So, it's long been a personal annoyance that various games distribute figurines that aren't particularly visually distinct. The lockdown has finally driven me to the point of trying to do something about it
Pandemic: Reign of Cthulu
The Pandemic figurines
The pandemic figurines are reasonably distinguishable, but a bit dull, and it requires some effort to associate the figurine with the right character sheet at the start
Painted cultists
The cultists don't strictly need to be painted, but it seemed a chance to add more colour and variety to the game.
Shoggoths on the march
Shoggoths should look ugly and menancing, and the pale blue just wasn't working for me
Painted heroes
Far from the best paint job ever, but it achieves the goal of making the figures resemble the card artwork and makes them more distinguishable on the map
Gears of War
Gears of War is arguably one of the worst offenders, with it's basically indistinguishable CoG figures.
However, the colour scheme of the cogs in the artwork doesn't help distinguish the figures, so I opted for the simple approach of solid colours to make them distinct
Not terribly artistic, but much more usable.
Fortune and Glory
That the FanG manual includes this handy reference sheet shows the issues with their figurines.
The heroes are somewhat distinguishable, but not particularly so at long distance, and the Nazi and Mob mooks are too similar with the default colouring
The different value tokens are somewhat too similar in size for that to be a good measure, and the different symbols are too hard to see at a distant. Painting the 1-value tokens makes things a lot clearer
Mob villians
Mob mooks
Nazi soldiers
Nazi villians
The different groups are now much more visually distinct, and it's much easier to recognise which figures are on the board
Painting the zepplin is not required, but seemed a fun idea
Visually distinct heroes are nice
Again, painting the pyramids isn't required, but I wanted the option to talk about different ones easily, so I added the option to refer to them by colour rather than just position on the board. The paintwork is a bit light, since I like the effect of the underlying colour bleeding through - it feels a better look for ancient ruins.
