Street Wars NYC: 1970's Street Gang Miniatures Game - Kickstarter

Like the sound of 70's style New York street gang skirmish? Then Street Wars NYC: 1970's Street Gang Miniatures Game could be just your thing!

The project is funded with 15 days to go and has some very cool minis - I am already backing and looking forward to what Iain and Funky Skull Games will unleash next!

Timber (G.I. Joe)

Timber is Snake Eyes' wolf companion, and not a mini I envisaged doing at the outset of my G.I. Joe Project. Painting got underway on the project in the last few weeks and it was then that Brummie mentioned he was doing one, so with that in mind I cobbled some rules ideas together, and that is how plans quickly change!

It may seem a bit bizarre, but a number of Joes and Cobra operatives had animal companions; therefore, excluding them wouldn't have been right. Brummie and I have been talking about ideas of how we can include a few more of the characters who had animal companions.

The mini was given to me by Brummie, but I have no idea where it is from. The painting was pretty easy, although I had to touch up the fur on one side to even out the patterning better. I tried to give a nice look representative of the various toys to the fur colouring, and even researched timber wolves' eyes colours for reference!

G.I. Joe Minis Painted (9)

G.I. Joe team: 7*

Cobra: 2**

Arashikage: 3*

Iron Grenadiers: 1**

Oktober Guard: 0

As I mentioned, I have prepped rules for personal use, to be able to use Timber in games of Squad Wars alongside Snake Eyes of course (either in a G.I. Joe team or an Arashikage Force).

Stalker (G.I. Joe)

Stalker is my sixth member of the G.I. Joe team finished, and my eighth G.I. Joe Project mini in all. He is a character I like a lot in the comics, probably because he was in the first G.I. Joe story I read (which was a reprint of the American stuff).

Although the pictures have washed out most of my highlighting on Stalker, I am reasonably happy with how he turned out. I decided against painting a camo stripe pattern as the base green colour is quite dark, and I opted for a fairly light contrast with his webbing and backpack. I started Stalker before Jinx, but finished the latter first which is pretty typical for me.

I have a few other members of the G.I. Joe team underway, and I hope to finish at least two or three more before the end of the month; Brummie and I have provisionally set early August for our first Squad Wars play-test. I have being prepping lots of materials for the opening games and I am looking forward to seeing if things work as I want them to.

G.I. Joe Minis Painted (8)
G.I. Joe team: 6
Cobra: 2*
Iron Grenadiers: 1*
Oktober Guard: 0

Jinx (G.I. Joe)

First up a big apology to regular readers for accidentally removing content from 100 comments from the blog; a slip of the mouse button while trying to sort out a load of spam comments caught me out and Blogger has no recycle bin unfortunately. Lesson learned!

Jinx is the latest mini completed for my G.I. Joe Project, and one of the characters less familiar to me until recently. I came to G.I. Joe through Action Force and the IDW comics published form around 2008 and onward. And so it is now I am making inroads into the old Marvel G.I. Joe comics, and shamefully have still not watched the movies (I have them on DVD, just too little time as always!). The upshot is that I have yet to see how much of a bad-ass Jinx seems to be but I hope to rectify that before too long!

Jinx is one of the good guys on the G.I Joe team, a protege of sorts to Snake Eyes, trained by the Arashikage clan. If there is one thing G.I. Joe canon is not short of, its ninjas....

The mini is one among a private commission I was fortunate to be able to get minis from. I started painting her a few days ago when I realised how I could paint up a spare ninja that I had for the G.I. Joe Project. Since both minis would be predominately red I made start on the pair before concentrating on Jinx's highlights and final work. By my standards it was a pretty quick turnaround which is always very welcome.

In the next few days I hope to finish Red Viper Ninja (Cobra) and Stalker (G.I. Joe), and after those I have a few more in the project painting queue.

G.I. Joe Minis Painted (7)
G.I. Joe team: 5
Cobra: 2*
Iron Grenadiers: 1*
Oktober Guard: 0

Working on the project has given me minis which I will be able to use to test out Squad Wars against Brummie. As a consequence I have been translating lots of characters from the G.I. Joe milieu into game stats for Squad Wars. And when I say, 'lots', I am not joking....

As an example of a character as defined in Squad Wars terms, here is the card I have prepped for Jinx. This is for personal use and won't be featured in any of the commercial side of Squad Wars when it is eventually launched (that will have IP that is my own for obvious reasons). The  game is designed to use a fairly low model count and mix solo characters as well as squads. Players won't need to use cards, a simple roster sheet will be fine, I just like having gaming cards and so while designing a simple template for free use, thought I would do some G.I. Joe characters with the template.

