Apocalypticum playtest, trying out vehicle rules

Last week we had our second playtest session for Apocalypticum, the forthcoming post-apocalyptic ruleset from Ganesha Games. Feedback from the game creator after our initial session helped us fine-tune our expectations for this game. We ended up devising a 3-player scenario — due to a snowy Chicago evening that stymied some gamers' travel plans.

The game started with a biker gang (using the Red Vultures stats from the rulebook; strangely there were no motorcycles on the table, so the gang must have walked in) guarding a collection of parked vehicles in the wastes outside Black Rain City. Presumably the vehicles' drivers were at a secret meeting and had left their armored cars and trucks under a close guard.

And that's a good thing, because two more gangs — KGB agents and Ruin Raiders — were approaching the impromptu parking lot from opposite sides of the table. Victory went to the first gang that could successfully start a car and drive it off the table. Here's the table near the start of the game. The vehicles are in the center and the two invading gangs are approaching from the left and right.


Karl played the biker gang in the center of the table, while Jon played the KGB team and I handled the Ruin Raiders.

Our opening moves saw Karl attempting to defend the vehicles by splitting his forces to engage both encroaching squads. Here my raiders take up positions behind a makeshift barricade to fire on the biker gang.


A melee quickly developed as the bikers moved closer to the raiders. What would have been a killing shot turned into a flub as the lead biker rolled a malfunction, causing his rusty pistol to break during the heat of the battle! The token next to him denotes his busted gun.

Across the table, Karl had a difficult time stopping the ceaseless advance of the KGB agents. After several rounds of ineffectual shooting (this became a theme for the night, alas) Jon realized he needed to go for the victory conditions and try to start up a vehicle. I tried to pace him by sending my raiders after the rusted vehicles parked on the battlefield.


In the Apocalypticum rules, vehicles are pretty much just scenario objectives on the battlefield. You can try to start 'em up, but you must roll a 6 on a d6. We modified that for this scenario to be a 5 or 6 on a d6, but we still found that not a single vehicle worked — so we further modified the scenario to say that the final vehicle, after all others had been tried, would be functional. In practice this meant that we tried the first 4 vehicles, to no avail, and then a mad dash began for the final, working vehicle.


(Sidenote: Black rain, a weather event that featured prominently into our previous battle report, came and went in the space of a single turn in this scenario, and it didn't have much of an effect on the game.)

Anyway, as the game approached its conclusion, my raiders desperately tried to stop Jon's KGB men from escaping in the last functioning vehicle, but we had spent too much time fighting off Karl's bikers. The communists started up the truck and rumbled off toward their side of the table — but some lucky shots from the bikers and raiders took out both tires on the vehicle, sending it skidding to a halt.

We called the game after this point. It was definitely a draw — Jon's KGB guys had claimed the functioning vehicle, but the combined shooting of Karl's bikers and my ruin raiders had stopped his escape.

Afterward we took stock of the game and discussed the rules. Here's something crazy — not a single figure was killed in this game! We each finished the game with the exact same number of guys that we started the game with. Where is the bloodshed and carnage? We unanimously agreed that Apocalypticum is just not deadly enough. No one could gain the upper hand because the combat stats were all compressed into a pretty narrow range of values. Guns that confer a +1 or +2 bonus to shooters didn't give us the sort of "outright death" results that should have come from a fast, furious gun battle in a post-apocalyptic car park.

I'm sure once the game is published it will have a much more detailed armory with heavy weapons, ray guns and other high-tech items to help increase the violence. I also understand that Apocalypticum is a campaign-oriented game, and in a campaign you don't always want your guys to die. But in this game everything felt extremely underpowered.

The vehicle rules worked OK, although they should almost certainly be modified for scenarios that require vehicles to be driven. We very nearly didn't find a single functioning vehicle on the battlefield. Here's the final shot of the game, showing Jon's KGB agents aboard a wastelands truck as they made their escape.


Despite the lack of carnage, we agreed that we really liked how the game played. It just needs a bit more brutality to increase the body count and make games more decisive.

— Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Miniatures you've never seen: High Command sci-fi

Here at Chicago Skirmish Wargames, we're big proponents of 28mm scale tabletop wargaming — on a budget. As well as buying from affordable outlets like Mega Minis, EM4 and Denizen, we also acquire lots of figures from companies or model lines that are now out of production. This occasional series of posts will dig deeper into the great lines of OOP miniatures that we've discovered in bargain bins, swap meets, auctions, and the other seedy locales where miniatures are traded.

Today's miniatures you've never seen: High Command sci-fi from Folio Works

This shrink-card of miniatures was offered to me by a friend at Bartertown who knows of my fondness for odd sci-fi minis. These are High Command HC 3/2 Protectorate Officers.


It's marked at DM14.90, which I assume is Deutschmarks. This pack has been on quite a journey over the past 20 years — from England, to Germany and the USA! The rear of the card has neat pictorial instructions on how to attach the weapons to their miniatures, as well as details about the date (1991) and country of origin (England).


From what I've been able to gather, Folio Works was a relatively short-lived company started by two ex-Games Workshop employees. Birthed in the early 90s, it was gone before Rogue Trader gave way to 2nd edition Warhammer 40,000. They produced a Fantasy Warlord fantasy line and a High Command sci-fi line.

Though short-lived, the figures compare well to similar early-90s miniatures and were notable for including separate metal weapons for each pack of figures, a feature that wasn't very common those days. The High Command line had figures similar to GW's Space Marines and Imperial Guard, as well as sci-fi Ratmen and Lizardmen. Some of the fantasy figures are still rumored to be produced today by other companies. Click here for more information about Folio Works and their figure lines. (EDIT: Just a few hours after this post went live, we received word that UK-based Kennington Figures still produces most of the fantasy and sci-fi figures from this line! Thanks Mike!)

As mentioned above the figures themselves compare favorably to their contemporaries. These
Protectorate Officers seem like pretty blatant compatible-with-GW-figures aimed at the 40k market.


Clearly the two figures on the right are exactly the same figure with a coat sculpted over the one on the far right. This adding or subtracting of detail to make one sculpt go further was a fairly common practice in the past, as anyone who has collected Necromunda figures will attest.


They scale fairly well with current Games Workshop offerings. When the soles of the feet are aligned, the swordsman is the same height as the GW plastic Cadian Imperial Guardsman (converted with a Pig Iron head), and the other is slightly shorter. Of course, the sculpting isn't quite up to the standards of today's generation of miniatures.


The gun sprue is nice, featuring some pretty clear copies of a GW laspistol and autopistol, along with a third gun that is somewhere between an SMG and a bolter. I imagine that hobbyists wishing to use these figures for GW games might toss out the weapons sprue altogether and just use GW weapons.


All in all, I'm pretty pleased with these figs. They'll probably be painted up as commissars when I get around to completing my Imperial Guard platoon composed entirely of Demonblade Shockforce Troopers (now sold by MegaMinis).

Coincidentally, researching these figs led to the discovery of the origin of a couple of sci-fi Ratmen that I had recieved a while back. Apparently the critters below are Ratten from High Command, though I can't tell which pack they belong to.




So there you have it: Folio Works' High Command miniatures, a long-lost line of figures from the golden-olden days of Rogue Trader. Good luck and good hunting for these figs — and if anyone has a few more Protectorate or Ratten figures they don't need, I may be willing to take them off your hands...

— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Playtesting Apocalypticum, the forthcoming ruleset by Ganesha Games

Last week our club had the pleasure of playtesting a draft version of the upcoming Apocalypticum ruleset by Ganesha Games.

Apocalypticum is a post-apocalyptic game, essentially a modified version of Ganesha's Mutants and Death Ray Guns title, which is itself inspired by Song of Blades & Heroes, our club's favorite fantasy skirmish game. So you can see how Apocalypticum seems tailor-made for a game group such as ours.

Mutants and Death Ray Guns seems inspired by a Gamma World-type vision of the post apocalypse, with robots, mutant plants and other wierdness. Apocalypticum, on the other hand, is a darker, grittier setting like those imagined in films like The Road Warrior, The Road, The Book of Eli, The Stand and others, where it's mostly desperate bands of humans fighting each other for survival.

