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.
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.
“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!
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.
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.
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!
Azazel's Bitz Box. 