Quarter 2 2017 Painting Summary

2017 Quarter 2 was a big improvement over Quarter 1, I am happy to say!

I got off to a very strong start painting 11 minis in April alone (I managed just 7 in January to March).

April certainly had a very much 'supers' flavour to my hobby outputs as I was also finishing up the draft text for a rules set (Supers Unlimited) I plan to release through Wargames Vault later in the year, and my first BMG tournament of the year (with a poor placing compared to last year's successes).

With the supers focus, April saw me tackle some minis which have been long overdue completion, as well as some ranges I haven't revised in a few years - a 'good thing' for me.

May and June combined saw me paint or finish another 11 minis, and in all the three months put me back on track with my overall target for the year after the slowdown I had in February and March. I started doing some work on new and dormant projects during this time:

• My SMG Project: essentially conversions of Knight Models stuff to add a few more options to the SMG crew ranks; the game may be dead but I have a few ideas I want to execute for it yet, complete with rules profiles for any new characters I do.
• My G.I. Joe Project got 5 new models added, meaning I am track towards having playable forces for another project....
• ...Squad Wars; a rule set I started working on a couple of years ago got a dust off and some heavy re-writes and is now almost ready for some play-test games; the game is intended to recreate military pulp-action scenarios from classic 1980's series such as G.I. Joe, Action Force, M.A.S.K., The A-Team, MegaForce etc. The game is not attached to any existing IP, just intended to emulate some of the things you might expect from gaming this kind of over the top genre.

It has been much happier for me hobby-wise in the last few months, mainly as I feel more productive in recent months. This has coincided with me taking a decision to leave the Pulp Monsters partnership (responsible for the Pulp City game). There a number of reasons behind that decision which I won't go into here, but the ultimate gain for me has been more time to mess around with projects which interest me. It has meant I have completed two draft game manuscripts ready for play-test, and have a third around half done.

I have been able to explore some new skills, getting to grips with GiMP and Photoshop as far as I need them (recently with GiMP very much so, especially as Fotor is essentially becoming a paid platform for generating collages).

So all in all, things have felt much more productive lately, in writing and design, as well as painting, which has been a good thing personally.

Painted in Q2 (+10 from Q2 2016)
BMG: 11
GI Joe: 5
SDZA Supers: 3
Other Supers: 2 minis
SMG: 1 mini (SMG Project)

White Tiger (SMG Project)

Well there we go - White Tiger is done, just by the skin of my teeth!

My contribution to Forgotten Heroes (click for link) and it has been great watching various projects unfold - well done all. I promise to be better organised next year - although I feel my G.I. Joe stuff this month is in keeping with the whole thing too. :)

Thankfully this was a fairly simple paint job which helped speed things up. I was able to go a little messy doing the necklace with the knowledge I could tidy up the 'white' areas. The white was mainly done using Vallejo Pale Blue Grey as a base up to Off-White. For some deeper recesses I mixed in a bit of Blue Grey.

I decided to shade the eyes with a pale green to tie into the amulets he wears, representing the glow of mystical power they infuse into him. Other than that a pretty simple paint-job.

I also worked up a rules card for him for the defunct Spider-man Miniatures Game, just to complete the project. His Reputation cost may get a slight re-jig when I rework how I have engineered my best guesses for KM's points formula. I fear not, there are more home-brew conversions planned for SMG in the near-future.

SMG Painting Summary
SMG characters owned: 15+2
Percentage of owned characters painted: 47.1% (8 models)
MUMG minis re-based to fit my SMG: 0
SMG Project minis painted: 1

White Tiger WiP

A quick update post on White Tiger. With work on other projects this one got a little side-tracked unfortunately.

The conversion is pretty simple and I ultimately opted to omit the leg-straps. I tried doing something with green-stuff but what I was trying simply wouldn't work, and I lack the sculpting skills to render them in fine-scale in keeping with the mini's aesthetic any other way. Therefore I have to accept they are a stage too far for me.

The teeth on the necklace were trimmed back and green-stuff amulet pieces added. I may need to do a bit more on those once I can see them better when the mini is undercoated (my eyes struggle to pick out some details on/against bare metal and I often can see much more clearly when undercoat is applied). I filed the boots and gloves to lessen the trademark Black Panther grooves, and then painted that over with brush-on matt varnish with the idea that the relatively thick liquid should fill those grooves - at least that is my plan; again I may need to do a little more once I can see things more clearly with the undercoat.

I still hope to get the mini painted today, time permitting. Watch this space!