It's worth noting that Apocalypticum's force lists are designed specifically around the post-apocalyptic miniatures produced by Lead Adventure, though forces can be custom built as well.

Here are the forces used in our playtest.

Ruin Raiders, painted by me


Tunnel Cutthroats, painted by Patrick


We used a 4x4 layout featuring a burned out city with trenches running through it from a long-forgotten war.


The game scenario involved two computer terminals in the center grey building and right black building. The team would have to reach a terminal, open the computer and then download 10 bits of information (a d6 roll at the beginning of each successive turn indicated how much info was retrieved).

My opponent, Tim, and I both went after the computer in the middle of the board with our opening moves. This picture shows Tim closing in on the front of the ruined multi-level building housing a computer core.


A few lucky activation rolls and I was quickly at the computer and had it open. Here's my one gang member who in the process of downloading data while the rest of the group moves off to defend the building.


Tim came head on to the building, but we found that Apocalypticum's rules for opening doors made it quite difficult for his gang to enter the building.


Sending my gangers up to higher levels, my leader then tossed a frag grenade down on Tim's Cutthroats. The grenade didn't do much, but it did send a few of his raiders scrambling back over the side of the trench.


A few rounds of fire between the forces on the roof and those on the ground resulted in no casualties.


Tim tried again to breach the door, this time with a group effort, but was unsuccessful. The rules for forcing doors are really tough! Must be all the skulls.


My raider at the console grabbed enough data to complete the necessary 10 bits and win the game. The leader rejoices.



Here are a few observations about the game and the rules. Some of these notes will make more sense to those familiar with Song of Blades and Heroes (SBH), Mutants and Death Ray Guns, and other Ganesha Games products.

• Black Rain — Apocalypticum takes place in a very specific setting: Black Rain City, a radiation-soaked, ruined urban metropolis inspired by any number of crumbling Eastern European cities. As a result of the apocalypse, black storm clouds hover over the city most of the time, periodically disgorging toxic sludge onto the terrain below. When the rules call for it, Black Rain appears or disappears every time a player rolls two failures in activation and passes the play to the other player, called a turnover. The phenomenon causes a -1 penalty to shooting and makes weapons more likely to break. While it didn't seem to have a huge effect on shooting, Black Rain came and went 5 times throughout the game.
  
  
• Lethality in combat — Our game was not very lethal, and none of our characters was knocked out of action. Most of the characters had relatively low combat scores which were enhanced by the weapons we were using. Bonuses from terrain and hard cover on the tabletop negated most of the weapons' bonuses — and since terrain was plentiful in our game, we had lots of knocked down or recoiling characters, but no outright kills. In SBH, which is mostly focused on D&D-style melee combat, characters that are knocked down don't tend to survive very long. In a shooting-focused game like Apocalypticum, it's much harder to finish off a character who has been injured. Other clubmates who played the game earlier that evening tried other tactics, such as stepping out of cover to gain a better line of sight on enemies — something we didn't do, as all our characters were shooting at each other from buildings and trenches.
  
  
• Turnovers — Between the two of us, Tim and I rolled a lot of double failures when activating our gangs. Most of our characters were more difficult to activate compared to our fantasy warbands in SBH, making failures more frequent. The turnovers did slow gameplay a bit, and caused the Black Rain to come and go frequently throughout the evening.
  
  
• Abstracted weapons — In the playtest draft we received, there were only a handful of firearms listed, and all were prone to jamming or breaking. I liked this aspect of the rules, as it enhances the scavenged post-apocalyptic tone, where everything is held together by rusty nails and a prayer.

Overall, I enjoyed this game immensely. It feels like a ruleset that is focused more on scenarios than kill-em-all battles, and terrain is very important to survivability. I also like the fact that the rules are based on Mutants and Death Ray Guns, and not Ganesha's modern-combat ruleset Flying Lead.

