Release the Kraken!

Back on track with my plan to play some Umbrella Academy the board game with my wife, I’ve finished another character:

This was the character that my gut felt I’d most likely take, but I really need to get round to re-reading the comics to see if I’m not just being swayed by the tv series (which reminds me, we still haven’t watched the last season of that…)

Lots and lots of grey makes up the Kraken’s uniform, and I went with a more yellow hair colour because I felt it would pop a bit more on the board.

As well as taking the siblings, in the game there are Allies that can come to your aid. Im not entirely sure how that works, as the cards are still shrink wrapped, but figured I should paint some up too just in case, and what better choice than Mom, the Umbrella Academy’s robotic caregiver:

I went for an unnatural skin tone that I really drive home at a glance that this isn’t a human (and she looks a bit like an Auton), and gave her solid black eyes too (thanks, Gundam Marker!) 

The dress was a it of an experiment - I couldn’t find any reference images for this outfit with a quick google, so took inspiration from someone else’s paint job, but decided that I wanted it to look slightly odd, and so went with a grey tone for the shadows, in the hopes it would make it look like a really dull, not fancy material. Not sure if I quite captured that, but done is done, and into the box they go:

Finishing these two brings the Tally to:

60 vs 192 = -132

What’s next? There are more Allies in the box that could in theory make an appearance, so those should be next up on the painting tile, and I should probably get the rest of the surviving siblings painted, so that we have options for playing (plus, I suspect they might also turn up as Allies during the game, so it wouldn’t hurt to have them on hand…)

Super Mission Force: first thoughts

Having previously played superhero games with my kids using some basic rules of my own creation, we wanted something a bit more in-depth (as in my bare bones rule set essentially each hero was a set of similar stats with a single special ability), but still simple and quick enough that my five year old could play it with us. Having seen other people playing it online, I thought we’d give Super Mission Force a try. 

While there is an excellent set of character creation rules in the rule book, for speed I grabbed some pre-generated characters from the Files section in the Four Colour Studios Facebook group. I figured for our first game while we’re learning the rules we would take a single character each, and stick to basic abilities (ignoring manoeuvres). My son wanted to be Venom, obviously, so I figured I’d take Spider-Man, for thematic reasons. My daughter, on the other hand, wanted to be Boom Boom, because I described her as ‘blowing things up and being sassy’, which apparently appealed.

According to the profiles it would be an even match for Venom to take on both Spider-Man and Boom Boom, so we set up our map to represent Venom bumping into the pair of heroes on their way home from a mission. Despite rolling fewer dice, my son was able to win the initiative on the first turn and so Venom was able to web swing his way across the entire map immediately:

Fun fact - we ended up using pretty much just this sixth of the map for the entire game. 

Super Mission Force uses a goal system (actually, I think it officially uses the trademarked Goalsystem) wherein you roll a dice pool and count successes, and I realised that I could use the dice from my old Havok set:

I figured this would be handy for the kids, counting skulls as one and explosions as two, rather than having to parse the numbers on a pile of regular dice. Inevitably, we all rolled terribly and so the game lasted longer than was statistically likely.

Also, our home printer didn’t want to behave today, so I hand wrote stat cards onto index cards for this game:

 

Long story short, Spider-man and Boom Boom did their best, but just couldn’t do consistent enough damage to overcome Venom’s health regeneration (despite managing to drop him down to his last health at one point). At one point Spider-Man webbed Venom so successfully that he could only break free if he rolled 6 successes on 4 dice, but they couldn’t even take him down despite him being totally immobilised, and my sone rolls better than his father so Venom was able to burst his bonds and wreak vengeance on the heroes:

Final thoughts: I like it! It was slightly slow going while we got used to the basic rules, but even my five year old was able to grasp the general mechanics pretty quickly. The game got a bit samey towards the end (punch, punch, try to stun so can run away then jump in for a big punch), but I think that’s more to do with there being so few figures on the board that rounds were pretty quick - with more figures per side, there would be more variety in each round. Not that we didn’t enjoy it with just a single figure each, as the goal system makes for fairly dramatic turns, where sometimes you roll a ton of dice and get bupkiss, only for your five year old to roll a statistically unlikely result on four dice to then rip himself out of your webs and proceed to murder everyone, so I think we’ll be playing again…

Everyone’s favourite quasi-dead guy

When asking my wife what character she thought she’d like to play if I was painting things for the Umbrella Academy board game, having seen the TV series she was quick to answer Klaus, so here he is:

Maybe I should go back and sort his eye out, but frankly he looks half decent as a board game piece so I’m happy with that.

The deathly skin tone didn’t come out quite how I’d planned, but honestly might look better than that, so happy little accidents, may they long continue.

Painting him brings the Tally to:

58 vs 192 = -134

And means the first tray in the box looks like this:

I’m Venom, my body weight is 40% tongue…

In between painting pieces for the Umbrella Academy board game, since I already had some black paints out I also finished this monstrous guy:

Whenever I’ve played with superhero miniatures with my children, my youngest has always asked to be Venom, which I didn’t have a miniature of, but thanks to eBay I’ve managed to rectify that. I’m not sure where my son’s love of the character comes from - he’s desperate to watch the Tom Hardy movies, but given that he’s five that’s not really on the cards yet. 

The spider logo came out quite nicely, I think, due to judicious use of Gundam liner pens to get the bits that I’d have struggled to line with a brush, then carefully tidying up with a brand new brush that came with my Father’s Day present, and has rapidly become my current favourite brush.

You wouldn’t believe it, but the black on Venom is three different shades, which you’d struggle to see in my pictures. Believe it or not, this was the second set of pictures I took of Venom, using natural light, but here’s another posed picture from the original set of Venom menacing the Spider-Man that I painted years ago:

I’m hoping to play some a super Mission Force with the kids, so I need to work out the stats for the symbiote. When asking my son who else he thought he might like to be on the same team as Venom, his first answer was Spider-Man (which I initially tried to object to, but thought the better of it), followed by Green Goblin. I have a Hobgoblin mini that I could paint, but apparently only ‘Green Goblin, wearing purple and green’ will do.

As of now, the Tally stands at:

57 vs 192 = -135

Now, back to the Umbrella Academy board game, no distractions. Honest.

Candy chomping assassins…

So, I’ve had the Umbrella Academy board game for about a year now, and figured I should probably try and play it a couple of times to justify the expense. Flicking through the rule book, I saw that to play with my wife for the first mission I’d only need to paint the characters we were using and Hazel and Cha Cha, so I set about getting on that:

I mean there’s also Allies and whatnot, but starting small makes me feel like I’m more likely to achieve my goal.

Being that the board game is based on the comics rather than the Netflix series, one benefit is that the colour schemes are fairly limited, so it’s pretty quick to get thing finished when I can actually stay awake long enough to get some painting done (working late at work the night before my week off when the clocks went back the day after absolutely wrecked my sleep schedule, resulting in my falling asleep after putting the kids to bed the first four or so nights of my week off, which is usually my painting time).

One down side to them being based on the comics is that it’s a comic written by Gerard Way, so black features heavily, which can be a pain to paint. The psychotic pair’s suits are really a very dark grey, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe I should invest in some sort of Contrast or Speedpaint Black for future miniatures…

Painting these two brings the Tally to:

56 vs 192 = -136

Now my board game looks like this:

Only about a million to go!