miniature | Sirrob01

Posts Tagged 'miniature'

Flipit Black X – Commanders

I’ve been slowly working my way through building the Black X faction for Flipit. I’ve got a tub full of half finished Black X troops still to go but the commanders and almost all the vehicles are finished (One Tank to go).

The Black x faction for Flipit has four commanders as someone pulled together an extra commander who suspiciously resembles Colonel Klink. The three commanders done by Newobmij have special abilities I was unable to locate any special rules for Hauptman (Col Klink 🙂 ). I’ll either have to make up some of my own or simply sub the abilities for one of the others in.

I wanted to give my Black X faction for flipit a city base theme, It probably seems odd to some people to have a basing theme for paper miniatures. However paper, plastic or metal good basing can really help finish off the miniatures and tie the army together. For the four commanders I made up some slightly raised bases so it looks like they are standing on the pavement in front of a road. I’m not sure it quiet works. It does give them a slight lift that should make them stand out from the regular troops so for the moment I’m happy with the effect. As I wasn’t sure this would work I magnetized the base of the miniatures and the top of the pavement surface so the miniatures can be removed from their bases easily (Erwin Muttonschnitzel needed this anyway).

Fat Dragon Games Capital City used for bases

Nothing much to mention in the assembly of Four Black X commanders for Flipit. Hanz Gewehr, Gunter Donnerfaust, Muttonschnitzel and Hauptmann all go together fairly easily. Donnerfausts claw and Hauptmanns crop were a little fiddly but this will have been because I’m building at 75% of full size.

Captian Erwin Muttonschnitzel is a little different his special ability lets him drive (command an Uberpanzer). When I dropped him into the top of the Uberpanzers turret his arms naturally caught and he was suspended at a terrible angle. I created a little magnetic stool for him to stand on when driving the tank this means he pokes out a little more than normal but lets him stand straight. This issue was probably caused as I built the Uberpanzer as with the Blue Falcons Tank at 100% not 75%.

The commanders for the Black X army are now ready to lead there troops into battle. Muttonschnitzel is peppering me with tiny tank fire demanding I hurry up and finish the troops so they can face off against their adversaries the Blue Falcons….I better get back to building those troops before he ups the fire rate 🙂 .

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared. – Buddha

Papercraft Build – Onemonk Hybrid Cannoneer

Published December 14, 2013 Builds , Papercraft 5 Comments
Tags: 2.5D, gaming, miniature, miniatures, Onemonk, paper miniatures, Paper Standee, Papercraft, Roleplaying, RPG, sci-fi, Standee, Wargamming

The onemonk site has not had a new release in a while but two days ago the Chimera Hybrid Cannoneer was released. For those who missed it Squirmydad took over custodianship of the onemonk website and all the content 4-5 months ago. Squirmydad has spent the past few months re-releasing all the old sets. Now the back catalog is back up he has released the first new set the Chimera Hybrid Cannoneer. Many of us have been waiting a longtime for this model ever since Onemonk showed some concept art 2-3 years ago… hmm maybe longer. I needed a break from building Flipit Black X troopers (25 waiting for arms) so I decided to build a Cannoneer.

The Cannoneer is a large model, think of it as either a light vehicle or small mech rather than as a single human sized model. The Cannoneer comes with four different weapons an Acid Lobber (right end), Spike Cannon (Left end) and two different types of claws (middle). These all mount to the top edge of the carapace, although I think I’ll be using the claws more for mods or possibly mount them down lower.

You can mount the weapons permanently or the Spike Cannon and Acid Lobber fit tightly enough that you can leave them as swappable weapon options (what I’ll be doing). I will be spraying mine with clear matte varnish so that the printed surface doesn’t take to much wear when sliding them on and off.

Once I finished wrestling with my printer (its getting a little old 🙂 )the assembling of the model wasn’t difficult but it did take some time, this is fine if you remember the model equates to a light mecha or vehicle rather than a single humanoid trooper. The Chimera Cannoneer will certainly help round out the Chimera Brood as they have been sorely lacking some heavier units/fire support. Unfortunately all the other Chimera models I had built were destroyed when the roof leaked in our back sun room so I’ll have to rebuild all the others from scratch again. This will be after the Black X army and the Orcs I’m working on, so many fun things so little time.