Flying Lead was not a bad game, but it had far more granularity in its approach to firearms, and there were many more variables in terms of shooting modifiers and results of firing. I prefer the more streamlined Mutants/Apocalypticum approach. That said, there are an impressive number of special rules in this game that really can make a character unique. For this game, we used stock characters from the book, but I look forward to making our own custom characters in the future.

Our next trial for the game comes in two weeks, when we will hopefully be able to try out some of the vehicle rules. Check back for more updates!

— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Big battles in Song of Blades & Heroes

Karl and I got together recently to try out some big battles in Song of Blades & Heroes, our go-to skirmish game (and the ruleset that helped this game club coalesce in the fall of 2010!).

Though it has a well-designed rules engine, Song of Blades & Heroes is definitely meant to be played around the 300-point benchmark, which equates to anywhere from 5 to 10 models per side. Seeing as how our club has dozens of SBH games under its collective belt, Karl and I decided to push the envelope a little bit and try out a 500-point game, followed by a 1,000-point game.

Playing at this level required two important rule tweaks: We required 1 leader for every 250 points on the table, and we allowed each player to fail one additional quality roll before his turn ended. Normally in SBH, if a player rolls two or more failures when trying to activate a figure, his turn ends immediately, even if he hasn't activated all the guys on his side. With this change, it gives the player one last chance to get something going, even after he fails once.

Both of these changes enhanced the game immensely and really made things hum at the 1,000-point threshold.

In the first game, Karl's 500-point elven warband faced off against my 500-point dwarven squad. In fantasy, the elf/dwarf animosity is a known quantity, so it was a cinch to come up with a plausible scenario: the two warbands were trying to take control of a small hamlet located on the windswept frontier. Whoever controlled 2 of the 3 buildings on the table by turn 6 would be the winner.

As it was, the 500-point game was hardly a contest. Karl's force was much more optimized than mine ("That's very 40k of you," I recall saying as he carefully positioned his troops to box out my dwarf leader), and he won a clean victory by slaughtering my poor dwarves and occupying 2 buildings.


In the second game, Karl recruited another warband, this one composed of fanciful woodland critters, alongside his elves. I added another 500-point hobgoblin warband as allies for my dwarves. We set up another scenario using a big ol' 3-tier hill in the center of the board. The objective was to seize the high ground and hold it until the end of the game. The side with the most troops atop the hill would be the winner.

Then we added a fun little wrinkle: a "fast travel" rule that allowed models to enter a passage behind a waterfall and emerge, one turn later, from a cave at the base of the hill objective. Here's the layout:


We actually used this rule quite a bit, and it resulted in some fun photos, such as this dwarf warrior emerging from the caverns to aid his fellows atop the hill. That is SO METAL!


At 1,000 points, we found that our turns took a bit longer than a typical game, but the house rule allowing two "fail out" rolls meant that we were still able to mobilize our dudes. Karl sent his elves charging to the top of the hill, where they met my huge troll warchief and his big honkin' axe. He was full to the brim with special rules (that's very 40k of me) and he held the elves at bay for several turns before dying.

Across the table, a major fight was developing around the waterfall. My dwarves attempted to create a stout blue line to block the entrance to the cave passageway, thus denying Karl the chance to use it to transport his guys across the table. We quickly added another house rule about the waterfall: it was actually holy water, and models standing in it received a bonus to combat! Here's how that scrum looked.


Yes, that's an anthropomorphic enchidna with a sword fighting against my dwarf crossbowman.

(Side note: It's a lot of fun playing with gamers who aren't super competitive and "in it to win it." The fact that Karl and I were able to come up with flavorful house rules on the fly, all in the name of adding some coolness to our game, speaks to the sort of game environment we've tried to foster with Chicago Skirmish Wargames. I think this sentiment describes just about everyone who we've ever gamed with at a club event.)

Anyway, after my troll warchief was killed, the game started going sideways for me. I still pulled off a few upsets, though: I used my flying manticore to swoop in and kill Karl's elf leader, which resulted in a morale check for his guys, and I sent my two mounted knights galloping up the hill to join in the fight the last minute. Here's how the table looked just before my troll warchief bit the dust and we called the game.


