I have several things to show off since its technically been two weeks since normal update though most of it is fairly small. The first thing I tackled is the second Nazi Knife Fighter from Hellboy. The first of many Nazis I have yet to paint. There’s not too much to say about it so I’ll just share some pictures, including a side-by-side that shows the first one on the left and newer one on the right. There are some subtle differences between the two but the only intentional one is that I decided to try and mix up the skin tones a bit across the various Nazis to try and make it interesting for myself. We’ll see if that makes a visual impact in the end or not.
Next up, we have something very small and a little tedious to work on: a pile of books. This is the first of four or five I plan on painting for Hellboy. I probably only need to finish 2-3 but I’ll do them all because I think they’ll look nice all together. The details on this one are tricky because they’re annoyingly small so I did the best I could. Working on this took longer and was less fun than I expected. I decided to change gears after painting this one but more on that in a second. Finally, I should mention that the odd thing with my camera where something truly tiny (28mm miniatures and below) comes out looking dark and kind of bland. You can really see this in the third picture below which was meant to be a scale comparison but ends up being a much better photo than the other two.
Saving the best for last, I also painted up a chair that goes with the Wizard’s desk from a couple of weeks ago. This was pretty enjoyable to paint and not overly time consuming. I always enjoy painting red and so that didn’t hurt matters any. I’ll hold off showing what it looks like with the desk as I want to wow you when you see the “moving diorama” or cinematic photo I have planned for Hellboy in the future when I get more of this done.
Since I finished the bookpile and chair, I finally rediscovered my motivation for display painting so I’m back to working on Lokaris now. It has been quite a bit since I really had any desire to resume working on the 75mm project but something clicked for me and I’ve been much more motivated to work on it the last couple of days. I made some nice improvements and even attached a new limb to him so I’m looking forward to showing some progress on him next week.
This week, I took a day off of work as a day of relaxation, with an eye towards playing Arkham Horror: Third Edition and trying the final scenario, Echoes of the Deep. And while I did play it that day, I mostly got crushed. The first time I got myself in a terrible position pretty early on because I kept flubbing dice rolls. In addition to some nasty fish creatures trailing my every step, I somehow managed to let three anomalies open up. That is about as dire as it gets and I was convinced there was no way to win so I threw in the towel. Here’s a quick picture of the board state before I stopped.
The second time I rolled dice better but realized I made several rules mistakes. I also took Rex Murphy and I really don’t like him as an investigator in Third Edition. He has an ability where he can only count 6’s instead of 5’s and 6’s as successes which is a big deal and he often misses key rolls because you just can’t get a 6 when you need it. In fact, I find him underwhelming compared to other clue getters in this game and I wouldn’t be surprised if I don’t use him again anytime soon. So I once again conceded to the mighty Cthulhu.
The third time I played through the whole scenario (for the first time finally!) and lost soundly again, unfortunately. The Echoes of the Deep scenario throws harder monsters at you than any of the previous do. There are potentially two Elite monsters on the board that damage your sanity each turn, unless you fight them and then they do even more damage. Its a lot to contend with. To make matters worse, I did not do a good job of keeping anomalies from lingering which causes doom to pile up on the scenario sheet and you to lose the scenario. So while I tried to make my investigators more combat-centered this time, it just didn’t work out.
Like a rabid Cthulhu follower, I actually got a 4th game in on Friday and I used what I think are the strongest investigators in the base game (Calvin Wright, Wendy Adams, and Marie Lambeau). Calvin and Wendy are very durable and pretty versatile compared to many other investigators that only do one thing really well. I’d never used Marie before and she lets you both repeat an action and provides a third action to herself or someone else, which is really powerful. She is easily the best “support” investigator in the base game, I’d wager!
I also tried to tweak my strategy slightly and really focus on preventing doom from hitting the scenario sheet (you will always lose Arkham Horror: Third Edition if it advances too high) by warding more and closing anomalies as quickly as possible. This did wonders for my overall performance and I even killed the first big monster that hits the board (who more or less “clears the way” for Cthulhu) but I wasn’t able to weaken the Cthulhu much before running out of time and was not close to being able to kill it with Calvin. I had a few tough breaks like when Marie suddenly died by being thrown onto train tracks by a stranger (!) and then losing Blessed on Calvin which makes him much more formidable in combat than he is without it.
So Cthulhu has beat me up a few times this week and I’m finding the scenario very difficult to beat using the Base Game only. I suspect that it might be easier if I add some more investigators from the next expansion into the mix but I want to write my review of Arkham Horror: Third Edition Base Game first. So expect that in the coming weeks as I get time. It will be a long article and so if you have no interest in the game, please don’t feel any pressure to read or comment upon it.
Finally, I’ve been working my way through some Arkham Horror inspired reading this week as well and I will launch a new kind of article called “Reading Arkham Horror” in the near future. If you like Lovecraft or the board/card games, then my hope is that you will find it interesting. There isn’t a ton of informative articles out there about Mythos writers so I figured it’d be fun to talk a bit about what I’ve been reading in case it might be of interest to some of you. I can’t say for sure when I’ll be able to finish the article so hopefully it will be a nice surprise when it does show up in your feed.
Kuribo's Painting 