From the Painting Table 9

I've managed to get a little bit of painting in over the winter break and actually managed to finish off a couple of projects that I present below.

First is the Thranduil from GW's new The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug range.  He wasn't cheap or to be honest good value, but he is very nice.

This is a squad of Mantic Games corporation troopers, these have a dual role in my collection.  They actually come from the project Pandora boardgame I got cheap a while back, but will also be seeing service in my Imperial Guard army for 40K.

And finally this Loka earth rook which came from this years mantic crazy Christmas box.  I like this guy a lot and am quite tempted to get a set of the pieces now.

Mantic Crazy Christmas Box 2013

Another year and another random box of assorted goodies from mantic for a cheap price, a mere £20.  As it's still avaliable as I write this I thought some of you might like to see what the box contains.  Well at least what my box contains as mantic do say contents will very. 

This seems to have been put together as a sort of 'sampler' of mantics range with a bit of everything thrown in, so broken down by game system we have:

Kings of War:
- 10 x elf bowmen
- 10 x human spearmen/swordsmen
- 3 x ogres

Warpath:
- 5 x forgefather stormrage veterans
- 2 x marauders

Dreadball
- dozer, giant
- helder, MVP

Deadzone
- sorak
- yindi

Loka
- earth elemental

And I also got a copy of mantic journal 4 which includes a mantic point. 

The only thing to note is that no bases are included, but I have plenty of spares kicking around so it's no issue to me.

 

That's 35 mins for £20, really not a bad deal.  I don't have much use for the elves, but everything else will be useful, I'm particulary chuffed with the deadzone minis and the ogres.

Treebeard Some Call Me......

The release of the extended DVD version of the Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey a couple of weeks ago has inspired me to paint a few models off my pile of Lord of the rings figures, the star of which is the mighty ent treebeard, but I've painted a few smaller characters as well.

The DVD was worth waiting for rather than getting the standard edition earlier in the year.  The extra scenes themselves are OK, but I can see why they got cut from the theatrical release.  The extra features are however fantastic and I've sat through and enjoyed around 8 hours worth of the documentaries plus the full length directors commentary.  I'll defiantly be getting the extended versions of the other films.

The first miniature releases for the desolation of Smaug are out now as well, the elf rangers look fantastic and I'm planning on getting some at some point (although not straight away as I have all those deadzone models to paint).

 

Treebeard

 

 

 

The sons of Elrond, Elladan & Elrohir.

 

Prince Imrahil of Dol Amroth, a high elf spearman and Grima Wormtongue.

 

Gorbag & Shagrat.

Deadzone Arrives

The first batch of stuff from the Deadzone kickstarter has arrived, actually it arrived over a week ago and it's taken me that long to glue it all together.  The first thing was the sheer size of the box, which was massive!  I think it's the biggest box of minis I've ever got delivered at one time.

Lets get straight to the minis, at this point I received plague, enforcer, marauder and rebs starters, along with plague, marauder and rebs booster sets and a selection of mercs.  Overall I'm very pleased with them, some great sculpts, even the marauders that I wasn't keen on look better in the flesh, the rebs and plague steal the show though and I can't wait to paint them up.  Some of the minis still suffer from mantic's mould line problem, but it wasn't too hard to fix, and some of them come in many, many, small pieces, the merc 'wrath' was a particular pain.  I needed a lot of super-glue to stick it all together.  I had a couple of 'warped' minis as well, but a quick dip in nearly boiling easily fixed the problem, so give that a go if you get any similar models from mantic.

The rulebook is full colour and in the same format as the dreadball one, not read all the rules yet, but production quality seems good and it's all very pretty.  The other star of the set is however the 2' x 2' gaming mat, which is frankly fantastic.  The material feels and looks good, doesn't crease, and has an appropriate, and nicely generic piece of artwork.

The scenary is a bit of a mixed bag, although I'm happy with it overall.  I got a lot more than I was expecting, and the tiles themselves are great and there's a lot you can do with them.  The connectors are a bit of a let down, they don't hold the tiles together properly and building even medium sized structures is a complete pain, however luckily there is an easy solution.  I've started gluing the pieces together, whilst this means I won't be able to rebuild the kits every time I play, it also means I won't have too which for me at least is a definite bonus.  I'll probably get some more of mantic's terrain at some point, and it's good, I just don't think it's endlessly rebuildable like they claim.

unfortunately this is a mantic kickstarter package, and that means it's missing a couple of bits, this time I only got 6 dice not 10, and I got an extra reb human and a missing a Sorak, not the end of the world and hopefully mantic will sort this out for me as they have with the issuses with my dreadball pledge (eventually).

The only real issues with this kickstarter stuff is that I'm starting to feel a little bit overwhelmed with all the stuff I have, the painting queue is massive, and I've not yet had time to fully explore all of dreadball yet and now I have this and a small mars attack pledge to work on as well.  It's a good problem to have.

 

Overall deadzone has turned out to be fantastic value for money, I can't believe how much stuff I've got and all the stuff that's still to come (asterians, forge fathers, more enforcers and sci-fi zombies).  I'd better stop here and go get painting........