On the middle tier of the hill you can see my four hobgoblins swarming up the slope while Karl's two pesky critters (a hyena and a cougar) harried my flank. Atop the hill, my troll warchief is doing his thing against a gaggle of elves, most of whom are wisely keeping their distance.

All in all it was a fun game, and we proved that larger SBH battles are not outside the realm of possibility, at least for experienced players.

— Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

With liberty and brush dipping for all!

Though I love the look of painted figures on dramatic terrain, I find painting to be one of my least-favorite parts of wargaming.

Since I discovered dipping a few years ago, it has revolutionized my hobby experience. I'm painting more figures, enjoying it more, getting better results and spending far less time per figure.

Dipping is a shortcut method, and advanced painters may find little of use here, but for those who want tabletop-quality models quickly, dipping is an excellent option. It is not only quick and easy, but can also be quite inexpensive. It seems that every other week the same questions about dipping appear on the forums I frequent — and to that mass of interest I present the following article on brush dipping.

What is dipping?
For the purposes of this article, dipping is the application of a polyurethane-and-stain combination product (referred to hereafter as the dip) to a miniature to create shading and highlighting. Traditional dipping involves the immersion of the figure in the dip. Brush dipping refers to using a brush to apply the dip instead of immersion, and is the subject of this article.

What does dipping do?
Dipping is a time-saving painting technique that in one step achieves the following results:

• Gives a shading effect to the model
• Darkens the recesses of the model like a wash or ink
• Creates a pseudo-highlight as it settles away from the edges of the miniature leaving it lighter than the rest of the model.
• Provides an extremely durable protective coating on the figure.

Why brush dipping?
In the author's opinion, applying the dip with a brush (called the "splash on" method by some) is preferable to the immersion method for several reasons. First, it allows the hobbyist more carefully control the application of the dip. Second, by virtue of not requiring the painter to shake off the excess dip, it can be done indoors with far less mess, effort and preparation. Lastly, there is not a major difference in the results or the amount of time required.

Army Painter Quickshade vs. Minwax Polyshades Satin
Might as well get this one out the the way early. Much ink has been spilled on the interwebs over whether Army Painter Quickshade is a re-labeled variation of Minwax Polyshades, a highly specialized revolutionary wargaming hobby product, or something in between.

Having never used Army Painter products, I cannot say for certain how they compare to Minwax. However, I have extensive experience with Minwax and can recommend their products with confidence. Also, I appreciate the fact that they cost one-quarter to one-third the price of Army Painter's products. I will be using Minwax Polyshades names for this review, but for those using Army Painter, the approximate Quickshade-to-Polyshade equivalents are below.

Army Painter Quickshade/Minwax Polyshades equivalents and Description

• Soft Tone/Pecan — A light brown dip, best used for applications where only a little shading is called for. This is my least used dip, but good to have around.
• Strong Tone/Antique Walnut — A more heavily pigmented brown dip. This general purpose dip is good for almost everything. This is by far the most common dip I use.
• Dark Tone/Tudor — This is a unique dip with black pigment. It is best used with colors that you would not want to add a brown hue to. Blues and some greens can look great with this dip, though it is by no means limited to those colors. I find myself using this dip more and more frequently.

To choose the correct shade of dip for your project, I recommend visiting the extensive Army Painter Gallery pages. The galleries are searchable by game, army, and basecoat color and often provide side-by-side images of the results of the three different shades of dip.

Supplies

• Dip — See above. Minwax Polyshades are carried by most US hardware or home improvement stores. The exception is Tudor, which can be hard to find. I've either found it, or special-ordered it from ACE hardware. It's worth the effort. Army Painter products are available online or at most gaming stores.
• Paints and Brushes — Whatever you normally use for painting your figures is fine for this. I use cheap craft paints and brushes, but there are definite advantages to high quality supplies as well.
• Brushes specifically for the dip — Buy cheap brushes for applying the dip. As long as the bristles aren't too coarse, any ultra-cheapo craft brushes that aren't too small will do.
• Paint thinner/brush cleaner/mineral spirits — The dip is not a water-soluble product, so you will need some paint thinner for brush cleaning and general cleanup. Don't bother with specialized model thinner. A can of mineral spirits from the Hardware store will do just fine.
• A small glass jar to hold the mineral spirits.
• Newspaper for protecting your surface and wiping dip off your brush.
• Matte varnish, either the brush-on variety or a simple spray can. This will take away the shiny surface that the dip leaves when it dries.
  
