thin like these.
The marines are also pretty match for Cadian Imperial Guardsmen in terms of their color scheme. Olive green with a shade and the straps picked out in burnt umber. These models don’t have much in the way of facial detail so I didn’t bother to paint the eyes. I think the effect of the wash on the face with subtle highlights is enough to make them look good on the table.
The Predators are the largest of the figures and as such have the most noticeable detail. They still feel pretty spindly when compared to “heroic scale” minis but that tends to be the case with most CAD designed models these days.
Also in this batch are a few of the expansions, a power loader, additional marines, commandos and alien warrior round out the extra boxes of what I hope are first edition models, because the base included is just a plain black round that doesn’t match the new sculpts. Oddly enough the sculpted bases attached to the minis are also too large to fit inside the rounds as a base topper. This seems like a huge miss to me, models bases not matching bothers me.
