Gambassi's Warehouse

My biggest birthday present was a 4Ground building in their Chicago Way series - the Gambassi Warehouse. This is the biggest building in the range, and the most expensive - £90-00. It is a very complicated kit, with many layers of different kinds to make up the walls. In the most extreme case there were five layers - a central core layer, then red brick layers either side, and then on top of the bricks very thin layers representing crumbling plaster. You have the option to remove some of the plaster areas, to reveal the bricks underneath - you can remove more or less, depending on how dilapidated you want the building to be.

All the windows are glazed, with clear acetate sheets and mdf grids to which you stick the acetate and then trim it before gluing it into the window spaces in the walls. There are many doors and trapdoors which all open and close, with careful construction. The upper storey and the roof can both be removed for access to the interior, and it is also possible to construct it as a single storey building by leaving the upper layer out. The stairs can be removed in this case, and replaced with a trapdoor to a dummy basement level. So there is a lot of detail and a lot of thought has gone into the design of this building. Fully recommended.

Cruising the mean streets

One of my birthday presents was a vehicle from Great Escape Games in The Chicago Way series - a Cadillac V-8 Town Sedan. This is a soft resin or hardish plastic model, with a metal driver. It went together well - the body/chassis is the majority of the model, and the rest are mostly accessories like the wheels, lights and so on. The exception is the roof/windows, which go together as a four part box and then need to be put on top of the body. In fact it sits quite well inside the top of the body, and I didn't glue it in so that the car can be shown open topped. The other thing I did was cut the windows out - I think it looks better with open spaces there than any attempt to paint it as glass. The driver is perfectly fine, not hugely characterful but does the job with or without the top on. I left him free from glue as well, so the car can be shown as empty if needed.

In the pictures the car is sitting on the Cigar Box Roaring Twenties Battle Mat, with various figures and bits of terrain - I am planning a game on there soon, but I have a bit of building to do first.

Fog from the air

At Fiasco in November I picked up a pack of Baccus Fallschirmjager Nebelwerfers, and with a bit of a gap in the Pulp figures I decided to paint these up. Pretty quick, just four weapons with four crew each, and like all the new Baccus figures these are nice models. I based them on the usual 1" square metal bases, textured with AK Terrains acrylic diorama paint - an alternative to Basetex, it is a little more runny and so easier to get into the difficult nooks on the base, though it is correspondingly more low-lying. I finished them off with drybrushed earth colour and various flocks and scatter.

More Survivors

I painted up another six survivor miniatures, this time from Hasslefree. They are from the Modern Adventurers range, and they're not very obviously aimed at the post-apocalypse market, though they will fit in pretty well. As models they are well animated, and fairly slight in general, though I didn't feel they had quite as much detail or "personality" as the Lead Adventurers I painted up previously. Still, they are good models, and Hasslefree has a very large range.

Survivors

I painted up half a dozen figures for post-apocalypse survivor games - This is Not a Test is the rule set I have in mind. These figures were from Magister Militum, from the Lead Adventurer range. There was a five-figure set called the Last Heroes, and a single figure from Dogs of War - a camouflaged sniper. I thought these were really nice figures - very cleanly cast, but more importantly, very characterful. The faces were distinctive and individual, with clear and natural expressions. In general they were a pleasure to paint and they came out very nicely.

Leven Old West buildings

At Fiasco in Leeds, back in late October, I bought one each of all the Leven Old West buildings - 18 in all. Actually a few more than 18 buildings, as a couple of the packs had multiple items. My overall intention is to build a town on a large base, maybe a couple of feet square, but I started out by painting them all up individually.

As usual the Leven buildings are a pleasure to paint, with nice details which show up well. On many of the buildings I was able to include signs (Saloon, Doctor etc) which I simply found on the web and downloaded to print. I think these really enhance the look of the whole thing, and help to establish scale and period. One of the "buildings" is the entrance to a mine, with rail tracks and general clutter - this is another nice model, but it may be a little tricky to include it in my townscape.

Wanna be in my Gang?

Continuing the Chicago Gangster theme in my purchases from Fiasco, here is the Pulp Figure set Bugs Malarkey's Gang. Five figures as is normal from Pulp, for £10. Three nattily dressed gunmen and one looking a little rougher in a scarf and beanie hat, plus the classic man with a violin case. They painted up very nicely, and as is standard now for me I cut away the metal bases and glued them to clear plastic bases.