If your looking for a Xenomorph styled Army but don’t want figure flats or are willing to spend a little more time building up the 2.5d Chimera Brood, drop across to RPGnow and pick up the whole set and then grab the Chimera Hybrid Cannoneer. I’m pretty sure you wont be disappointed and the sets even though a little old (except the Chimera Hybrid Cannoneer) are still great value for money.

The mind is everything. What you think you become. – Buddha

Flipit Blue Falcons – Vehicles

Published November 28, 2013 Builds , Papercraft , Wargaming 5 Comments
Tags: blue falcons, build, flipit, flying lead, miniature, miniatures, paper miniatures, Paper Standee, Papercraft

Here are the Blue Falcon Vehicles from Flipit, I’ve built all the vehicle types except the Agile II. I will only build that model if I can find a copy of the Red Hammer mech. I’ve included some notes and handy pointers from when I assembled each vehicle, hopefully these will be helpful for anyone else who may wish to build their own Blue Falcon army.

First up for the Blue Falcons Motor pool we have the bikes. These are a pretty simple build cut out and score the lines, then fold up one side and glue the front back strip in place, then glue the other side up. I then glued some small rocks into the inside of the bike to help weight the base down. I did push my riders down a little far when I glued them in.

Next up is the AA Microtank (Night Owl), I found this model the hardest of all the Blue Falcon vehicles to assemble. Scaling it down to 75% meant the little gun barrels were extremely difficult to roll. So on one of my Microtanks I cheated by replacing the paper gun barrels with toothpicks cut to the correct length and coloured yellow. The tracks were also a little fiddly but the best way I found to assemble them was to glue the track base to both sides and then wrap the ends around and glue in place. There are not many references around about how to build the Microtank so I pulled together a quick reference page which will hopefully be a helpful to others who might wish to build one.

All Troops need some form of APC and the Blue Falcons come equipped with a rugged 4×4 called the Osprey. The model came together pretty easily, I did modify the windshield and inserted a small clear panel. I glued 4 troops into the vehicle permanently for two reasons; firstly as I based all my soldiers they wont fit in the vehicle with bases and secondly I didn’t want to be fiddling around pulling out and putting troops into the transport mid game much easier to just deploy a unit and mark the vehicle empty. There are a number of completed pictures of the transport around the place but as with above Microtank I pulled together a quick 1 page assembly reference.

To protect the skies the Blue Falcons can deploy a Fighter Jet (Peregrine). This is my favorite model for the blue falcon army (followed by the Micro tank), there’s something about it which just makes it cool and fun looking (I deny all knowledge of sitting around swooshing jets through the air making engine noises). They were however a little fiddly to pull together at 75%. Make sure you have a pen or something thin handy to push/pull/press tabs into place while they glue. Newobmij put together some assembly instructions for the jets. I did build my own custom flight stands which are magnetized and let me store the jets much more easily, I did however make them a little tall and may need to shorten them a little in future.

Lastly we have the Blue Falcon Tank. I did build a 75% version of this tank but it just seemed a little small for the main line Tank so I rebuilt the tank(s) at 100%. With everything else scaled to 75% this gives the tanks a much more impressive presence on the table, well to me. I’ll be building the other faction tanks at 100% as well. Newobmij has also done a very nice sequence of pictures showing assembly of this tank. The only other minor change I made was that instead of using the paper/card axle I replaced this with a Kebab skewer cut to correct length, it was the perfect size as an axle and much straighter and stronger than anything I could roll from card/paper.

Lastly I needed some way to store my miniatures, so I grabbed two blue CD box’s from an Office supply store. For one of the CD boxes I created a lift in and out module to hold the soldiers. The 2nd box will be used to store the Agile II (assuming I build it) and all the vehicles, if I need I can fit several units of troops on the top floor of the lift in and out module and several vehicles on the bottom so if I’m traveling anywhere I can take a single box with enough troops to game with.

Well that’s enough troops to field a fairly hefty Blue Falcon army so I’ll move on a build a similar sized black X army. Although I’m really not looking forward to making another 50+ Soldiers :).

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value – Albert Einstein

How to Base Paper Miniatures – Part 2

Published November 22, 2013 Papercraft 1 Comment
Tags: base, basing, gaming, how to, miniature, miniatures, paper miniatures, Paper Standee, Papercraft, Standee

I detailed a few of the DIY options available for paper miniature basing here. However there are a few (and I mean a few) commerical options for bases around the web for paper miniatures.

