Miniature Gaming

[Martijn Meerts]

I'm not that into miniature gaming, mainly because I have no one to play with, but I recently did buy a bunch of 3D models for a very good price. Most of these are ready for printing, and include lots of figures, but also blocks to build a dungeon. They include various wall sections, floor sections, corners, pillars, doors etc. It's kinda fun to just print them and stick them together to form a dungeon. Only downside is that the wall sections take like 3 hours to print 🙂

 

[cteno4]

Definitely a snag hook!

 

jeff

[Cat]

7 hours ago, Martijn Meerts said:

I'm not that into miniature gaming, mainly because I have no one to play with, but I recently did buy a bunch of 3D models for a very good price. Most of these are ready for printing, and include lots of figures, but also blocks to build a dungeon. They include various wall sections, floor sections, corners, pillars, doors etc. It's kinda fun to just print them and stick them together to form a dungeon. Only downside is that the wall sections take like 3 hours to print 🙂

 

Spray paint is your friend!  I do stone and brick work with multiple colours of spray at a distance to get a speckle effect.  I mostly use the Testor's rattle cans because the paint comes out in bigger droplets than better quality paints.
 
Here's a 3D printed wall doen purely with spray paints and then brush painted the timber work.  Part of a set of ruins to use with The Silver Bayonet, gothic horror skirmish gaming in the Napoleonic period.  This is a new game and superb at firing up the imagination and creativity.  And it includes a number of solo scenarios that work quite well.
 

[Martijn Meerts]

Speckles are easy to do with an airbrush as well, just set the compressor to a very low PSI.

 

I'm not even close to painting anything yet, partially because the attic is still a mess 🙂  So far I've only been doing a bit of printing. I bought a Fat Dragon Games (https://www.fatdragongames.com/fdgfiles/3d-printer-models/) set on Humble Bundle for a few euro. I have the dungeon starter and cavern starter, with some additional bits and pieces.

 

I'm printing them at 75% scale, since I thought at 100% they're just too big, and take too long to print (up to 8 hours or so for a wall corner at high detail). I also tried 50%, but then the clips to keep the pieces together are a bit too tight. 75% seems a pretty decent compromise both with regards to size and printing time (some 3 hours for a corner at high detail). In the end I won't really do anything with it, but it's a fun little distraction for now, especially since I can just start a couple of prints while working from home.

 

[Martijn Meerts]

This is an example of those dungeon blocks, printed at 75% and high quality. Obviously these need to be painted at some point 🙂

 

 

In the meantime I've also bought same additional blocks. 1 set of narrow hallways, crumbling walls and fake walls, and a large caverns expansion set that includes a lot of blocks which allows you to build a whole mining railway 😄

 

 

[Cat]

Sweet — I love dungeon crawls!

[Cat]

Roxanne & I had a great time up in Maine for a long weekend poking about Portland and enjoying Huzzah, a Miniatures gaming convention.  After several years pandemic hiatus, finally got to run some big Girls und Panzer and Wacky Max games again.
: 3
 

 

 

 

Edited May 15, 2022 by Cat

[katoftw]

Is it a proper girls und panzer game or just another tank game that you have glued some girls to tanks?

[Cat]

10 hours ago, katoftw said:

Is it a proper girls und panzer game or just another tank game that you have glued some girls to tanks?

Proper — home brew rules that a friend in England started and we've been developing and really captures the flavour of the show.  I'm still in the process of taking our very draft rules and writing them out more fully so others will be able to pick them up and play.
 
Creative maneuvers are encouraged — in the photo above, the Anglerfish team had attempted a reverse move and jump off the steep hill to get away from opponents who were closing in, but Mako failed her tankrobatics dice roll so their tank fell and got KO'd from the drop.  Lighter tanks have a better chance of doing that sort of thing.
 
The group in the woods was a whole chain of sneaky tanks that had revealed their hidden positions in sequence for a long string of ambush and counter-ambush.  The Hippo team has rammed and pinned the BT-42 against the KO'd Turtle team, preventing Miko from being able to drive away; with their gun barrels overlapping each other's tanks, these two can't shoot each other in that position.
 
Most shooting is based on the caliber of the gun; so the lighter guns shoot first, giving them a chance to take out the bigger tanks if they shoot well.
 
Each school gets some special rules to cover their particular senshado specialties.
 
For multi-player convention games, I've found it best to run them as multi-team flag matches.  This one was an alliance of Pravda-Oarai-Maginot vs. Kuromoromini-Jatkosota-Saunders with 5 tanks for each school.  Each school has their own flag tank.  To win, all three flag tanks on the opposing side had to be knocked out.  Pravda alliance won 3–1.
 
 

[Beaver]

Fun stuff. I assembled a fair sized Dirtside 2 army back in sixth form but sold it all in the end as I could not find anyone else interested in playing it.

[Cat]

Another project I've been working on over the last few years is painting up gangs from the 1979 movie The Warriors to use with Mean Streets game rules.

Finally finished up the titular gang and am quite pleased.  Did a lot of stop-frame on the DVD to check colours and details.  A production still of them standing in the sunlight at Coney Island provided the correct sneaker colours. 
: 3

 

For the patches on the back of the vests, I painted the patch areas white, and after that dried, added the lettering and logo details with my trusty .005 Micron Art pens.

 

 

[Cat]

Finally starting on some of the 1/64 terrain for The Warriors.  The game board will be set in the Broadway Junction Station area of Brownsville, Brooklyn where the Turnbull ACS scene was filmed.  Game is set in June 1979, as evidenced by the prices and odd-even day rationing at the Texaco Station, a 1/64 model by Greenlight that works great when detailed and dirtied up.
 
