Painted Mansions of Madness investigators part 1

Having finished painting the miniatures for "This War of Mine: The board game" I continued painting up the first couple of investigators for Mansions of Madness 2nd edition. The miniatures are a mix of 1st and 2nd edition minis. I purchased clear 25mm bases from a Spanish company "Green Stuff World" which sells the bases in packs of 20 for an affordable sum.

I have 16 investigators left to paint. The quality of the sculpts is very mixed, but they are fun and easy to paint.

I will also soon be painting up a couple of Gloomhaven miniatures for myself and a friend from work. I'll post those when they are done.

Getting into

Fifth and final part of my series about By Fire & Sword. In this final part I talk about the scenarios and various effects of force strength, reconnaissance level and additional effects that the defending player can use during scenario gameplay at the skirmish level.

Hope you guys enjoyed the series. It was quite a bit of work to put it together, or actually editing each episode was the most time consuming part.

Also don't miss out on browsing my Facebook page as I have been posting a bunch of painted miniatures for Mansions of Madness up there. I will be posting the miniatures on the blog in larger groups once I receive clear bases to put them on.

This War of Mine painted characters

I finally finished painting all the playable characters for "This War of Mine: The board game". The models are simple castings and required a different approach from regular wargaming miniatures, but I enjoyed the simplicity and could focus on the colors instead of lots of details cluttering each miniature.

This was also a bit of an experiment, I have never painted board game miniatures before and I was very tempted to paint up the investigators from Mansions of Madness 2nd edition, but wanted to try out painting board game minis on a smaller scale first (there are fewer characters in TWoM than in MoM: 2nd edition).

All in all I'm very happy with the result. There are more miniatures in the Kickstarter edition that I got, with soldiers, kids, thugs, a dog and some farmers as well. At the moment I'm fine with the models painted up, the others I have barely touched during gameplay so they did not feel as urgent to paint as the playable characters. I may paint up the rest in the future, but I will likely focus on the investigators from MoM next instead.

Getting into By Fire & Sword: part 4 units overview

Part 4 of my series about By Fire & Sword, this time I take a look at some of the common unit types and special rules that you will find in the game.

Next (and probably final part) will be about the scenarios, counting reconnaissance points, victory points and casualties in skirmish battles.

Medieval houses set review

Roughly two months ago I ran across Urbanmatz, a retailer of prepainted terrain and gaming mats. I saw that they were taking pre-orders for some painted terrain. As soon as the set became available I purchased one to add to my terrain collection. 

The set arrived last weekend and I've taken a closer look, do the pre-paint and house quality hold up?

What you get in the set is 6 buildings and a bridge. You get 3 copies of a large dwelling, 2 copies of a smaller dwelling, 1 blacksmith and the stone bridge which is a huge terrain piece. The price at 119Euro for 7 pieces of solid terrain is fair with an average price of 17Euro per model. No assembly required and they come prepainted.

The quality of the castings is good, and the sculpts themselves are imo very nice, especially the smaller buildings with the more intricate wooden framing. They look very medieval/European. The blacksmith is my favorite piece, and it the largest building.

The bridge is also nice, and it is large enough to allow you to put the popular "Battlefield in a box"/Flames of War river terrain below.

But the main reason I purchased the prepainted buildings was that the paintjob looked very promising on the pictures up on the retailers homepage. Having received the buildings and having inspected them up close I admit that the paintjob was not as good as I had hoped. The buildings are tabletop quality and still look great at an arm's length, but for a neat freak like me there were mainly issues with paint splotches on some of the walls and such that lowered the general impression. 

This does not mean that the paintjob is awful, but I wish it was a bit more tidy. This however prompted be to try to repaint one of the buildings just to see how that would work. I did that grom scratch, by undercoating the building with black primer, then drybrushing and washing the stonework, repainting the wooden framing and drybrushing the roof.

 I'm in the process of repainting one of the smaller buildings, and this time I tried to do that without any black undercoat, and it worked equally well - you will be able to see some WIP pictures of that on my facebook page.

The paintjob took about 2 hours, which is good enough for me to get a slightly cleaner result.

Overall, I still recommend the buildings for the sculpts themselves. They look great, and the material is some kind of durable plastic/resin that does not chip. So if you need to add some stone buildings to your collection of fantasy or historical terrain, these are great.

Repainted example