I’m not going to cover the option of simply buying pre-cut plain flat wooden/plastic bases as pretty much that’s the same as permanent flat basing I mentioned in the previous blog post, be it with a little less cutting. I should mention all my paper miniatures are built using 220gsm (140lb) card which means by the time the front and backs are glued together it equates to 440gsm (280lb) thickness. If your using thinner card the bases may not grip as well as they did for me.

The first option are bases described as “card stands”. I’ve only found these as round bases approximately 20mm (3/4 inch) in diameter made of that hard plastic material approximately 6mm tall from base to the top . There are similar bases which are square but unfortunately these are 30mm in size (1 1/4 inch) and a little big for my uses. Both do come in a wide range of colours and they are pretty cheap, they work out to about 10-20cents (AUD each) and I managed to find them at a few different web stores in various countries (UK round 1 UK round 2, US square 1, US square 2). Basically these stands all work the same they have little offset plastic nodules inside the slot which grab the miniature base tab.

Over time these bases could slowly tear or wear out the base tab (best to slide them in sideways to minimize damage). However if your at all worried you can always strength the base tab by coating it with super glue this will virtually turn the card into plastic. At the end of the day though if a miniatures tab gets to beat up which should take a fair old while simply reprint the miniature, that is one of the advantages of paper miniatures :). Value for money wise these bases are great so long as you don’t mind the restriction of either 20mm round or 40mm square and your miniatures sitting a little tall. Even if your not sure grabbing a bag they wont break the bank.

Next up we have the Rolls Royce of paper miniatures stands by Litko games. The bases are custom created/made by Litko so there is a far wider range of choices 12 different shapes and sizes from circles, squares, rectangles and hexagons in various sizes from 20mm to 50mm. They are available in three colours; clear, clear-bronze and solid-black. The bases themselves are cut from 3mm thick acrylic and work by having a slightly curved slot which holds the miniature in place. If you buy a bag of 50 bases they work out at 40cents (USD each), if you stretch it to a bag of 100 they work out slightly cheaper.

I tried very hard to shake a miniature out of the base but the bases stubbornly refused to let go of the miniature, so I think Jim over at Litko has designed the curve of the holding slot perfectly. The curve is slight enough that miniatures are not permanently bent and when removed they go back to flat very quickly, the bigger base also means the miniatures are slightly tougher to knock over compared to the 20mm card stands above. I picked up a bag 25mm clear hexagons and will definitely pick up some more bases.

I can’t really recommend one base type over the other, if your in the US and get that super cheap shipping from Litko I’d say just jump at the Litko bases. For the rest of us scattered around the globe paying ridiculous postage no matter what. If your on a very tight budget grab the cheaper bases they’ll be more than acceptable. If you have a few more $$$ to spend grab the Litko bases you wont be disappointed.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please. – Mark Twain

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
Mark Twain
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Flipit Blue Falcons – Troops

Published November 16, 2013 Builds , Papercraft , Wargaming 1 Comment
Tags: blue falcons, build, flipit, flying lead, miniature, miniatures, paper miniatures, Paper Standee, Papercraft

A Flipit army wont get very far without troops and support personnel, so here are the Blue Falcon troops. There is not very much I can say about these as the pictures pretty much say it all. I did modify the base Blue Falcon troops so I had a male and female version but all the rest are pretty much stock except printed and built at around 75%. I did mount them all to 1 inch Octagon bases for extra stability (2mm mag sheet) and it seems to help finish them. Some of the edging looks a little rough but I was having issues with edge bleed. The pictures pretty much show the whole story so enjoy :). If you need help building the troops check out this you tube video.

Male and Female Soldiers

Awaiting Parade

In Units On Parade

Close Up Single Unit

Mortar Crew (Need to build two more)

Science Team Equipped with Jet Packs

Mechanic, Medic, Grumpy Sergeant and Saboteur

Armory – Little Low On Standard Rifles – Weapons tubes were fiddly at 75%

Showing Size Scale

Next up will be all the Blue Falcon vehicles and then I’ll move on to the Black X’s so the Blue Falcons have someone to fight against. I’ll try and find someway to share the female troops somewhere so keep a weather eye open if your interested in those.

