Massive Darkness: Bridges

Massive Darkness Bridge Scenery

Tom Bombadil and Goldberry ponder the lack of a river near this bridge.

Not much to say here. While poking around the boxes of Kickstarter junk while cleaning up recently I found a whote box I picked up from the Massive Darkness Kickstarter contining Doors & Bridges. The doors look like a bit of work while the bridges looked like very little work. Can you guess which ones got fished out and painted?

Massive Darkness Bridge Scenery

I did find them a bit too clean and plain, so I did the Liquid Greenstuff Texture trick (just dab the crap on to a smooth surface to create some texture), and also gave a bit of hint of a green tone around the underside and edges, to suggest mould due to moisture. While these were painted in July, they’re clearly far from Jewels. But they’ll work ok whenever we eventually play MD (sometime after Imperial Assault, I’d say) as well as in various other wargames. Maybe not Kill Team, but they’d certainly be fine for Middle-Earth Battle Companies!

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!