  

Brush dipping step by step
Let's follow the brush dipping process with a group of fantasy elves.

1) Priming — As dipping will darken the model overall, I recommend a white basecoat to keep the initial painted colors brighter. Grey or colored primers may be acceptable, but try to keep them a shade or two lighter than you would otherwise use.


2) Painting — The basic dip technique requires only basic block colors. Neatly applied base colors are all that is necessary, though some folks will do a bit of highlighting before the dip. At this point, I also do the basing (sand, one color of paint) but no highlight/drybrush or foliage. As with the primer, remember to compensate for the darkening effect of the dip by using colors a shade or two brighter than you otherwise would.


3) Prepare the dip — Stir the can of dip to make an even consistency. It should be a pretty smooth flowing liquid. If it seems to viscous (sometimes it will thicken over time), you can stir in a bit of mineral spirits, but don't overdo it.

4) Apply the dip — With one of your dip brushes, apply the dip all over the model. One or two brushfuls of dip is usually enough for one 28mm infantry model.


5) Draw off the dip — With your dip brush, dab away dip from the places it is pooling on the model. Wipe your brush on the newspaper often. You want the dip to darken the recesses without completely filling them and to shade the other surfaces without making them look overly muddy or pooled. It's ok to leave some on the base to shade the basing as well. At this point and periodically throughout this process, it's a good idea to clean off your brush with some mineral spirits.

6) Final draw off — After you've drawn off the dip from the model, check again to make sure that it hasn't pooled up again, and then set it aside. If at any point in steps 4 through 6 you find you've missed a spot, you can always apply some more dip. The pics below show very clearly how the dip will pool and how it looks when the dip has been properly drawn off.



7) Last check — After a few minutes, or when you've finished 5 to 10 models, check your figures again. At this point, the dip will have thickened too much to be drawn off, but if you find that it's pooled or gotten too thick at any part of the model, a brush dipped in mineral spirits can be used to clean off that spot (or the entire model). When you've removed the offending gunk, you can repeat steps 4 through 6 for that section of the model.

8) Allow to dry for 24 to 48 hours — I highly recommend 48 hours if possible. If the dip is not completely dry, it can interfere with the later steps. Matte spray on top of not-quite-dried dip can produce an ugly crackled film.

9) Edge the base and do any additional painting — Most of my models will receive very little additional painting. The most common additional painting I do at this stage is painting the edge of the base, drybrushing the base texture, adding eyes and sometimes drybrushing any fur on the model. If you find that the glossy post-dip surface is too smooth and slippery for effective painting, you can proceed to step 10 (matte finish has more "tooth" than gloss finish), then return to step 9 and repeat step 10 again.

10) Matte finish — A matte finish will take away the glossy shine that occurs when the dip dries. It also provides an additional level of protection. I use clear matte spray from the hardware store or artists brush-on matte varnish, both of which are very affordable. Lately, I've been using the brush-on stuff more often, as it is much easier to apply at my desk, dries faster, and requires no additional setup.

10) Base foliage — Some folks prefer to add foliage to the base before the matte finish and some prefer to do so afterwards. I prefer before as the matte finish can help in adhesion, but it's by no means a firm rule. With the elves here, I was going for an early 90's Games Workshop look, so I went with the old-school method of ballast painted green with a drybrushed highlight and no foliage.


11) And you're done! Now get those miniatures to the table!

Want to see more? Here's a gallery of miniatures from my collection that have gotten their own dip treatment.

These two Void Junkers, the fantasy giant and the dwarf were dipped with Minwax Antique Walnut.




This Reaper Echidnox was also dipped with Antique Walnut. I include it as an example of heavy drybrushing applied after the dip.


