Thinking Outside the Box

On Tuesday I arrived home to find two parcel cards in my mailbox. Having forgotten that I'd received tracking numbers from Cool Mini Or Not  a little over a week earlier, I wasn't expecting these massive things. I missed out on the first Zombicide  campaign on Kickstarter, so for their second one I went all in, not realizing quite what I was getting into. "What did you order THIS time?" "Ok, let's see what's in box number one..." "Cool artwork. Gross, but cool." "Wow, that's a LOT of zombies." "So that's everything in box 1. What's in the other one?" Oddly enough, the second package was exactly the same as the first. Even down to the zombie dogs and dog companions boxes being slightly squashed. As far as I can tell I was only charged for one set... Double the zombies double the fun? Not sure what happened, but I'll not complain too loudly about it.

Since getting into Tannhauser  earlier this month I have been casting my net far and wide across the internet trying to find fan-made materials to add to my games. With Halloween fast approaching I happened upon a fun sounding "Zombie Survival" scenario created by Miah999 over at Front Toward Enemy . If you want to have a look at the scenario rules for yourself you can find it here . I downloaded the zombie card and glued it to a piece of cardboard off the back of one of my notepads. When I cut the backing cardboard piece, I cut it a little larger to allow for a border around the card. Once it was glued down I finished the edges of it with black electrical tape. I didn't think to take a photo of my card, but you can see it in the photos below, on the left hand side of the game board. I decided to set up the scenario on the crypt map from the core game set, and grabbed some of my painted zombies that I showed off earlier this year.  With the board set up, zombies and ...

I apparently have no fiscal fortitude, willpower, or whatever else you want to call it. As I've made mention of before I have a massive pile of figures awaiting construction and paint. Not to mention that they cover what seems to be dozens of genres, time periods and rule sets. But they keep on coming...because I keep on pledging. This year alone I've supported over a half dozen more Kickstarter campaigns: Wild West Exodus , Empire of the Dead - Requiem , Hell Dorado - Inferno , Zombicide Season 2 , Acthung!Cthulhu , Secret Weapons Tablescapes ,  Deadzone and Guardians Chronicles  which ended today. While technically yes, a few of those are not miniature games per se, I am in fact going to receive minis from the A!C pledge too. Another 25 figures in fact. Six new mythos investigators, six new monster figures, and 10 Nazi zombies. I doubt I'll get to actually play the role playing game but the books look fantastic and I'm sure I'll enjoy reading all that fluffy ...

Yup, more zombies. I painted most of this set at the same time as the RAFM zombies box I posted earlier. The only additional figures here were the zombie judge and zombie mistress, which I'll talk about at the end of the article. As I mentioned in my review of this set , the contents consist of two sprues of Mantic zombies with some custom metal bits mixed in, plus original sculpts for the zombie mistress and zombie judge in metal. I've already discussed the construction of the figures and components in that post. Overall the figures turned out very well and were quite a lot of fun to paint. I do have another JDMG Zombie Horde set but when I build my next batch of zombies I think I'll add in some parts from my box of Wargames Factory male zombies too. There are plenty of parts to go around, and mixing them all together should provide me with some really unique figures. Since all the metal torsos in the set were the same I didn't want to use them for ever...

Received these 12 days after placing my order directly from Wargames Factory  in the US. They responded quickly, the same day in fact, with a shipping confirmation. Strangely enough, and through no fault of WGF at all, the package ended up traveling all the way from Utah to Los Angeles, before finally being shipped up here to Canada (where it also passed through Richmond, BC). Not exactly effective logistics being exercised by the US Postal service there. Why would you send something 1000 km farther away from it's destination first!? However, back to the topic at hand. I ordered four different boxes and after shipping and exchange they cost approximately $26 CAD each. One shop in town does stock a few of the WGF products, but not their full range. Were I to purchase them locally they would cost almost exactly the same price after taxes, but I wouldn't be able to get all the sets I wanted when I wanted them. Either way really...order online and wait, or buy locally immediate...

Well folks, with all the zombies out there in games, on TV and in the popular media these days, you'd think I would have painted dozens of them by now. Amazingly enough however these are my first but I'm pretty sure there are going to be hordes  more of them! (Ha ha, see what I did there?) Here's my work with a box of RAFM zombies I bought late last summer at Sentry Box for $30. There were ten in the box, and I admit to being a little annoyed at getting duplicates of two of the figures inside. A little creative painting though and hopefully they won't be too obvious among a mass of undead flesh eaters. Congratulations, you've just had twins...twice! The lone female in the set is massive  in stature. If she were standing upright she'd tower over top of the rest of the figures, and that right arm is almost as long as she is tall. The gore and wounds on her are well sculpted, but do think that she's rather over the top (as are her 'endowments...