Crocs and Hippos

 With my mind set on having a waterborne adventure for our game, I turned to the scenarios included in the Congo rule book for inspiration.  Luckily for me there were a number of possibilities that would work, especially if I combined a couple of the scenarios together.  Ultimately this was going to be a chase across the board hampered by pursuing tribesmen and, of course, crocodiles!  I had a number of these ruthless reptiles that needed to be painted, but what I was really after were some waterline variants to patrol the swamps.  So it was that I found myself wrapping 'Wargames Foundry' crocodiles in something called mini-mold from 'TT-Combat'.

This was always going to have a limited success, especially given the low relief of the details on my small crocodiles, but I just need to sell the illusion of this toothsome predator lurking just below the surface of the brackish water.  So once the impression was made, I packed it full of green stuff and et voilà, swimming crocodiles!  

After a little bit of trimming they were affixed to small pill like bases and then painted to match the others in the collection.  I also experimented with some water texture around the edges, but I am not entirely sure this has worked as well as I had hoped and might have proven more effective if I just painted the edges to represent water, which is exactly what I did with the hippos!

"What talk of river horse?" I hear you cry.  Well good reader it would appear that my shame of unpainted soldery has now exploded into the digiverse with the unfathomable need to purchase STL files for 3D printing.  Nothing new in this, but I don't even own a digital printer and yet I have amassed a vast assortment of files that would potentially see me print models from dinosaurs to Dooku all at the click of a button.    'The Dark Templar', a chap that has thoroughly embraced this hobby departure very kindly offered to print some hippopotami as a contribution to the game and so when the beasts arrived in the post, ahead of the big day, I was absolutely thrilled.  I am afraid, I can't tell you what resin was used or even the width of the layers, but I was instantly aware of just how light they were compared to the weight of a metal piece.  The fun, dynamic poses were just what I wanted and immediately set about them with some grey undercoat.  In fact the undercoat was so effective that I only had to pick out a few details and dry brush some scarring to their backs and they were done!  So with characters and menagerie finished, I just had one more piece to add - the swamp! 

Congo teams assembled

Just the briefest of posts from me this morning to detail the additional forces that were required to host the game of Congo last summer.  I have been trying to reign in the hobby expenditure of late, at least a tad, and so made a determined effort to use miniatures that had been left abandoned in the drawers of despair as a first port of call.  As part of the adventure was going to involve a rush back to the paddle steamer, I decided to have the a nautical theme for the Adventurers' Party and was fortunate to fall upon some wonderful 'Empress Miniatures' Naval Brigade troops that had even been prepped.  The rules allow options to field a group of soldiers, well trained men armed with rifles that can ignore stress tokens.  So for soldiers read sailors, similarly well trained and with hearts of oak, ably commanded by officers who, for this scenario, were designated as adventurers.  

The final two adventurer slots went to a certain rugged archaeologist and his somewhat taller leading lady.  Dr. Jones, who in this adventure is now Welsh and working for the British Museum, was originally bought from 'Studio Miniatures', but is still available at 'Hayland Terrain'.  Her ladyship, Beatrix, who hails from the Potteries is inexplicably drawn to gentlemen in blue jackets with silver buttons, particularly if their name was Peter, and is another 'Empress' sculpt. 

I already had a well established 'Forest Tribes' team from our previous encounters, but needed to move things around to gain parity across both teams.  This created a vacancy for some scouts and provided me with an opportunity to indulge in some rather fanciful war paint, inspired by the artwork in the rule book, on some 'Foundry' miniatures.  With the teams now assembled was little terrain and some extras, but here, dear reader, is where the mission creep set in.  

 

Colonial Paddle Steamer

This fabulous kit has been in my collection for far too long, lying unassembled and unloved in the pile of procrastination, until last summer when I was determined to put on a game for my good friends Bullcher Feb and the Dark Templar.  I had a notion that I wanted to return to the Congo, a rule set that we had all enjoyed a few years back, and what perfect way to explore the dense jungles than by a riverbourne cruise in a paddle steamer.

As with all 'Sarissa Precision' kits there is a quality that exudes from this model, it is simply so well designed that I knew it was going to go together well.  When starting a build there is also a sense of apprehension as there will always be a point when you have to make a decision about playability over construction and as I tend to do so much of my planning on the fly this moment often cripples the construction process by causing me to overthink to point of inactivity.  There is also a point in every build, and I appreciate that this might be just me and my fat fingers, when there is a sickening snap as some integral part of the structure is fractured or broken due to my stubbornness to yield to the fragility of MDF!

So it was with this build.  I had taken the boat to school to work on in the evenings that I wasn't on duty, all was proceeding well when I had to make a decision about whether to stick the decks together along with the roof panels.  In the end I decided against it believing that it would make it easier to paint and accessorise when I got home.  Following this hiatus a sickening snap was heard as I tried to drive home part of the substructure, but my familiarity with this type of kit allowed me to adopt a far more pragmatic approach than to throw the model across the office and simple repair was effected without any obvious loss to aesthetic or dignity. 

It is a shame that the same couldn't be said for the cardboard funnel, which I butchered beyond all possible explanation.  This would clearly need a little more thought later in the process.  Finally completed the launch returned home and sat idly by as I found new dustractions*, but as the playdate loomed ever closer it was clear that I needed to get it finished.  It was at this point that I realised that my poorly assembled funnel was also poorly sited causing it to look as if would topple over in a stiff breeze.  I briefly considered removing the offending piece and building it again from scratch, but instead decided to embrace my mistakes and incorporate them as part of the wear and tear of a working vessel.   

*Dustraction - a new, shiny hobby related project that after initial excitement is relegated to gather dust.

I had great plans to accessorize this fabulous kit to within an inch of its life, but I was rapidly running out of time, so instead limited myself to some rigging, to hold up the toppling funnel, and a tarpaulin for the rear deck.  All of this was undercoated so that painting could start.   

The painting itself was a breeze as having primed the model, I fired up the trusty airbrush and attacked the hard to get to areas with a light grey.  The planks were then drybrushed and with some accents of colour it was complete.  The weathering was achieved by using various washes, but looking at it now I could probably have pushed this a little further.  Still all things considered a passable job and great to see the model assembled and painted - now on to the characters needed for the expedition! 

The ever growing flotilla of 'Sarissa Precision' kits.