Sedition Wars Kickstarter

This last week the first shipment of the Sedition Wars Kickstarter arrived at my doorstep.  Sadly I haven't had as much time as I would have liked to work on it, but I did get all the extra figures from the Biohazard reward level assembled.

Sedition Wars: Battle for Alabaster is a board game similar to Space Hulk in that they use 28mm miniatures on modular tiles that can be rearranged to form different battlegrounds to play in.  I've not yet had time to play, or even time to assemble all the miniatures yet, but it looks like it'll be a pretty good game from the rules skimming I have done.


First we have the strain, a bio experiment gone wrong or some such on Alabaster Station.  (I haven't had time to read through the setting fluff.  So can only go on what I've gleaned from following the Kickstarter.)  Personally they're awesome models, With nice variety in bioforms, even if each style of creature only has a single pose. 



The Strain have a large number of large based bioforms, the pride and joy of the spokesman for the kickstarter being the Grendlr.  Which while an impressive model, is a royal pain to assemble.  It starts off with the two halves of the body, which as you can hopefully see to the right (click image for larger view), do not line up what-so-ever with each other and require a near-boiling water bath to soften up one side or the other to reform it.  As the halves are already deformed and deformed more to get them to fit back together, the maw bit then also needs a bath to fit on the newly shaped maw socket.  There's also a design issue here where part of the alignment plug (either on the maw or on the body) needs to be removed so it has a chance to fit.  The legs luckily fit in their sockets fine, though they no longer all line up where the flat parts are to connect with the base, again a near-boiling water bath fixes this by getting it's legs soft and holding each foot against the base while they cool back down.



I think my favorite of the larger bioforms is the Brimstone, it reminds me of the 'dogs' from Ghostbusters.  And the Scythe is my favorite of the smaller Bioforms.







To fight the infection we have the Vanguard.  While they have a variety of weapons, there are only three body poses (two female, one male).  I'm hoping that this is due to having only assembled the Biohazard extra figures as, while I like a mostly female force, I can't really believe the Vanguard forces are 2/3rds female.  One of the two female poses needs a near-boiling water bath as well as the arms are too far apart to equip the basic rifle.  On the plus side I received an extra basic rifle for the female sculpt, and an extra male torso in my biohazard set.  Sadly the female rifle and the male torso aren't immediately compatible so no easy extra model there, but nice anyway.




Generally I'm happy so far, other then the models are in that annoying new spin-cast plastic/resin stuff that doesn't glue well, sand well, or basically do anything well.  I'm guessing it's much cheaper then good ol' polystyrene.



Battle for Alabaster logo used without permission from The Sedition Wars website.  Biohazard reward level image used without permission from the Sedition Wars Kickstarter page.

Zombie Vixens Review

I picked up a box of Zombie Vixens by Wargames Factory from The War Store over the holidays and figured I might as well give them a quick review as I've gotten around to assembling one sprue worth of zombies.


First thing is the zombies are cast in the more classic polystyrene plastic allowing standard plastic cement to bond them together.  This is a great positive to me what with all these hybrid resin/plastics and such that require superglue to put together.

The details on the models are muddy,  which from prior experience with Wargames Factory is to be expected, and while the miniatures themselves are multi-part, they don't go together as well as other figures I've seen.  It feels like a number of miniatures were designed then cut up to put on the sprues without thought for mixing and matching them, even though extras are provided.  Shoulders are arbitrarily on the torso or the arm, making large amounts of trimming and/or gap filling required for fitting them together.  Mold lines are visible but a quick filing or lightly gliding a hobby blade over them clears them up nicely as is pretty usual for the plastic.

The poses themselves are nice and dynamically zombie, and with some work you'll end up with a nice varied range of additional zombies for cheap.  I paid $15.99 for the box making these figures about 44 cents a unit if you count the 'crawlers' as figures.  The vixen's heads are connected to the torsos with a pair of (mostly) matching flat spots greatly limiting the pose-ability of the heads.  This also means they are not immediately compatible with the company's first zombie set which used ball and socket joints for the necks.  This makes the broken necked lolling head pose much harder to achieve with the vixens.  I don't know if it's just my lack of in-style knowledge, but most of the hairstyles look like they came out of 80s sitcoms and are far too neat for a zombie.  I can't imagine these vixens dolling up their hair before going out for a flesh hunt.



 Inside the box are three identical sprues meaning the box has 3 each of 10 unique poses (12 if you count the 'crawlers').  There are 15 unique heads, 32 total arms, (7 stubs that could potentially be used on either arm and and a roughly even split of right/left arms a number of which are simply mirrored for right/left hands,) and 3 accessories, including 2 handbags and a serving tray. 


All in all, though it sounds like I'm mostly tearing down the figures, I'm happy with them as they're a dynamic, low cost, and flavorful addition of female zombies in what I've found to be a generally male zombie horde.  They'll likely make appearances in many of the skirmish games my gaming group is looking at running.  Sadly we still haven't found a system that suits us.


Additional zombie vixen photographs.

Dancing Floor

Bases for my Showgirls, yay!  They're actually made from coffee stir sticks cut to arbitrary lengths.  This was mostly to produce more interesting bases, but it happens to also be how my hardwood floor came for my old bedroom.  I'm not yet sure how I want to finish them, I have some left over scraps from the manufacturing process to test with, and I have some wood aging stuff coming to try.  I'm hoping to age the wood a bit to draw out the grain, then either a real varnish or something to make them look more dance floor like.

The process evolved a bit during construction, initially I'd laid the sticks out and used other sticks as cross supports to hold them in place.  However after cutting the support off the second base and having to reposition the fiddly little pieces constantly, I realized I could use a paper backing for the flooring as seen in the picture above.  Using the paper backing sped up the process immensely and I got four or five bases done in the time it took to make one.

To get the right sized inserts, I made with a circle cutter.  The 30mm base one had to be sanded down a bit as it ended up being a bit too large.  These were then laid out on the stir stick floor and traced around.  they were then cut out using a combination of old sprue cutters, xacto saw and xacto blade.  I should've gotten more pictures of the process, and I'll make sure to when I make more bases, but I have enough bases for my entire collection of showgirls, which is a Colette du'Bois starter, a couple packs of Corphees, and a pack of Mechanical Doves.

Ork Mob paint WIP

Yay for basecoats.  I haven't actually gotten much done this last week what with the holidays, I did manage to paint some more base colors on a (mostly) random selection of orks.  I've been working on them off and on for pretty much the entire time I've known about Special Operations Killzone.  There isn't really any theme unifying them into a single mob, but as they're a skirmish kinda gathered as they went, I feel that fits.  Their (as yet unchosen) bases will be their unifying feature.  A number of them are supposed to have additional armour plates that I've made, but not yet attached (or even primed yet).  I have 2 more of the looted weapon(?) orks similar to the one on the far right of the picture and another big shoota boy that were supposed to be part of the mob, but have no paint at all yet.  Painting random colors on 13 different orks is an interesting process and getting the red for that pair of pants was a pain.

They were (are?) for Special Operations: Killzone, but I haven't really thought about that system in a while now.  I don't know when I'll get around to working more on them, as I finally have all the parts for my Showgirls crew in Malifaux so I'll probably have some updates on assembly and painting ideas soon.


Oh, also does anyone have any experience with the Savage Worlds Showdown game engine?  It's a free miniatures ruleset available here.