A Trio of Baddies for Star Wars: Imperial Assault

Continuing on my Star Wars riff, here's a trio of Imperial baddies to help make our our heroes, well, more heroic.

I found these to be quite nice miniatures on the whole. Great animation and while they're a bit softly cast in a few places, they usually have fairly well-defined detail.  My only real caveat is that each set only offers one pose. So, in an effort not to bore you with a bunch of duplicates, here are a few single samples from three separate sets: an Imperial officer, a stormtrooper, equipped in desert gear, and a snowtrooper (or a 'cold assault stormtrooper' to the SW anoraks out there).

The officer is depicted in a 'commanding pose' which seems straight out of Central Casting: an outstretched hand pointing to some impossible objective which will probably get both him and his minions ignominiously ventilated. Come to think of it, he does look a bit of a dick.

I painted him in the classic olive green of the Imperial Navy. His two colleagues (apparently off camera, polishing their boots or practicing getting force-choked by Sith Lords) are done in black for the Stormtrooper Corps and white for the Intelligence Bureau.

Next up, I found the snowtrooper a doodle to paint: brilliant white armour with cream for the fabricy bits, then apply a diluted wash and finish up with a quick highlight using the original colours = done. 

I've always had a soft spot for snowtroopers. Not because they're necessarily that interesting design-wise, but because they're intrinsically linked to 'The Empire Strikes Back' - arguably the best movie of the whole franchise - cool in both setting and association.

The last figure is my favourite of the batch, a stormtrooper equipped for desert operations. I weathered him up a bit so he looks like he's been scrabbling around Tatooine for the past few days looking for droids. Definitely one of the iconic figures from the first movie.

I like how he's tucked right into his blaster rifle, ready to miss everything that's put in front of him. Really, you almost feel sorry for these hapless gits. They sweat their bollocks off galloping around the desert on huge lizards in scorching heat wearing armour that probably chafes like a sonofabitch, then they get completely played by a dusty old hermit, miss all the action at the cantina, only to get humiliatingly drilled by some small-time smuggler and his walking rug of a co-pilot. 

Good gravy, what a bunch of pathetic mutts.  

Nonetheless, even in light of all of this, they're still the cat's pajamas in my books - so go figure.

Next Up: Something for the Renaissance collection.

A Trio of Heroes from Star Wars Imperial Assault

For a bit of pulp summer reading, I picked up 'Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View'. 

Wow, what a page turner!  I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying it. The book is comprised of 40 short stories, all centred on the original 1977 film. Sure, some of the stories are a bit hackneyed, but most are quite inspired and a few are absolute genius. All of them do a great job in making readers of <ahem> a certain vintage very nostalgic for that innocent, bright-eyed, thrilling tale which came from 'a more civilized age'.

So, with all these wonderful stories percolating in my mind, I thought it a perfect excuse to get a few more figures painted for my Imperial Assault collection.

Here are three intrepid Rebels, eager to take the good fight to the Empire.

Saska Teft is from the 'Twin Shadows' expansion. She's a tech type of character, being very handy at hacking into Imperial systems while providing support for the rest of the party.

Fenn Signis is from the core boxed set, a weapon's expert, being specially good at laying down heaps of suppressive fire and causing mayhem amongst any close-clustered Imperial targets. 

I've run out of clear acrylic bases so I just went with gloss black for this group. I actually quite like nice, clean, minimalist look so I might just run with it in the future.

Gaarkhan is also from the core set, he's a Wookie warrior (yeah, obviously) who, not surprisingly, deals out loads of pain in close combat. 

The plastic used for these figures is quite crisp on the whole, and reasonably hard, but some of the longer weapons still suffer from being somewhat al dente in their aspirations of being straight and true, so I try to replace these bits with brass rod to give them a bit of rigidity. 

I also added a bit of length to Gaarkhan's halberd as I thought it would better suit his imposing height.

I'm doing up a series of Imperial types which maybe I'll bring out in a future post.

Entry #5 to AHPC VIII: Darth Vader, Kayn Somos and Stormtroopers for 'Imperial Assault'

I know, I know, there's been a bit of a boardgame theme running through my stuff to date. I have no clue whats driving it. I can assure you it's not out of any grand design on my part. As Robbie Robertson once sang, 'I don't know, the wind just sort of pushed me this way.' 

'Imperial Assault' is a newly discovered game for me, so I was pretty stoked to try painting some of the figures. I know the game is old news for many as it's been out for several years, but my interest was piqued when I heard that, like 'Mansions of Madness', an app was being released to run the game's core mechanics allowing it to become fully cooperative. 

The new Imperial Assault app.

The announcement of the app coincided with the news that one of our local game stores was shutting down. The silver lining to this sad news was that in and among all the stock they were blowing out was a heap of 'Imperial Assault' stuff. So being a big Star Wars geek, I jumped in with both feet and snapped it up.

So here are my beginning efforts of the core box.  I thought I'd start with a good big whack of bad guys as, well, you always need lots of bad guys for the heroes to ventilate and/or foil their nefarious plans. 

This is a detachment of nine Stormtroopers, their captain Kayn Somos and my favourite Sith Lord, Darth Vader. 

I thought the Stormtroopers would be an easy win being all white, but of course their armour was quite fiddly to get close to what I was wanting. I'm still not entirely happy with them, but they'll die in droves, just like unpainted ones, so they'll make do.

The plastic on these figures was not too bad to work on, but still a bit too bendy for my tastes. I removed Vader's slightly warped light saber and replaced it with brass rod, and for a bit of fun, I used some thin plastic rod to simulate him deflecting an incoming laser blast.

Photographing these guys was a bit of a challenge as Vader sort of disappears into the black background and I was too lazy to swap it out with something lighter.

Again, I replaced the stock bases with clear acrylic to allow the playing-tile surfaces to show through. Following my standard skirmish trope, I also gave Vader and Somos different shaped bases to aid in their rank identification, though this is pretty silly as it's blazingly obvious when you look at the figures! Apparently it's hard to stop a creature of habit. ;)

Thanks for visiting and have a great week!