This Scots Terrier shows that even over a fairly dark brown, the black pigment in Minwax Tudor can still provide contrast.


The Jaguar's spots were not painted first. The coloration is all due to the Tudor dip!


I hope you found this article useful. Any questions? Please post in the comments section and I'll do my best to respond.

— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

28mm on the cheap: Sci-fi hovercraft

While finalizing my entry for the Tomorrow's War Strike Force Contest over at Ambush Alley Games, I realized I needed an APC for my mercenary company to ride around in. I found a likely conversion candidate with this toy, part of a group that Karl picked up for cheap at a gaming auction.


It's from an old toy line from the 90s. The model is the right size to cart around a half-squad or a reinforced fireteam. It just took some quick conversion work and a rough coat of paint for this grav vehicle to fit in with my strike force. Here's a closeup of the finished product.


And here's a photo of the entire strike force. Almost all of the figures are Pig Iron Heavy Infantry troopers. Vote for me if I end up in the running for the fan favorite award!


— Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

28mm on the cheap: Post-apocalyptic vehicles, before and after

In my last "28mm on the Cheap" article, I offered a how-to guide on turning toy cars into gaming models. As promised, here's the followup article showing before and after shots of a few more toys-to-models conversions.

All these followed roughly the same easy process as in my previous article: disassemble, convert, prime black, drybrush colors, a few heavy washes, drybrush with tan for dust and seal. Thus, I haven't included much in the way of instructions or procedure. These are mostly just before and after pics to get you inspired, along with a few tips along the way.

Land Rover by Fast Lane/New Ray

Fast Lane is the Toys R Us box name for a slew of toys, and many of their 1/43 vehicles are simply New Ray toys in a different box. New Ray toys are partially metal with lots of plastic parts and are notable for producing well-detailed toy vehicles at a very affordable price. Here's a very similar toy to the one I purchased.

Some paint and a lot of additional bits later, here's the final result.

The machine gun seen in this almost-completed picture is on a pin so that it can be removed for storage or switched out with some of my other vehicles that also have holes to accomodate weapons with a pin mount.

Peterbilt Tanker Truck by Fast Lane/New Ray

Another New Ray product, this truck is no longer available at most Toys R Us stores, but can be found elsewhere. Here's the original toy:

This toy was extensively diassembled and modified.

In order to make it possible for figures to stand all around the tank, the bed was halved and widened and moved outward, and the tank was moved back.

1/43 trucks are large enough to accommodate 28mm drivers. This driver was made from various Games Workshop Imperial Guard body parts. The pictures don't show that one hand is on the wheel and one is on the shifter.

One other tip: The paint jobs on toy cars are so sturdy that after the initial paint-over, you can usually scratch the paint you applied away with your fingernail to reveal the logos from the original paint job. In this case I was able to bring back the Peterbilt logos on the front and sides of the hood.

GeoTrax Dumptruck by Fisher-Price

This Fisher price vehicle comes from the GeoTrax line of vehicles that run on plastic train tracks. It cost me a dollar at a resale shop. The GeoTrax line has many vehcles that have an exagerated style that can be adopted easily to sci-fi settings. Here's the original toy.


And here's the final product. The wheels came from another toy found at a resale shop.

The roof is detachable, and I removed the plastic ballast and electronics (it had light and sound) so figures can be placed in the bed as well.

Silverado Dually by Jada Battle Machines

Widely available (with new paint schemes each year), this 1/32 scale vehicle is covered with guns and it quite usable right out of the box.

I still decided to raise the bed gun, add stowage and railings (made from the roll cage that comes inside the truck cab) and give it a good dirtying.

At 1/32 it's a bit larger than my other cars, but looks fine on the table.

How do they compare?

Here's all but the Fisher-Price truck in a rough scale comparison. The Mahindra Scorpio (far left), Silverado and VW are 1/32. The Peterbilt Tank Truck and Land Rover are 1/43.


We've decided to run a post-apocalyptic "Road Warrior" scenario at Little Wars in April, so these vehicles will doubtless play a starring role at the convention!

— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member