There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. –Aristotle

Flipit Blue Falcons – Commanders

Published November 9, 2013 Builds , Papercraft , Wargaming 4 Comments
Tags: blue falcons, build, flipit, flying lead, miniature, miniatures, paper miniatures, Paper Standee, Papercraft

I really like the models for the flipit wargame made by newobimj, probably as they have a fun chibi look. As a bonus they come with there very own wargame called flipit for which newobi mj has designed 4 full factions. The game has been around a fair while 4+ years and basically these have been on my to build list for about that long.

I finally settled on a scale to build the armies at I spent way to much time trying to decide on a scale with numerous test builds occuring between 100% and 65%. After comparing all the test builds I finally settled on a 75% scaling. This makes the little weapon tubes still build-able and the miniatures themselves stand about 28mm to the eye or 35mm to the top of the head/helmet. I plan on building all four factions and using them for flipit but also defiance and of course flying lead.

First up I decided to build the Blue Falcon faction, I spent sometime working out how to assemble a few of the models as well as throwing together a few Custom models. First up I’ve completed the Commanders of the blue falcons faction; Air Marshal Roce Bleauciel, Serge Cargoe and Acel DeSparrow, I modified all of them so they use the karate chop hands and mounted them permanently to octagon bases.

First up we have Serge Cargoe, semi cyborg mad scientist type who gets around in an exo-skeleton wielding a nasty zap pistol and lightning glove. The assembly of the standard figure was pretty easy simple cylinder and a round top head. The exo-skeleton was a little tougher, I re-enforced each of the legs with wire in the middle and then mounted them to the backpack, bending them a little. I couldn’t find any instructions or any pictures of an already complete Cargoe so I made a best guess with the leg locations. Hopefully the wire will prevent any future miniature sag through the paper bending.

Next up we have Acel DeSparrow, Rocketeer and all round smiling hero. I made some minor adjustments to his helmet colour so it was more gold/brass then silver and knocked together a rocket blast so it looks like he is just lifting off the ground. I used a tank explosion available on the flipit forum to make the rocket fire and smoke. Looking at it I probably made the smoke and fire a little long.

Lastly we have the big cheese of the Blue Falcons Air Marshal Roce Bleauciel. I didn’t want to have him sitting at the same height as the other falcons so I found a nice Crate papercraft (scaled to about 80%) and placed the Air Marshal on top of the Crate. I was trying to make it look like the Air Marshal was giving a speech before the troops head into battle and so he’s not looking the same as all the other regular troops when placed on the table.

I found these a lot of fun to build and I’ve got more builds in the Blue Falcon faction coming shortly. If I could I’d share my 75% version of these files but unfortunately I can’t post in the flipit forum so for now you’ll have to scale them yourself. Later on if I get an okay to share or can post them in the flipit forum I’ll share them as I’ve done cut files as well. If I was building these guys again I would definitely edge in matching colour rather than in black but as I’ve now started in black edging they’ll all be black edged for consistency :).

Troop Builds here

Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one. – Dr. Seuss

Papercraft Build – Dungeon Plungin The Monsters

Published July 9, 2013 Board Games , Builds , Papercraft 2 Comments
Tags: build, Dungeon Plungin, gaming, miniature, miniatures, paper miniatures, Paper Standee

As part of getting myself back into the old paper craft miniature rhythm I had to (re)learn how to use my new cutter properly on my new PC. So for practice I decided to pull together another copy of Dungeon Plungin. I’d wanted to recreate a copy of Dungeon Plungin (DP) after my last half finished copy got soaked when the roof leaked, that was nearly 3 years ago so I’m well overdue to start a rebuild. I decided to print out and build all the monsters need for the current DP V3 and the new under development DP V4 (V3.8ish).

I’ve had some problems in the past with tall flat paper miniatures bending under there own weight, even when using 220gsm card glued back to back. To help strengthen the taller miniatures I added a wire spine. Basically I grabbed a cheap wire garbage bag tie (mine were paper wrapped) and cut it to length . Then I glued the tie vertically from the top of the miniature to the bottom. This gives the miniature some additional rigidity, it can still be bent and flattened but hopefully wont self bend/bow when in use.

Wire tie in approximate location were it’s glued between front and back

I built the DP V3 quests and monsters first, some of these already had cut files. For the practice I recreated most of the cut files from scratch. First up the Knocking Wall Quest, full of Imps, Devilings, Gremlins, Gargoyles and one minor Demon (big guy with wings). I played around with the colours on the miniatures so they are not all the same colour, other than that they are all stock standard.

