Little Boxes …from Mantic’s Mars Attacks/Terrain Crate

All 4 sides of Mantic’s Mars Attacks box stacks.

These boxes are not on the hillside, nor are they made of ticky-tacky, but they are (almost) all the same.

Ok, this is a scenery post, and a simple one at that, as it deals with a few pieces of minor scatter terrain. A long time ago, I backed Mantic’s Mars Attacks Kickstarter, and amongst all of the stuff that I received (and still haven’t used.. shhh!) was a few sets of the scenery accessories.

Mars Attacks Accessory Pic from Iron Saint’s Children of the Kraken Blog – go visit!

Naturally, I forgot to take a photo of the Accessory pieces before I started on any of this stuff, and Mantic’s photos don’t show them very well. It is in fact a very good gaming set. It turns out that I had four of them. Unless I find another 1 or 2 in boxes someday. I actually started painting the post boxes and rubbish bins back in summer, about 9 months ago, but managed to mess up the salt weathering. So the whole project went into limbo. A few days ago I spotted the box-barricades sitting on my painting desk and so decided to clean them up in a vaguely useful way – by painting them!

So here they are. Exciting, no? I kept them as generic as possible so they can work in as many settings as possible, from historicals through moderns, zombipocalypses and to sci-fi in about 28 to 38,000 years’ time. (When most things are still oddly recognisable when compared to nowadays.)

Crates. Probably from Grendel.

I also found a couple of resin crates that had been bought in the 90’s and sitting around part-painted for years, and spent the whole of 10 minutes that it took to finish them as well. I have the attention span of a flea, sometimes… I think they’re probably originally from some set by Grendel/Scotia Grendel, since that’s where most of my really old resin junk originates from.

Mantic Mars Attacks Boxes

Size and thematic comparisons.

Finally, some Zombipocalypse survivors, Space Marines and Dwarves help out with showing the scale and how they fit in decently well with all three disparate types of model. They’re a little on the small side, and while they’ll work well as meeples for barricades in games of Zombicide, they feel a little like those annoying foot-high “walls” that videogames use to keep our otherwise athletic heroes from straying outside of the designated play area… They might work better stacks on top of other items to create useful cover, but even as is they make for decent ground clutter.

Kickstarter: Mars Attacks – Mantic Games

I’m not going to start to make a habit of pimping Kickstarters or anything like that, but I thought this one in particular might be worth sharing, since there’s only a day or two to go, and Mantic appear to have really pulled out all the stops for this one – right down to not using restic, renders of the models, and throwing an enormous amount of free stuff at it. I was originally in it just for the scenery, since I’m not a particular fan of the IP, but I’m now considering staying in for the scenery and getting a large set of the game’s stuff as well, since it’s written by Jake Thornton and looks like it would be quite a bit of fun.

Basically, it’s a boardgame, which is pretty much cross-compatible with DeadZone (Mantic’s Sci-Fi boardgame that’s about to come out in December) – so similar in style to Dust Tactics with miniatures and ground tiles, but they’re also doing things like a DeadZone team (Sci-Fi Bloodbowl to use a simple analogy, but actually much closer to the classic Amiga game Speedball.) They’re also going to put out rules to use the models in Warpath, which is their sci-fi miniatures skirmish game.

One of the main reasons I’m pimping it here is that they ran into a bit of trouble, with a lot of backers dropping out – so yesterday I sent in a suggestion for them to add in their excellent DeadZone scenery and talk to Guillotine Games/CMON (who they’re on friendly terms with) about some crossover using the MA survivors in Zombicide – since the survivors have a very similar stylistic look and feel. This morning, I got an email from Ronnie replying to my message and I see they’ve added the DZ scenery, a shout-out from CMON to their Zombicide backers in my inbox that also suggests the MA survivors would work in Zombicide and a new $500k stretch goals of Zombies vs Martians!

Oh, and they added a shitton of extra freebies as well.

Anyway, here’s the $100 “Sweet Spot” pledge level image, though they also have a giganton of stuff for those willing to go in for $300, which I’ve also added below.

More painted models soon! Hoping for some good natural light today…