Miniature Mondays: Flooded Edition
This week was a busy one for me. On a note utterly unrelated to Kickstarter or miniatures, I put an offer in on a house this weekend. Hopefully this means that in the near future life will settle down so I can devote some time to painting, and more time to blogging and such; in the interim though, as I prepare to move and all that, I imagine it will get worse before it gets better. We’ll see.
The current events of my life are the only overwhelming thing we have to cover today. This week we have 6 new projects to look at on Kickstarter and a variety of painting pictures to peruse.
Fantasy Gaming Figures – The first project this week isn’t exactly for miniatures, but it’s really close. These creators want to make fantasy themed meeples. While I’m not sure the world needs them, its certainly interesting. I might even be interested, except for the project seems to be a platform to sell more copies of their previous one.
28mm Franco-Prussian Minis – Want some authentic Franco-Prussian minis? Neither does anyone else it seems. Its a shame – because the sculpts on this project are actually quite good.
Magnetic Tabletop – This one seems like a solution in search of a problem. I confess I’m not totally sure what one would do with this one.
Goblin Miniatures – I reserve judgement on this one till they actually post a sculpt or likely render. People do love goblins though; already $5k has been shelled on vaporware.
Zynvaded – For only $40 you too can get 46 figures in the rare 1:1 scale. No, unfortunately that does not mean each figure is life sized (though that would be a great deal.) It means that 1 figure is 1 inch tall.
The Martian Front – This one is the big winner this week. At over $110K and counting, it looks likely to make some real money. Sadly like all the effort put into this project more than the actual results. Their prelaunch campaign (learned about thanks to a regular reader’s tip) was really great, but sadly I am impressed by neither their sculpts not scale. Still – this one bears watching.
This week Jessica completes another textbook paint job on her husband’s Eldar army. I did some painting with her on Saturday (but sadly have nothing to show for it.) She’s a machine, folks. Really. We took a look at her army, and lets just say she needs to share it with the world – it was pretty impressive.
Clint also submitted an image this week, and always he does not disappoint We really need to see this Ork unit come together in a group shot! That’s just a little bit of archer humor folks – don’t mind me.
Jeff and his wife Kerry also submitted some pictures this week. They are painting all their Zombicide miniatures, with a completion goal of the end of the month. Take a look at their amazing WIPs!
Want to share your paint jobs with the world? Send me an email with your pictures at Caffeineforge@gmail.com.
Caffeineforge 
Being the one who’d mentioned the “All Quiet on the Martian Front” project, you’d think that I would be enthusiastic about it. Turns out, even though I DO like the sculpts, I just couldn’t bring myself to back it. I tried, but I cancelled it after a couple of days.
Part of that is the weird pledge levels. You’d think that in a game involving Martians fighting human armies that you’d want pretty balanced forces, and they did provide those, but there are also a lot of pledge levels that have way more of one or the other. They also created Early Bird levels for the lower tiers, but not the upper ones, though they corrected that. Still $245 for an early bird set is still a hell of a lot of money.
Still, we all know that miniature projects live and die by the stretch goals, right? And that’s the other problem. They list on the backing levels the number of unlockable items possible through stretch goals. The $245 level, for instance, has 10 possible. However, the backer frenzy lasted exactly one day, and it’s been relatively flat since then. They were at $83k at the end of the first day, but they’ve only gotten $30k in the six days since. The last two days saw a total of 19 new backers. At this rate, many of those unlockables will stay locked.
I think the game has a lot of potential, and I may give it a second look when it’s released. But for now…no, can’t do it.
BTW, I started painting my Dust figures. First up is the Axis Zombies. Critiques are welcome, since they were literally the first minis I’ve ever painted. http://i.imgur.com/b8tnL12.jpg
Those are worlds better than my first attempts. Normally I would say the shading is a little heavy, but I think greasy coveralls go well with Nazi zombies.
Bravo sir!
Next time email the pictures and I’ll get them up in my weekly line up!
Yeah, they’re definitely darker, especially compared to the official versions. The first one was just testing the wash, but the rest were intentional, as I figured mindless zombies weren’t going to be fussy about cleaning. I’m working now on the more advanced zombies (the ones that can carry gear & weapons), and I’ll be shading those much lighter. Hopefully. Thanks for the compliment. I’m still rough on the little details, but hopefully that’ll come with practice.
Jeff and Kerry: Ever since I first saw George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, I love zombies! Though I hear zombies only love me fore my mind…..
You two are off to a great start, I can’t wait to see them finished!!
As always Jessica and Clint, you guys rule! If I had half the talent for painting as you guys I might just pick up some minis and go to work. Sadly this isn’t the case. But with the awesome you folks do every week I can dream.
Nice work everyone!! Thanks for sharing!
Nice job, Brian!