Next we have the Orcish raider and Troll Lair Quest. Instead of building the basic miniatures needed for these two quests I built the full extended pack of Orc’s, Trolls and Goblins. I haven’t counted them all but I’m sure if I wanted to I could field a fairly decent Orc based Army and I’m not even certain all the miniatures are used in those two quests, still variety is the spice of life. I once again messed around with the colouring on a few of the miniatures.

The next quest is the Witch of the West Wood, Onemonk created the miniatures for the quest back in 2008 so they have a more Onemonk feel and the whole quest and the monsters has a tongue in cheek feel with dire bunnies, squirrels and O-Wee-O guards. As with the other monsters in the other quests I did some minor recolours.

Last official quest for V3 DP is the Tomb of the Lich King. No recolours this time although I did spend sometime adding backs to the skeletons and reapers, then discovered Erf_Beto had already done this, you can grab his back and front versions here and here. A long time ago I did mod some standing rats and you can see those in my builds below, you can grab those from the Oversoul Games forum.

There are 5 Quests currently for DP V4 (V3.8). Some of the quests reuse the miniatures from V3, some are a mix and others are all new. For the moment you can grab all the V4 (3.8) play test stuff from the Oversoul Games forum. One of the major changes between V3 and V4 is the toughness of the monsters so the mix and levels are a little different. I did not make any mods to any of the miniatures as they are currently subject to change as the version evolves.

The first quest is the Dogface Demon quest filled with Kobolds and a single Gremlin, which I’ll grab from the ones above:

Next Quest for DP V4 is Rock Solid, it’s your fairly normal rat, snake, spider cave quest with an earth elemental for the Boss. The rats I’ll reuse from the Lich King Quest above.

Both The Where Wolf , Castle Gryphon and Trolls Lair quest, consist of Greenskins, Wolves and a few gargoyles, no new monsters so no extra pictures for those three quests. In the base monster pack for V4 there are other monsters included either for you to create your own quests or possibly as the Oversoul crew have something planned. Below in no particular order are the additional monsters included in the base monster pack for DP V4.

With the DP miniatures I assembled them as standard tab bases, this allows me to store the monsters in a smaller space and perfectly flat plus make use of some new bases I’ve ordered which I’ll post about once they arrive. As for my DP set I just need to finish creating some room decorations, primarily chests and maybe a few tables. Then it’s onto the hero’s and my Dungeon Plungin set will be finished and ready for the next Friday/Saturday afternoon of board gaming with friends.

Papercraft Build – Undersea Kingdom

Published November 13, 2012 Builds , Papercraft Leave a Comment
Tags: Mayhem in Paper, miniature, miniatures, paper miniatures, Paper Standee, Papercraft, scifi, Standee, undersea kingdom, volkite

Squirmydad (Mayhem in Paper)across on the cardboard warrior forum designed a paper version of the Juggernaut from the Undersea Kingdom TV show/series. Right about now I can see most people scratching their heads as I was. Basically it was a 1936 TV series put together to compete against Flash Gordon. It’s not what you would call a high budget series. However when I saw some of the pictures that Squirmydad posted from the series, it tugged at my nostalgia bone in particular the Volkites (large robot guys) . I suspect they remind me of the monsters from the early Doctor Who episodes I used to watch as a kid, you know the high budget monsters from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Doctors stint in the TARDIS.

Volkite Upclose

Squirmydad was almost finished the model so I thought I’d try my hand at drawing some Volkites. As Squirmydad was almost finished the Juggernaut I drew and finished these fast. These are the quickest I’ve ever completed some paper mini’s basically from scribbling on the page to 5 finished mini’s was about 3 maybe 4 days. I did use every trick I could think of such as mirroring bits and reusing as much as possible. I was pretty happy with the results although I did fall into my usual bad habits drawing them but still learnt a lot. The one mistake I did make which made it to the final versions available is that the fold line on the tabs is about 1/64 (1/2mm) to high so you’ll need to score just below the line not on it (I must have bumped the line at some point).

Juggernaut with Volkites in foreground

Squirmydad did an excellent job on the Undersea Kingdom Juggernaut, considering the flimsy reference pictures available I think he has nailed the vehicle almost perfectly. The model is very easy to build, I assembled it in one afternoon and it has that classic Sci-fi retro feel. Squirmydad has also done a set of Robo/Silhouete SD GSD files so for those who own one of those cutters the model is even easier to build. There is a full sheet of clear instructions as well, although for the most part the model goes together easily enough and I only checked the instructions twice.

