Like a fair few other people in our hobby, I backed the Conan Kickstarter a couple of years ago, and also like many of us, I had my first wave of stuff arrive recently. Now I only got around to taking the stuff out of the shipping boxes last week, and frankly, I haven’t had the time to look further into the actual boxed game or the equally huge “Kickstarter Extras” box. Boxes. I got two King Pledges… 😉

Conan’s Adventure Pack. Sans Barrels…

What I did do while I was cleaning up in the War Room and making space to put the Conan stuff onto one of the shelves was notice how nice the models in some of the add-on boxes looked. Specifically, the “Adventure Pack”. The models looked really fine, baby. That is to say that they looked very finely detailed. Much moreso than anything I’d expect to get from a boardgame, and moreso from a kickstarter boardgame where the usual reaction to the models is “yeah, these are pretty decent” or a sadly unsurprising disappointment. After seeing Subedai get busy with some of his Conan models, I thought “why not?” and opened up the adventure pack to paint the contents as they looked like they’d paint up nice and quickly.

…and here are Conan’s Barrels.

So that’s what we have here. Barrels. I haven’t started on the other stuff yet, but the barrels are pretty nice for what they are. I usually paint my barrels up in the standard, admittedly boring way that most of us do. Dark brown wood, metal hoops. Job done. Nothing wrong with that, but with posts by Dagger and Brush on building trees with realistic bark colours resonating in the back of my head, I decided to paint these ones so that they looked a little more …realistic? worn? aged? So they would look like they’ve been left outside in the elements for their time. Faded, stained wood and rusted metal.

Conan’s barrels. Stacked. Somewhat..

Primed white, base coated with Vallejo Skeleton Bone coloured primer and then drybrushed with Reaper HD Arctic Grey. Hoops painted with Vallejo Plate Mail Metal coloured primer and then painted over with very-thinned Vallejo Model Air Light Rust and Orange Rust. The whole thing then washed with 50-50 Army Painter Soft tone wash and windex, and then with Citadel Nuln Oil Gloss. Gloss Polyurethane varnish, followed by Testor’s Dullcote. I’ve got that down here fo rmy future reference in case I end up with more of these barrels or want to recreate the exact look. It’s annoying when you paint everything that you have of some kind of scenery, and then find more somewhere, and then can’t remember exactly how you did them. I found some more of those Confrontation walls recently, and so now instead of having painted them more or less instantly, they’re just sitting there. In fact, I’ve lost them again somewhere. Bah.

Norsemen and their Norse Dwarf cousins discuss the best way to provide scale shots for barrels.

After checking the Kickstarter details, I see that each core pledge box comes with an extra 5 chests. Add those to the 5 in the accessories box and I’ll have 15 chests to paint up. They’re pretty finely detailed, but the thing stopping me from blasting through them now is working out how to paint them. Wood? Iron? Bronze? It’s bloody exhausting!