Zombie Base Tutorial 2

So, following on from last week's ramblings, and without further ado, this is the method I'm using to base my Zombies!!! Bag O'Zombies figures. I may also use it to base my Wargames Factory Zombies, but I haven't painted any of them yet.

Equipment needed

The following items are required to make these bases:

• textured plasticard
• 25mm craft punch or compass cutters (something to make the circles)
• 25mm MDF bases
• glue - superglue or PVA and polystyrene glue
• Lego bricks and scrap of plain plasticard
• very good clippers (I use Xuron side clippers)

Making the Lego form

Lining everything up is quite tricky, so I made a form from three Lego bricks taped to some plain plasticard with double-sided sticky tape

This keeps the bases lined up while they're being glued together and also means that fingers aren't near superglue.

Making the base toppers

Simply punch circles from the plasticard using the craft punch, or use a compass cutter. The punch is quicker, although it struggles with plasticard much thicker than 0.5mm.

I made a paper template for the punch, which lets me line it up close to the previous hole and minimises waste on the plasticard. Removing the punched "frames" from the plasticard sheet is done using a scalpel or scraper. The compass cutter has neither of these issues, but you do end up with a hole in the middle of your base :-)

Building the base

Glue two 25mm MDF bases together using the form to position them. They can be glued with either PVA or superglue. Superglue is quicker and can be cheaper (I bought eight tubes for £1 from a local PoundLand. I'm not sure it's the best quality superglue ever, but is fine for this project)

Glue the topper to the MDF bases. It's easier to use superglue for this, but PVA would probably work.

The side of the MDF bases should be sealed using PVA glue. This gives a better surface to paint on, as the plain MDF is just soaks up paint. It also helps to disguise the join between the various parts of the base.

Preparing the Zombie

Take one plastic zombie and carefully remove him from his base. This should be done using the best clippers you have, as you want to keep as much of the feet as possible.

File down the feet to try and make them flat. There's not much surface area to glue, so the flatter the base, the greater the area in contact with the plasticard and the better the bond. Glue the zombie to the new base using polystyrene cement and leave to dry.

The finished zombie on its new base. This can be decorated with rubble if required, although I haven't bothered with the ones I've done.

The final painted figure next to the original one and a Studio Miniatures zombie. The base and figure will never win any awards, but they make for an acceptable, if basic, zombie, and height-wise, they're much closer to the 32mm figures.

Future plans

I have a 50mm craft punch and picked up some 50mm round MDF bases recently. I plan to use the above technique (although probably only one MDF base deep) to make some horde bases.

I'm still not sure how I'll paint all the figures in a horde; do I attach them all to the one base and try to paint them en masse, or paint them separately and move them from their painting bases to the horde base?

I am wondering about using a paper punch to create small painting bases from the 50mm horde base. These could then be dropped back into the larger one when the figures are painted. However, it's still early days on these thoughts and I think some experimentation will be required.

Zombie Base Tutorial 1

I started writing this as a zombie basing tutorial with a bit of preamble. The pre, however, has become a full blown amble, so I’m splitting it into two posts. This one covers the long and tortuous journey, while the second post will cover the actual construction of the base.

My Zombie Horde

I have a number of types of zombie in my horde. The largest group is based on the Zombies!!! Bag’O Zombies figures, which definitely fall into the “cheap and cheerful” category. There are four figures available: man, woman, dog and clown.

There are two problems with these figures: the first is that each type is only in a single pose, but the second, and main problem, is that they’re only a little over 26mm high from ground to top of the head, which means they look tiny when placed next to the current figures on the market. They come with a moulded on base that adds a couple of millimetres, but they still look too small.

Below is a picture of them next to some StudioMiniatures zombies, showing the size difference.

I reckoned that, if they could be brought up to the same height as current figures, they'd be okay. This is a photo of some of the completed ones (using clay), next to the same StudioMiniatures figures. They're not brilliant, but they are acceptable.

With that aim in mind, I set about trying to increase the height of their bases. I tried a number of approaches:

Clay

I glued the zombie to a plastic slottabase (one without a slot) and applied some air drying clay. This worked okay and brought the zombie up to a reasonable height, but didn’t give a particularly pavement-like appearance to the base.

Filler

The clay was okay, but it wasn't particularly easy to apply, and the package dried out before I was ready for the next group (despite sealing it). My next approach, suggested by a forum post, was to use Tetrion wall filler.