Juggernaut by Squirmydad – Mayhem in Paper

I managed to finish up 5 Volkites, 4 with guns and 1 with just traditional claws. Now I’m not entirely sure I got the colouring right as the show was in black and white but I coloured the models to give them that retro sci-fi feel without going to over the top. I then didn’t do my normal trick of procrastinating over the small imperfections and simply wrapped them up and called them done.

Volkites ready to Invade

Lastly a picture with the Volkites around their Juggernaut vehicle. Now the observant of you will note that the Volkites cant actually enter their vehicle, being to tall. Interestingly if you look at the original shots of the Juggernaut and the Volkites from the TV series you’ll notice that in the show they likewise couldn’t physically fit in the Juggernaut. So I think somehow Squirmydad and I got the scaling spot on and as with all good 1930’s sci-fi you’ll have to get inventive with your scene cutting 🙂

Volkites and Juggernaut

Squirmydad had one last piece of fun with the models and did a quick 1930’s inspired movie poster of the Juggernaut and Volkites.

If you’d like a copy of the models you can grab them from the Mayhem in Paper website:

Link to Mayhem in Paper Freebies Section

Link to Juggernaut and Volkite Zip

Hope you have fun terrorizing your 1930’s sci-fi pulp hero’s 🙂

Trying out Axles and Alloys

Published October 21, 2012 Gaming Reports Leave a Comment
Tags: axlesandalloys, miniature, miniatures, Wargaming

Over the weekend myself and a number of friends got together to give Axles and Alloys II a try. The get together was a little impromptu so I had to throw some terrain together the night before, basically just some polystyrene covered with sand and quickly spray painted red/brown.

For the game itself I modified the rules slightly so we could use a bunch of micro machine cars (about n scale/15mm). Although it doesn’t quite have the impact on the table it did make the game much easier to transport. For using the micro machine cars I used the tried and true method of converting inchs to cm and it seemed to work out well with the rules still holding together very well. The board we played on was only about 45cm x 75 cm ( 1.5 x 2.5 feet) and it did get a little crowded with 7 players, but this just meant more mayhem. I wrote up some quick vehicle cards and for each game we shuffled and dealt the cards out so no-one had the same car twice.

We played a total of two games with basic race to the finish goal. The first game resulted in all player vehicles being out of commission by the end of the 5th turn, except one. This was mostly caused by the figure 8 track design and a rather cramped first turn which resulted in much ramming, weapons fire and collisions with terrain as skids and drifts were misjudged, also a lack of anyone using the brake pedal didn’t help 🙂 :

The above photo was taken just after the second turn at this point the Orange and Green cars driver had been killed after a wicked burst of MG fire from the rear by the blue car. The blue car had been savagely rammed by both the yellow 4×4 and orange and green car in the 1st turn. As you can see even though it was our first game a mountain of mines and spikes had already been dropped.

Similar time as the above shot but you can see the field was fairly well spread out the purple dragster in the middle went on to win the game.

This was near the end of the game, the yellow 4×4 slide into the towering rock cluster after I misjudged drift. The two blue cars ended up ramming each other and then getting out of control and colliding with each other a second time. We were unsure if this meant another ram but we played it that way and it destroyed both cars, one due to driver death. You can just see the purple dragster in the background heading of to win the race.

Final positions of everyone at the end of game 1, the lime green car on the right edge had tried a massive drift circle and had been planning to try and cut off, then ram to death the purple dragster but came unstuck on some rocks. This left the purple dragster as the last car alive.

For the second game we changed the board layout so it was a simple Horseshoe track with 1 lap to win. This seemed to help with 4 cars still surviving when one crossed the finish line.

Cars lined up at the blue start finish line for race 2. Three cars are obscured by the terrain in the lower left of the shot.

Just after the 1st turn with a few cars having moved for their second, two cars used the ramp suffering a little damage but it was a heap of fun for the players and to watch.

This was at the top turn, once again the purple dragster was in the lead. Just after the purple dragster passed around the turn, there were 2 head on collisions which knocked out a couple of cars. The purple dragster itself was rammed head on to try and knock it out and slow it down but unfortunately it didn’t quite work and the purple dragster once again went on to win.