The subway head house is 3D print.  It was quite fun making signs and ads for it.  In June '79, the MTA announced their big 'We're Changing' campaign to update and unify signs across the system with the now standard coloured dots with letters or numbers for line identification.  It would take a number of years to complete those upgrades, and Brownsville would not be at the top of the list for improvements.  It took a lot of late nights with whisky and googling to puzzle out plausible signs for this station before the change!
 

[cteno4]

Nicely done cat!

 

jeff

[chadbag]

All the 3D dungeons and stuff are way cool looking.  Just a reminder of why I don't yet have a 3D printer (i'd spend all my time and money printing cool things)

 

But I'm still old school.  Graph paper and imagination!  Maybe some figures to establish relative positioning...

[Cat]

18 hours ago, chadbag said:

(i'd spend all my time and money printing cool things)

I have enough friends with printers, I've been able to avoid buying one.
: 3

[Yugamu Tsuki]

They're dangerous very, those machines. I printed some dungeons and goblin cities from Fat Dragon and don't think I have ever even played on them, my cat just maneuvers around the graveyard trying not to knock over any of the tombstones. Usually when we get together for Battletech we use the old HeroScape hex spaces.

[Martijn Meerts]

I printed a bunch of Fat Dragon things as well, for no reason whatsoever apart from it just being fun. By now I've thrown away some of it already.

 

I also have a bigger resin printer now, so I've been tempted trying to print these tiles on the resin printer, but there's a couple of other things I need to print for some friends first. 

 

[MeTheSwede]

That's very impressive Cat! I had to go back and reread a couple of times. 1:64 !

 

So much detail! I could never have guessed.

 

 

Let's see if I can dig up a photo or two of my Romans and Gauls.

[MeTheSwede]

The Romans are closest to the camera, Gallic horde waiting in front of the hills.

 

If you can't recognise Vercingetorix leading his Gauls, it might be because I forgot to paint his moustache.

 

 

 

Me not yet having painted more than two legions are making the Romans nervous. At least Caesar is known for being good at throwing dice.

 

[MeTheSwede]

I forgot to mention that these are 2mm figures, so around 1:850 scale.

[Cat]

1 hour ago, MeTheSwede said:

I forgot to mention that these are 2mm figures, so around 1:850 scale.

So painting that mustache would be very easy then!

[Cat]

Finally got to run the first games of The Warriors this past weekend at Huzzah Con up in Portland Maine, and everyone had a grand time!
 
After several false starts with various complications, a friend was able to start rolling the buildings and trains off the printer last fall.  The production delay meant I had to crank through getting ready for show time.  There's still plenty of work to do detailing and dirtying up the streets, but I got the concrete areas spray painted on the borads the day before we left.  Finished the last graffiti and window on the cars at the hotel.  Everything was ready enough by 11:30pm Friday, dice began rolling at 9am Saturday.  Plenty of time to spare.
: 3
 
Except for the Texaco Station that I had posted earlier, all the other buildings, tracks, and trains are 3D prints at ~1/64 scale, and I scratch built the control house under the elevated with Evergreen plastic (whipped that together the prior weekend).  The fences on the train platform are HO Model Power on a styrene riser, and safety railing along the curved track is O scale Plastruct.
 
For additional time stamps setting the game in June 1979 is the double-feature at the local grindhouse: Dawn of the Dead, and Master Killer (no known as the 36th Chamber of Shaolin).  And flavour of the month at Baskin Robbins is Sunflower Power — the worst flavour they ever made, they couldn't give that stuff away (candy coated sunflower seeds in a lemon ice cream and wicked salty).
 
The 1/64 diecast cars have all been weathered and a bit of detail painting on the innards, plus 1979 style license plates and inspection stickers added, mostly New York with a scattering of others.

 

Edited May 22 by Cat

[Kamome]

Amazing work @Cat That “L” train looks incredible. 

 

Hats off to miniature painters. I was gifted a Marvel Crisis Protocol starter box and have been slowly trying to paint each element. Definitely a different animal to try and accentuate light and shadows on something so small. Haven’t been hugely successful so far, only really able to represent each coloured area but enjoying the learning curve. Need more confidence to try and represent ambient light etc.. 

 

My attempts thus far. Need to have a few more colour options in various hues. 

[Cat]

Off to a great start there with the Marvels!
 
I'll go back later and add some more splash and more colours on the 'livery' later, but I got the basic fill done just in time for the game.  That was really fun laying out and creating!
 
It's the 'J' Train on the El.  You can see the signboards here in this WIP picture, painting and listening to the soundtrack Friday morning at the hotel. I put in blank destination boards, as happens sometimes; this way the train can be going in either direction.  The car numbers I printed out are ones that were used in the movie.  Some whiskey and late night research rabbit holes on the internets and I'm a happy Cat.
=^,^=
 

 

Finished the graffiti  and gluing on the signs at 1am Thursday night, Dullcote spray before breakfast, and then gloss paint on the windows done by 12:20pm Friday.  Con started at 2pm.  Just had to finish up some playsheets for the game Friday night.
 
The train didn't even factor into the scenario I was running this time, but it really helps set the mood for the game and catches eyes across the room.  Won the prize for Best game in Session Saturday morning, and 1st runner up for Best in Show, whee!

Edited May 23 by Cat

[maihama eki]

We loved that movie when I was kid. My friend had HBO at his house which was pretty rare at that time, and we watched it over and over late at night.

 

"Warriors... come out to play-ay..."