I glued the zombie to a 25mm diameter MDF base and built up around the zombie’s base with the filler. It was quicker than the clay, but again, the end result didn’t look particularly good - pretty much the same as the clay base approach.

Casting my own base

One of the things that I wanted was for the zombie to look like it was walking on a pavement, something I hadn’t managed to achieve with the previous two approaches. I decided to create a base with a hole left for the zombie’s base, cast it up and use that. My thinking was that the top of the base would be textured plasticard, so it would provide the desired pavement look.

I spent/wasted a few days cutting and filing a base master. It was built up from several layers of plasticard as my compass cutter wouldn’t handle the thicker plasticard (I don’t think I have anything that cleanly cuts 2 mm thick card).

Base master, and with zombie dropped in

Anyway, I finally finished the master, at which point I realised that there were a number of problems:

• as the master was built from several layers of plasticard, it wasn’t particularly smooth. RTV silicone rubber has a nasty habit of reproducing everything it touches, so I was going to be left with very untidy bases that would require further finishing
• I only had one master, so I’d have to either cast the bases one at a time or cast a few and make a new master with eight or ten bases on it. This was starting to look very time consuming, as well as being massive overkill given the quality of the figures I was basing
• materials for casting the bases. I’ve never had much luck with resin, so it looked like the bases would either be plaster or Alumilite (yes, I know it’s a resin, but hopefully even I couldn’t mess up something that only takes three minutes to set). Plaster would get chipped the first time it was used, and the only Alumilite I have is several years old, although still unopened
• cost. Both RTV rubber and Alumilite are expensive and I suspect each base would have cost a lot more than the figure standing on it

This was starting to get silly, so I decided to try and simplify the basing process. I wondered about doing away with the slottabase and instead sitting the zombie in the centre of a plastic tube, which I would then fill up to the base level with something. For the plastic tubing, I turned to...

Denture Tablet Tube

I had a look for 25mm diameter plastic tubing in my local model shop, but couldn't find anything. After a think about where I could get some, I picked up a tube of the cheapest own brand denture tablets I could find. It didn't seem appropriate to measure the diameter of the tube in the shop, but on getting it home, it turned out to be exactly 25mm.

Out came my trusty razor saw to try and cut it. While still more than capable of cutting metal, it bounced off the plastic, not even making a dent. One shiny new razor saw later and I'd hit my next problem - I can't cut straight to save myself.

The mitre boxes I had weren't deep enough for the tubing and the new one I bought was too wide to securely hold the tube while I cut it. Add to all this the fact that cutting it produced a very untidy edge that was going to require a lot of cleaning up and I realised that this wasn't going to be the solution to my problem either.

Drilling out a blank to make a master

I accepted that I wasn't going to mass produce plastic rings from denture tubes any time soon, but reasoned that I could probably manage one. My plan was to create a blank base - effectively a mini pedestal - and then make a hole (or leave a hole when constructing the master) for the zombie base to drop in. It would then just be a simple matter to tidy up the gap between the zombie base and the rest of the pedestal. This, of course, still left the problem of mass production, not to mention the act of creating the master.

Fortunately, the denture tube and pedestal drilling base ideas were restricted to my fevered imagination, so I didn't actually waste any time trying to create anything.

Progress

I can’t remember what started my thoughts in this direction (possibly desperation on the part of my right brain), but I started to think about removing the built in zombie base. Most of my problems I had encountered were to do with getting the rest of the ground up to the height of the integral base, so removing that base would remove that problem - level the playing field, so to speak. With that thought fresh in my mind, I clipped a zombie from its base and glued it directly to textured plasticard.

This immediately gave me the flat pavement surface I wanted. However, it also made the zombie 26mm high again. My first thought on this was to glue the zombie base back underneath the new base, mount everything on a MDF base and then apply filler to conceal the gap.

This all seemed to be getting silly again, so I had a think and came up with the idea of building the pedestal part of the base from 2p pieces, topped off with the textured plasticard. The coins are the same diameter as the plasticard and stack and glue without any problems.

I built ten of these bases, attached the figures and took the whole lot into the loft for undercoating.

It was at this point that I realised that the bases were very heavy. Three 2p pieces may not seem much, but compared to a plastic figure, they’re a lot. They were so heavy that I was concerned that they would pull free of a figure when it was being used in a game. This concern was realised when I was undercoating them, as one of the zombies detached itself from its base while I was lifting it to be sprayed.

