Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Space Empires: Replicators by GMT Games - Unboxing

I joined in on the P500 pre-order of Space Empires: Replicators at the last minute.  This expansion of Space Empires 4x is published by GMT Games and was designed by Jim Krohn.

This is the second expansion for Space Empires 4x and this one adds several new features to the game:  a new race (the Replicators), terrain tiles, a resource deck, and some new ships.


Below you can see a couple of pictures of the contents.

Such pretty art on the box

3 types of production sheets

4 copies of the Research Chart/Ship Chart

2 sheets of ship tokens

6 sheets of Terrain Tiles

Empire Advantage Deck

Resource Cards
The components are nice and match well with the components of the core box.

Friday, February 2, 2018

End of year painting challenge November/December

I'm a little behind in getting this posted, but better late than never.

My buddy, Bill challenged some of my local group to an end of year painting challenge.

I do paint quite a bit, but it isn't at the level for a painting competition by any means, so I wasn't sure I wanted in on this.  However, Bill explained that quantity was the focus of the challenge.  He said this was about finishing projects and just getting models completed.  He said we should all paint to our normal standard and work toward getting some things finished.

Well, I could do that.  And I did.  I actually managed to pump out quite a pile of models and terrain.

Deadzone has been on my gaming radar for a while.  I picked up some stuff a couple years ago, but never did anything with it.  So I thought I would work on that as the basis of this challenge.  I could paint up some terrain and forces over the 2 months.


The terrain is pretty basic, but I like how it turned out.  I tried to stretch the models as much as I could, so I used foam core board with textured plasti-card for most of the roofs.




The Plague models are interesting, but I've never really liked the look of the colors used in the fluff.  I tried something a little different and while they aren't perfect, the are now finished and ready for battle.


The Enforcers are fairly well armored and equipped soldiers.  I gave these a simple paint job that will be easy to replicate and managed to get all my 1st edition models finished.


I also needed to finish up the Xenomorphs from AVP: The Hunt Begins.  Bill is painting the Predators and Colonial Marines so I just needed to knock a few models.  I had already painted the juveniles from one box, but needed to paint the adult aliens from both boxes and the juveniles from the 2nd box.  Again, simple paint jobs, but they look good on the table.


I was talked into going to a Kings of War tournament at a nearby shop, but wanted to change up my Goblin army a little.  So I needed to get a couple things painted.

First, I painted a snotling pump wagon.  This is an old Games Workshop model that I picked up at a convention this summer.  I have always like this model, for whatever reason.  I put on my painting shirt and went to work on this model and had it finished in short order.


I also wanted to add some mawbeasts to my goblin army.  A lot of people use GW squigs and Mantic has dog-like models for the unit (that I secretly don't really like the look of).  I have a few squigs floating around, but not enough to do up several units.  I've been trying to find an alternative and came across a pretty decent solution.  I purchased some models from Battle Valor Games for another project, and in that purchase I bought some war hound.  A little paint and these turned into some nice (though maybe small-ish) proxies for my mawbeast packs.


Overall I got quite a few models painted.  I however, didn't get video of everything because I was trying to pump out a lot of models and it does that a certain amount of time to record the process.  I will have some video to share and will probably do more of some of these things so I can show you the process I used for several of these models.

In the end, I pulled out a win in the painting challenge.  It was really based on volume as some of the others painted some very nice looking models.  For the prize, I was awarded with this lovely dagger, that I'm assured was pulled from the back of a very bad man.