Category Archives: Board Games

Who Let The Dogs Out? Zombicide Dog Companions

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I’ve been waiting ages to use that awful pun. I just had to finish the last of the six Zombicide dogs first.

Zombicide Dog Companions, American Bulldogs

Moog and Gapard, the American Bulldogs

The American Bulldogs were the first dogs I got finished. I attempted to pretty much match the dogs up to their appropriate artwork, but also did their collars and leads in slightly different colours so that players could have a secondary colour thing to latch into visually. Also, six black collars and leads would have been boring.

Zombicide Dog Companions, German Shepherds

Martens and Bismuth, the German Shepherds

After finishing the Bulldogs, the others sat on my desk for literally months until I managed to force myself to paint the German Shepherds. Martens is easily my favourite paintjob of the bunch.

Zombicide Dog Companions, Blue Heelers

Lucien and Cherry, the Blue Heelers

And finally, I finished the last of the Blue Heelers. I didn’t mind doing Cherry, the ginger-brown one, but Lucian was annoying as all hell to do.

Despite the fact that they all came up pretty decently, I really didn’t enjoy painting the dogs. I’m not sure why, but I kinda just lost interest in them after the Bulldogs were done, and at that point they became a chore. It might have been the smaller size, or perhaps trying to match the colours closely to the figures’ cards. I’m really not sure.

I’ve seen people clip the stands off the dog models and glue them directly to their bases, but my group tends to play Zombicide a lot, and as a result, all of the models get a lot of handling. This means they need to be and stay especially robust – no flimsy models wanted here, and if I did the clipping I’d be concerned that their leaping poses with few contact points simply wouldn’t hold up to the amount of play that we do.

They provide a very powerful buff in the game. Our group no longer really bothers to give the Dogs much in the way of commands or orders except for occasionally early on in the game if someone lacks a decent melee weapon. We also use them for the extra search action, but mostly we use them for the bonus dice to melee attacks. We’re about to finish the Season 2 campaign done vanilla-style, excepting the addition of a few extra survivors so the 4 of us can play with 2 characters each, but once that’s done, we’ll be combining everything together and there’ll be some really nasty melee-centric characters. 2x Claw Hammers with 2x American Pitbulls and the Gas Mask? 14 dice melee per action that can take out any number of Vanilla, Toxic or Berserker Walkers, Runners or Zombie Dogs and the Pitbulls’ damage of 2 as backup for Fatty duties? Ouch!

Citadel TL13 Talisman Troll (1986)

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Another blast from the past today. The Talisman Troll. Remember when Games Workshop used to make boardgames? No, not “Specialist” (a title that came much later) minatures games that started in a big box, like Battlefleet Gothic or Necromunda or even Dark Future, but actual self-contained Board Games. Talisman was one of these, alongside things like DungeonQuest, Chaos Marauders (which was a card-based game about Orcs & Goblins), Block Mania (set in 2000ad’s world of Dredd), The Fury of Dracula and so forth. There really was quite a variety. GW was quite a prolific producer of both original and licenced boardgames for a bit of time back in the 1980’s before they went fully-Warhammer focused.

Citadel's TL13 Talisman Troll (1986)

Citadel’s TL13 Talisman Troll.

I had a few of the old metal Talisman figures, but I never really liked any of them especially. I think the Space Marine (from Timescape) got rolled into my RT-era models, though even that was an unimpressive sculpt. I’ve probably got a few of the others still floating around somewhere, I recall a man with a top hat in his hand, a woman with a small cauldron, and the Ninja being in my collection. They probably still are. In a container of junky old lead. Somewhere.

Citadel's TL13 Talisman Troll (1986)

TL13 Talisman Troll shows off his trousers.

Anyway, this troll was the one of those old figures that has gotten painted and not lost over the years. I painted him with a flesh tone rather than green as by the time I got around to painting him I had no intent to use him as a Troll or in Talisman. Instead, he was recruited to my small gang of old-school Beastmen. We’re talking old-school Beastmen, before the entire race had been retconned into the Broo-inspired Goatmen and Satyrs that dominate to this day. Not that I dislike modern Beastmen. I actually think they’re ace. I just happen to also like the variety found in the older RoC-era ones as well. So this guy fit in with the mixture of malformed miscontents quite well. Or well enough.

Citadel's TL13 Talisman Troll (1986)

Rear View of the TL13 Talisman Troll.

I gave him old-school warhammery stripey trousers and dirtied him up a little. I could obviously use him as something like a half-orc or even a more D&D-styled orc for roleplaying purposes. Whichever way, he looks very much the demi-human style thug. I’ll probably roll him back into the old-school beastmen unit for KoW that will be very much Warriors of Chaos-aligned, as the more modern Beastmen will be their own thing.

Talisman Troll Character Card & Standup –  Talisman 2nd Edition.