Friday, May 1, 2020

What we do in the lockdown

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.

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