I finally finished up another batch of SAGA figures. These are more Victrix figures pulled from the Pillage starter bag and "upgraded" with some 3d printed shields.
These took a little longer because as always, I struggle a bit with non uniform "units"
That's right! Another project log. This is mostly because I want paint colors documented. I took a half hour or so to "Marine Juice" the first figure for a collection. Back when I worked at the Hobby Shop, we carried Hydra Miniatures. I picked up the odd figure here and there to just sort of have without any sort of real plan. Hydra's getting ready to release Atomic Tank, which looks to be a sort of Retro Raygun at Epic scale (10mm I believe in this case). I have some early test models to paint up from that range but wanted to sort of start chipping away at the 28mm stuff.
First up is Dr. Zahn. Colors are Caledor Sky, Tenebrous Grey, White Grey, Gunmetal, Blood Red, marine juice. Super quick Paint Job as usual. I have some other figures from the range I'll probably get painted up soon. I've got a little more SAGA stuff to get off the bench next but for now, this was a nice break.
In a manic late night paint session I had a thought. See, I have a tendency to start projects and not finish them. This is actually one of 3 of these types of post I've written tonight. (The others are scheduled out so as not to bog you all down.) I was thinking though, as one does as they dip their brush into their tea cup for the umpteenth time in the midnight hours. My desk is, and frankly always has been, a disaster. While coming to the sort of realization today that I don't game the way I used to, I was think I still enjoy collecting and painting. As a result, over the years I've gotten into these cheap plastic tubs to store work in progress "stuff." So besides the desk that looks like this
I've also got my "work in progress" shelf, that looks like this
Each of those tubs, most of each of those drawers, and each of those cardboard boxes house some sort of "project I've started and not finished. Dating back frequently years at a time.
At the risk of setting a 2026 goal, here in 2025 I have a bit of an idea.
I want to take October (and most likely November) to try and just tidy up the workbench part of the desk itself. Whether that's remove, finish, or organize, I'd like to try and clean up the bench in one way or another. October (though there is very little of it left, 11 days at time of writing this) is nearly over but let's start somewhere. I would like to try and participate in the AHPC this year if there's room and I think this would be a nice way to get rolling into that.
Then, Starting in December, I'm going to attempt to take one tub a month and do the same. Either Finish what's in it, box it up for long term storage, or get rid of it entirely. I'll be using the Works in Progress project log to document it for fun.
As part of my, any progress is good progress mantra, here's some forward progress on Art, my second Cabinet Piece for the year.
This is a long, rambly introspective post about how the years been going. I've decided to leave the bulk of the post below the break so for those of you who aren't interesting in the boardgame/blog stuff can skip it easier.
I realize that we may be reaching a point of diminishing returns on the "Matt decides to restart a project" scheme but here we are again. I've had old west stuff for a long time. It's one of those historical adjacent eras I really like, like pirates and gangsters.
Recently, after the success of the Fantasy ruins, I decided it might be worth revamping (replacing) my mdf with 3d prints. I already have a few figures painted, probably enough to run a game of some sort.
After a bit of researching I settled in on the range from digital taxidermy. The kits cost around 40 bucks after conversion. I started by printing a saloon as well as a few of the "houses". After doing a little bit of googling, I've settled on wanting to print about 10-13 buildings in total to make a nice little town. The buildings run a hair on the small side but do fit nicely on the build plate. The saloon came as 6 parts and needed tree supports to print. I'm not 100 percent sure how much effort im going to put in to painting interiors but they do have interior details sculpted in.
There's a pretty big range of stuff including scatter and such which is nice. The eventual plan is something like a Legends of the Old West campaign, though I have several rulesets to try including Dead Mans Hand, Rules with no Name, Shoot n Skedaddle, and What a Cowboy.
Next on the workbench is a unit of Spanish for Silver Bayonet. These are the metal figures from Northstar. They painted super quick. I think the only "new" color I've introduced to the Napoleonic palette is Hull Red from AK 3G. This is a nice red brown, more brown than red. A good addition to my suite of colors.
I ran out of Army painter white and switched to vallejo white spray for the primer (and subsequently all the white details) and the result is a lot grayer but I think it worked great for the spanish to make them look a bit more "rag tag"
These painted super super quick, probably quicker than the French. I managed to also get some Clue markers painted. These were just 3d prints from Thingiverse.
The only other "official" models I have to paint at the moment are the 2 packs of Bandits but I may pick up some more stuff. We actually have a bit of a short battle report and some initial thoughts coming soon too.
A few of the guys have been musing over doing a short, 3-game Frostgrave second edition campaign day and as a result I've dug out all my old original Nickstarter stuff and slapped together two warbands. This is the first of them. I'm going to go with a Sigilist this time around. The Wizard and Apprentice are metal, the remaining figures from Frostgrave Soldiers 1. I went with close to box art for the wizards paint and themed it around that. So the wizard has a body guard themed in dark green with a matching rune and the apprentice has her own with a light green and matching rune. Its simple but as someone who doesn't name models for example I thought it was a nice narrative touch.
I've also been thinking about Dungeons lately, something we'll come back to. I did a tiny bit of digging and discovered that there are just a ton of resources available to print your own copy of Warhammer Quest '95. Now I've never played it and have no idea if its worth the hassle but I've been wanting to learn some of the equipment at work so figured this was a good opportunity to self teach
I mentioned dungeon crawls. I've been in the early stages of writing my own dungeon crawl ruleset. I'm not ready to share much in the way of details yet but after we got a bit of playtesting in the other day I am ready to share that it exists
I didn't manage to get many photos as we were pretty engrossed in the rules discussion. I'll admit I spent quite a while writing rules with place holder numbers that did not work at all on the first encounter. A quick on the fly adjustment though and everything started working perfectly. There will be more down the road but for now all you get is this quick little teaser.
