Deadzone 2 shipped a little while back, and I’m finally getting around to wanting to play it.

I played the first edition a handful of times, and it was okay.  A little baroque in places, a little broke in other places.  Ultimately a game that wasn’t great, though, and probably deserved more work before publication. It saw a little action when it shipped and then nothing.

I’m hoping the second edition, which seems less messy, might be better. I won’t know until I actually give it a few spins, though, so I’m seeing if I can find enough interest at Huzzah for some exploratory game.

Sigmar only knows how much of this stuff I have, so it’d be nice if it were worth playing.

In anticipation of this, I hit the different Mantic Blog  posts with starting Strike Teams and packed each of the models needed for them (assembling a few where needed). Now, because the idea of painting more 1:72 is killing my soul, I’m painting up those models.   As you can imagine, it’s going fast: with a low model count and sculpts that are… serviceable, it’s easy to make speedy headway.

Below are some photos of what I knocked out last week.  (Apologies for them: I’m still trying to find a good replacement for the Picasa Desktop app.  I clearly over-relied on “I’m Feeling Lucky”.  Worse yet, I literally cannot figure out why this next photo insists on being rotated. )

Despite having painted all of the Rebs from the first wave, I still needed one more Yndij to use as a Leader. So: the Yndij Mercenary, Eddak P’mera.

These Steel Militia guys are the most obnoxious, fiddly, stupid goddamn models I’ve put together in a long, long time.  I’m all for flexibility, but these models should have had half as many pieces as they did.

That said: I’m pretty pleased with them. I like the way they look once they’re together, and I like the paint scheme I came up with for them.

The Hammerfall guys or whatever they’re called go together more easily than the Militia, but don’t look as good.  There are also some weird things to the sculpt. Not thrilled at the idea of painting more of them.

The Brokkr, on the other hand, I really like, but I as nice as the orange jumpsuits look in the studio scheme, I regret imitating them.  It’s a pain in the ass to work with those orange paints.

The Enforcer hard plastic kit is utter garbage. The Enforcer Pathfinder kit is… not perfect, but is light years better. They’re really coming a long way. Worth noting: there are clearly (once painted) torsos and arms that are female and torsos and arms that are male.  This is expressed by musculature and tone: there are no gigantic armored boobs where, and I applaud that.

You kind of need to be looking for it, though, because otherwise you end up with a female torso and swole as hell Arnold arms (like I did).

I’m very pleased with how the black came out here. It looks black, without being black. Going to have to make sure I hang onto my notes for these.

Next up, I’m wrapping up some Veer-myn (about which I have Thoughts), and then I’ll probably stop procrastinating and work on something useful. With the Veer-myn done, I’ll have all the starting strike teams painted save for the dumb-looking Enforcers, Marauders, and Asterians.