On bringing them back down from the loft, I accepted that the coins were going to be too heavy, so removed the zombies from the plasticard (I couldn't recover the plasticard toppers, they just tore when I tried to remove them) and binned the coins (I really couldn't see my local shops accepting three 2p coins superglued together, with their edges covered in black paint)

On looking around for something lighter for the pedestal, I struck upon the MDF bases I'd used earlier. Two of these are the same height as three coins, and weigh virtually nothing. These bases are sold as laser-cut 25mm bases, but, ironically, they're slightly less than 25mm diameter (they just don't make lasers like they used to). This means that the plasticard is slightly too large, but it's not much, and looks acceptable.

I glued two bases together (using superglue rather than wood glue for some reason) and attached a plasticard topper. The final painted result is shown below

and a comparison shot of a StudioMiniature zombie, a pedestal zombie and an "out the bag" zombie

This is going to be my base construction method for the rest of these figures. The bases are light and quick to make (as I'll be describing next post) and bring the figure up to an acceptable height on the gaming table. I used them in the battle report last week and they survived the trip and the game without any damage.

Conclusion

For anyone who's managed to read this far :-), there are a number of lessons I've learned from all this:

• don't get fixated on an approach. I spent all my time trying to build the ground up to the attached base and it never occurred to me to simply remove the base
• it's a lot cheaper in your head. In the end I managed to avoid buying too much stuff, but some of my approaches would have been expensive failures: RTV rubber, resin etc. - not to mention that I actually looked up the cost of a power mitre saw. There is one, done by Minicraft/Proxxon, but it's very expensive.
• keep notes. I kept an Evernote document with the various ideas written down. It's quite interesting (to me anyway) to see what I tried, and things I discarded without even attempting. If nothing else, it can be used to write a really long-winded blog post one day.

Next time I will cover the actual making of the bases. It will be a lot shorter, but will have more pictures.

ZombieHunt April 2011

My brother-in-law, Bill, and I played a zombie hunt game using the AR:SE rules a couple of weekends ago, our first wargame of any type for several years. The after action report on the game is below. Apologies for the gradient fill in some of the pictures; we played in Bill's front room, so I cropped out bits of wall and furniture.

Looking for supplies

We had three teams of armed survivors each, and the plan was to scout around the table, picking up civilian survivors and supplies and killing zombies. We were going to keep score, but forgot almost immediately.

We placed a number of cards face down on various buildings to represent potential civilian survivors. When we got near a building, we turned the card over. If it was a red card there was nobody there, but on a black card we diced for which group it was (the civilians were split into six groups, with three dummy groups). Continuing the memory-lapse theme, we swapped the colour of the cards when checking, then wondered why we had difficulty finding anyone (well I did. Everywhere Bill drove, hordes of civilians ran out to greet him)

We had never used the rules before, so the first couple of turns Bill played a turn, and then I played a turn. However, this gave the zombies too many actions, so we decided that we would both play on a red card, and the zombies on a black card.

Bill's A-team drove down the middle of town and immediately found survivors. They stopped to pick them up, but got attacked by zombies. Two of the A-team were turned, but the rest fought them off and rescued the two survivors. This was the start of what was to become a very busy van.

My first team didn't do much, other than drive about in their monster truck. They nearly rescued a couple of survivors, but unfortunately they were eaten as they were getting on-board the truck. They did manage to kill a few zombies, but one of the problems was they only had three pistols amongst them, so they had very little to shoot with. Had they ever got out the van it would have been a different matter, as they had an axe, a hockey stick and a chainsaw. My other two groups had more firepower, but making sure a group has adequate ranged firepower is something I'll be paying more attention to next time.

We had placed a group, consisting of a corporate extraction team (five swat team members) and the "suit" they were extracting, in a building in the middle of the board. That group's mission had been to rescue the "suit" and get him back to a helicopter that was coming in later. However, their vehicle had crashed and they'd taken refuge in the building.

Their overturned blue van is in the middle of the picture below

They hailed the A-team as it was passing and piled in, bringing the total number of passengers in the van to 11. A short while later it picked up another couple of civilians. However, even with 13 people cramped in the van, and quite possibly on the roof, they still managed to kill an impressive number of zombies. They eventually made it to the helicopter landing site and barricaded themselves in to await the chopper.

At one point, all the following people were crammed into the van (16 in total)

While all this was going on, two of my teams were driving down the main road, not really doing anything, and the monster truck was bumping over rubble, looking for a way off the board. I think it managed to pick up some supplies, but other than that it was just a quiet afternoon drive.

