Zombicide!

A couple months several present and past co-workers decided to get together for a game night after work. One friend of mine suggested we play Zombicide which I had heard of a few years ago, but somehow lost track of it and never played. It looked like a good team building game given its co-op nature and seemed like it would be fairly easy to pick up even by those whose most in-depth gaming experience until now was Monopoly (no offense - I like that game too).

Anyway, we all had a great time and after the single play I was hooked. I found that I'd missed all the Kickstarter excitement (and exclusive content), but was glad to see that the original game and most of the expansions had made it to retail stores including my local hobby store and of course online.

Painting miniature figures has never been one of my favorite things to do as I generally prefer to build and paint terrain for games to take place on. My plan is to build some 3D scenery as others (here and here) have done to supplement the game. Rather than replicate the exact tiles from the game, I think it would be neat to base a new set of tiles off of downtown Des Moines, Iowa (USA) (the largest city closest to where I live). Before getting to that project, however, I thought getting the figures out of the way would be a good idea as I may run out of steam before getting to them.

All of my semi-current paints are geared towards terrain (larger quantity, lesser quality) so if I was going to paint miniatures, I'd need something a little more fresh than my random assortment of 15-20 year old Games Workshop, Ral Partha, and other mostly dried up pots. Army Painter made a good move to pair with CoolMiniOrNot and deploy a line of paints and tutorials on painting the Zombicide miniatures. If I was completely new to painting, I probably would have purchased the exact paints they advertised, but I decided to go with the Mega Paint Set II. I've been quite pleased with the paint consistency and quality as well as the brushes that were included. The brushes don't quite stack up to my classic Winsor & Newton Series 7 (size 1), but the regiment brush holds a decent point and can carry quite a bit of paint.

With paints in hand, I decided to take the plunge into painting minis again...  Keep an eye out for my next posting which will be much lighter on words and much heavier on pictures!