Category Archives: Zombicide

Zombicide “Rick” (Jason Statham as Chev Chelios from “Crank 2: High Voltage”and Angry Mary by Karl Kopinski

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Zombicide Jason Statham as Chev Chelios from Crank 2, Angry Mary by Karl Kopinski

Orez and Marouda’s favourite survivors, ready for action.

A couple more Zombicide survivors today – the last two from the previous batch.

Zombicide Jason Statham as Chev Chelios from Crank 2, Angry Mary by Karl Kopinski

…and the results of a couple of unfortunate Zombie Spawn draws.

Zombicide figures are odd ducks. They have some really well done, subtle truescale details like the folds in clothing while at the same time often having soft details on faces and weapons. It’s a limitation of the PVC that they are made from, and while they’re pretty much the best boardgame models I’ve used or painted, I still don’t entirely enjoy painting them in the same way that I do with a metal, HIPS or resin model. Still, they get a lot of use on my tabletop, so if anything deserves to keep a priority rating in my painting (such as it is), then these figures do.

aka Jason Statham as Chev Chelios from Crank 2, Zombicide

Zombicide “Rick” and Zombivor version.

“Rick” is a homage to Jason Statham as Chev Chelios from the 2009 Film “Crank 2: High Voltage“.

It seems that Statham’s outfit from Crank is a somewhat popular “costume” for people to wear. I guess it’s pretty flexible and a lot more subtle than going somewhere dressed as a Jedi. Turns out that in the second film, he had some fairly distinctive shoes because product placement. No matter to me, and as they have a look I can replicate on the model, so much the better

Angry Mary – a Karl Kopinski Original Survivor for Zombicide

Angry Mary is an original Zombicide survivor, from the Karl Kopinski guest artist box.

Mary is a popular character whenever one of us manages to draw her, and from our early games kind of defaulted to Marouda’s Zombpocalypse proxy, especially since Marouda managed to draw Angry Mary pretty regularly. So Mary has her combat boots painted as Marouda’s purple Doc Martens in a semi-subtle nod.

Mary’s black fatigues and gloves are pretty dark, though they are highlighted subtly, and in a way to preserve them being black as opposed to grey. I’m just not fond of the whole “shade to white” thing that’s very popular on my own models. Statham’s dark blue jacket gave me the same kind of difficulty. For a change, the photography seems to have picked both out decently.

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!