Bill's other two teams consisted of a group in a stretch Humvee limo and a group in an old fashioned pickup truck.

The limo group managed to avoid having anyone dragged out, despite being attacked by a lot of zombies. It picked up some civilians and supplies, then headed off the board.

The pickup truck took a very torturous route around the board, including fitting through some very tight spaces between buildings. It got mobbed at one particular location and lost one of its crew when they were dragged out.

Meanwhile, the A-team, corporate minders and half the remaining civilian population of the town were  barricaded in, waiting for the helicopter, which took three turns to arrive. While dicing for it, we also diced to see if zombies appeared behind the group. A few did, but there was more than enough firepower available to deal with them.

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The helicopter finally appeared

There were too many people for the helicopter to carry, so we decided the civilians would fly out, and everyone with a gun would pile back into the A-team van. As the helicopter landing site was at the end of the board, it was just a short drive away to safety.

All in all, I think we only lost three survivor figures and a couple of civilians. There were a few civilians we didn't rescue, and a whole bunch of supplies we missed, but there will always be an opportunity to return for those.

Post game thoughts

Probably the biggest mistake we made was that everyone stayed in the trucks and never got out. It should have been much more on foot, dodging into and through buildings, but there wasn't enough stuff blocking the streets to stop the trucks. An approach for subsequent games may be to have a lot of rubble, and then determine whether it can be cleared or not when the vehicle reaches it. If it can be cleared, dice for how many actions it'll take (or dice each turn to see if enough has been moved), all the while with zombies approaching.

Rules thoughts

The rules really need an umpire, as there are a lot of situations that they don't cover (not surprising, given that they're only two pages long). Their simplicity, however, is also their strength, as it was easy to remember how many shots each weapon had, what the movement rates were etc.

The zombie tanks and hordes are a nice element, but really need "fleshed out" more.

Hordes instantly kill a person on foot, but seem to have absolutely no effect on vehicles: they don't slow them down, drag people from them, nothing.

Likewise, tanks throw things and have three lives, but other than that, nothing. Given that both tanks and hordes only move on a few specific cards, they spent most of their time standing around being shot or just bypassed.

We should have assigned personality types to each armed survivor group, which could have made their behaviour more interesting. Everyone helped everyone else, but some backstabbing might have been fun.

Final thoughts

Overall, an enjoyable and fast paced game. The rules, while minimalist, were easy to learn. Next time, there will be less driving and a lot more shoe leather involved.

Carronade 2011

I was at Carronade yesterday with my brother in law, so no pictures this week; just a report on the show and a list of the stuff I bought :-)

Carronade is the first of the central Scotland wargame shows this year, the other two being Wappinshaw in Glasgow in June and Claymore in Edinburgh in August.

I was looking for a few things, and got some of them. As always at these events, I also ended up with a whole lot of stuff that I hadn't planned on buying.

The show itself was large and very busy. There was a good range of ages present, and it's nice to see kids getting a chance to view aspects of the hobby other than those decided by a certain company who shall remain nameless.

There were a load of display games, although to be honest I didn't even really glance at them this year. We normally walk round the traders then take another pass over the games, but it took so long to get round the traders we didn't do the second pass. This wasn't because buying stuff from the stands took a long time, but because there was so much to see. Generally speaking, getting and buying stuff was the easy part, almost too easy :-(

My purchases fell into three categories:

• Figures
• Scenery
• Other stuff

Figures

In the "planned to buy" category, I picked up the Warlord 28mm plastic late war British Infantry and the Urban Mammoth Larvons (the snake guys I mentioned in xxx). The Urban Mammoth figures were half price, so that was a nice bonus.

In the "unplanned category" I mostly picked up individual figures that will be useful for the Demon Apocalypse setting. This included Confrontation’s Gorgon, Reaper Undead Priests and some DarkAge and Warcrow figures.

In the "seemed like a good idea at the time" category I picked up a Victorian Science Fiction set containing a cyclist on a steam powered penny farthing and a man and his robot dog. Nice figures (it was the cyclist that caught my eye), but I really no idea why I bought them, as VSF and steampunk in general don’t do anything for me.

