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!

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

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.