Zombicide: Green Horde – Hedges

Zombicide: Green Horde Hedges

I know that title sounds super-exciting, right? Basically, Wave 2 of my Zombicide Green Horde Kickstarter pledge finally arrived a week or so ago, and after having a look and poke around, I found that I’d ordered 2 sets of the 3D Plastic Hedges, as well as 2 sets of the 3D Plastic Obstacles.

Obviously, these will make games of Zombicide nicer looking (which I haven’t played in more than a year now – though to be fair we did play it weekly for a year or more). More obviously, these have a lot of potential use outside of the singular board game. Which even more completely obviously, is why I bought so many of the things.

Zombicide: Green Horde - Hedges

A Marine, Survivor and Reiksgard provide scale.

They looked pretty decent right out of the box – certainly good enough for boardgamers to enjoy. But that doesn’t cut it for us wargamers, so I sprayed them with a darker olive drab colour, then gave them a zenithal spray with a lighter green (both from my custom spray can collection). Marouda then told me that she didn’t think they were dark enough, so I decided to fix that with a dark wash. Since hitting 40 of these would use a bloody lot of wash (Athonian Camoshade, perhaps?) I decided to break out a couple of dropper bottles of my pre-mixed mediums and go the Les Bursley route of making my own – which is why I ended up posting Les’ tutorial here the other day.

Zombicide: Green Horde - Hedges

“Quantity has a quality all it’s own” – Uncle Joe (probably).

The first wash didn’t dry as dark as I would have liked, so I mixed up another, darker tone, and applied that to the lower-mid area of the hedges, and that seemed to do the job. Then a bright green drybrush, paint the rocks, dapple the rocks (I briefly considered the liquid greenstuff-dab technique to give them texture… but doing it on all those rocks across 40 hedges? – no thanks!

Zombicide: Green Horde - Hedges

There’s a decent amount of coverage with the hedges alone. Add in fences, buildings and scatter and there’s a good chunk of table sorted.

So then I gave them a dark wash, and called it a day after nixing the idea of another drybrush and then weathering powders. Again – commonsense. There’s 40 of these bloody things, and nobody is going to be staring too closely at the rocks on their bases.

Zombicide: Green Horde - Hedges

Enough to make a Hedge Maze, albeit a small one!

Gloss spray varnish, let cure for a day, then satin spray varnish – now they’re done! When you see me talk about a “significant” amount of scatter terrain as a project goal shortly, this is the sort of thing I envision. A couple of these isn’t much, but this many is a worthy task.

Zombicide: Green Horde - Hedges

Pretending to be the Bocage…

What I like is the fact that they can easily work across many genres and locales. Modern, Historical, 40k, urban, rural and well-maintained gardens. I can even see them being used for 15mm Bocage hedgerows as needed, since those Normandy hedgerows are huge!

Conan Kickstarter’s Black Dragons (June-It ’18)

Conan Kickstarter’s Black Dragons

A few more models from the Conan Kickstarter today. Black Dragons. These figures come as a set of 5. I just got the one set, but I could see the value in other people picking up two or four sets to use them as units in wargames or as villainous mooks in their own custom scenarios. I’ve painted them in a scheme influenced by the box art, but with a few more spot colours and metal shades added in, as they looked a bit too plain in all-iron. Huh, it seems like the little nodule that I thought was a forehead-gem is supposed to be a spike.

“Then a medley of voices reached his ears, and the room was thronged with the finally roused people of the court–knights, peers, ladies, men-at-arms, councillors–all babbling and shouting and getting in one another’s way. The Black Dragons were on hand, wild with rage, swearing and ruffling, with their hands on their hilts and foreign oaths in their teeth.”

Robert E. Howard – The Phoenix on the Sword

So it turns out that the Black Dragons are Conan’s bodyguards, and that their Captain, Pallantides is a stretch goal that I’m sure I’ll find inside the big box eventually.

Conan Kickstarter's Black Dragons

I picked these guys out a couple of months ago as they looked like they’d be an easy win – what with mostly being covered in armour. As it happened, they weren’t super hard to paint, but they also weren’t fun at all, either – so they took a bit longer. The small size, combined with loss of detail, ill-defined details and messiness in their lines due to the PVC made them pretty shitty models to be quite honest. They basically got finished due to this month’s challenge theme being enough to motivate me to get them done and out of the way. Hopefully Captain Palindrome will be a nicer, or more fun model to paint. Conan Kickstarter's Black Dragons, Wolves, Baal-Pteor, Demon of the Earth, Giant TIger

Here’s a shot of them alongside their Conan-Kickstarter brethren that I’ve painted. Ok, so I skipped the scatter-terrain barrels and only put out two of the Wolves. At this rate I’ll end up getting all of the add-on boxed models done before I crack open the core game and paint a Conan figure!