Scenery

Every so often I consider the Hexon II Terrain System from Kallistra, but I’ve never bought any. This time I decided I’d pick up a packet of unflocked tiles and see how easy they were to paint and flock, as the pre-painted ones are just too expensive, being more than twice the cost of the unpainted ones. "Making Terrain and Buildings for Historical Wargames" has quite a few examples of using the tiles, so hopefully I’ll get round to testing the ones I bought. Note - I actually quite like the book and got a few ideas from it, unlike its reviewer on Amazon :-)

Other scenery I bought included a Ral Partha ruined Greek Temple and a couple of Architects of War pieces (family graveyard plot and desert well. This is a company I'd never heard of before the show, but there looks to be some interesting scenery on their website). All these pieces should find a home in the Demon apocalypse when I finally get around to painting them. I also picked up a Ral Partha 1:300 science fiction Science Building. I am a sucker for 1:300 SF scenery and, if I ever win the lottery, I plan to start my own business making the stuff. There’s a box full of interesting plastic shapes in the loft, just waiting to be put together in new and exciting ways to bring out their inner building. One day :-)

I picked up a 6 foot x 5 foot dark green felt mat. I have a sand coloured one, but the only green mat I have is an old Subutteo cloth (from the 1970s I think). Not sure if it’s worth anything (general rule of the Universe - if I own it, it’s not), but it was overdue for retirement.

Lastly on the scenery front, I picked up some static grass and a whole lot of MDF bases in 25mm, 50mm and 50mm oval. These are mostly destined for my zombies, with the larger ones hopefully being useful for basing zombie hordes.

Other stuff

I normally pick up a set or two of rules and some books at these events, but this year I didn’t buy any books and only picked up one set of rules: "No more room in Hell (Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse)" from Iron Ivan Games. I’ve had a quick scan, and they look okay. If I ever get around to playing a game with them, I’ll be sure to do an after action report.

Paint was very sparse this year: a few folk selling Army Painter stuff (loads of spray cans and dip), but only two places that I saw selling Vallejo paints, and only one of them with a reasonable selection. I picked up some greens that I was missing and some of the mediums (glaze, matt, retarder).

There was a flea market upstairs, but other than sticking my head through the door I didn’t venture in. I’m not sure I like the car boot sale approach as opposed to the traditional bring and buy. It’s easier to browse at a bring and buy as there’s no pressure on the person on the other side of the table to sell, so you tend to be left alone to rummage.

Final thoughts

All in all, we were there for a couple of hours, but could definitely have stayed longer if we’d wandered back around to view the display games. Our money was spent, however, so it was time to go home.

A good show overall, easily up to its usual high standard. I think there were more traders this year, and the variety of stuff for sale seemed wider than last year.

Wappinshaw’s next (with a load of pictures of the games at Carronade on their website). I missed it last year because of a clash with a family thing, but this year it’s earlier so I plan to be there. It’s not been the largest of shows in the past, but it has a new venue this year, so hopefully that will help.

Demon Bad Guys 2

These are some of the other bad guys involved in the Demon apocalypse (the first figures were introduced here)

I moved the camera back a bit with these figures, going more for group shots than individual close-ups, especially as the paint jobs really don't stand up to the scrutiny of a macro lens :-(

First up, some of the old Citadel cultists. They did some others, but these were the only ones that fitted in with the background. I seem to remember the others had unfeasibly large guns, or were otherwise unsuitable.

Old Citadel metal Dark Eldar/Elf Wytches. I really hated painting these figures, and I think it shows :-) The colour choice makes them look like angry Smurfs, which wasn't really my intention.

And what would Dark Eldar be without a blood altar?

I do have the new Dark Edlar Wytch plastics, with more of a plan for their background (mercenary slavers from the Demon dimension - actually pretty much their role in GW lore when you think about it), so hopefully I won't mind painting them so much. I picked up the VodooWorx alien temple bases recently, and I plan to use those for bases for the new Wytches.

Next up are some of the different types of I-Kore/Urban Mammoth spider demon monsters. I don't remember seeing them on the Urban Mammoth site, so I'm not sure if they're still available.

There are a lot of red figures hanging around in my collection. Quite a few of them are nothing but red, and this is something I need to vary a bit in future painting.

As well as the Master Vampires from last week, there are also some mid-level vampires

And finally, on a completely unrelated topic - I found this old Citadel Limited Edition miniature hanging out in the demon drawer. This was a range that Citadel did back in the 1980s, releasing non-themed figures (on a monthly basis, if memory serves). This is the Chaos Jester - apologies for the dodgy colour balance, he and the camera didn't get along at all.