As part of the setup one piece of terrain had a hole in it and we designated the leading edge a ramp, so a car could fly up the ramp and jump out the hole. The purple dragster did this but due to the ramming damage incurred and then hitting the ramp to fast was almost destroyed on landing. The dragster crossed the line with 2 damage box’s remaining.

Much fun was had by all over the two games and the rules themselves are written very well, we only had a couple of minor spots were we weren’t quiet sure what the rules should work, but we simply worked something out. Due to the success of the game I plan on mounting the micro machines to bases permanently and giving them a quick coat of paint. As a group we are more likely to do pickup one off games and so to randomize the vehicles a little more we may put in place some form of random weapon assignment mechanism. The only other minor change we might make is to double the weapon damage we found ramming was much more deadly than weapons and want to encourage weapon use a little more.

If your looking for a fun car game, which doesn’t take itself to seriously give Axles and Alloys II a try, for the price (free) I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Have Fun 🙂

UFO MK I – Papercraft

Published November 28, 2011 Mine , Papercraft , Wargaming 1 Comment
Tags: flying unit, miniature, miniatures, okumarts, Paper Army, paper craft, paper miniatures, Papercraft, UFO, Wargamming

I’ve spent the past 2-3 weeks working on finishing a papercraft UFO, primarily to use with Okumarts retro aliens. The UFO itself is reasonably small (75mm/3inches across), this does mean some of the parts are quiet difficult to build due to the size of the parts. The Guns are the most fiddly followed by the canopy and then the rest of the UFO. I will warn that this is not an easy model to assemble and you will need at least 2 hours to cut and assemble the clear canopy version, the first time you make it. I have also included a solid coloured canopy if you don’t want all the internal detail

Quick Download Links

UFO Mk1 Final – PDF (25mb)

Instructions UFO Mk1 (5mb)

UFO Mark One Studio (rename extension to “.studio” after download)

I designed the base UFO in sketchup and ran through several different designs before settling on an Octogon as the bases for the UFO.

For each of the initial designs I also built a rough version in plain white card to see how hard the design was to build. I added some small plastic beads to the below gun ends to help give them that more retro laser/gun look similar to how Okumarts drew his weapons.

To try and make the instructions a little clearer after I’d flattened the model and textured it. I laid the texture over the top of the sketchup model and created some renders for use in the instructions. Below are some renders I made up for the instructions, you can see the rest in the instructions :). I learnt a lot about what not to do when trying to texture a model in Skechup and will be much more careful with the layout of any future models.

As far as texturing goes it was fairly standard GIMP work, I did add two base texture types a sort of brushed metal look and a more enamel paint look. I put in a large number of colour options as not all the colours worked with both texturing looks, plus I’ve learn’t to keep my texture and colour layers seperate so that adding a new colour is just a matter of duplicate existing layer and flood fill. I also split the base and cockpit out so you can have a coloured top, a metal coloured base and then if you like a different coloured metal texture for the inside of the cockpit. I added a few other customizable bits such as; different insignia, different light colours, several different engine globe colours and two different clear canopy designs (see final picture (type two) and test build (type one)) . There is a studio cut file for the model (use the new Studio Designer to open), I included both an SD and Cameo layer for cutting, the SD is the default layer so if your cutting on the new Cameo don’t forget to turn on the correct layer before printing (if anyone does use a Cameo to cut the file let me know if it works :)). I have hand cut and cut with the Silhouette SD and due to the size and scale of some parts on the UFO if you can afford the time I’d definitely recommend hand cutting as the human hand and eye are still more accurate than the SD, with the small parts on the UFO even a small mis-alignment during cutting can cause problems during assembly of the UFO.

Newspaper Mockup: City Scape by Barive, Text inspired by H.G.Wells War of the Worlds

I actually had a lot of fun putting this model together, with both the dragonfly and dunebuggy I used a lot of time up learning how to best lay the files out etc which meant a bundle of re-work for both. Although still a lot of work the UFO seemed to flow much better and I knew what to do to help speed up certain steps and what to expect in regards to amount of work at each step. A rough breakdown of time is about a 1/3 on the mesh, 1/3 on texturing/layout and 1/3 on instructions.

I’m off to build a few more UFO’s so that my retro aliens can face of against the terra force marines and at least have some chance of competing against the Dunebuggy and Dragonfly. Hope you enjoy the model :).