Neighborhood Watch: A Superhero AAR

The Fantastic Four are on a well earned vacation in Pango Pango, and they have asked the X-Men and the Avengers to water the plants and generally keep an eye on the place while they are away.

The X-Men begin their patrol, looking for shady characters.  It's a good thing too, because...

The Hobgoblin, Black Cat, Abomination, Doctor Doom, Juggernaut, and Sabertooth have arrived to trash the Fantastic Four's building. Hobgoblin gets things started by hitting it with a pumpkin bomb, causing a fire. 

The X-men call for reinforcements, and the Avengers arrive.  While Iron Man tries to deal with the fire, Firestar and Spider-Woman  go after the Hobgoblin. Hulk and Ant Man prepare to slow down the other villains until the X-Men can get in position.

Unable to stop the fire, Iron Man blasts Abomination, while Cyclops gets a shot in at Juggernaut.  Firestar and Spider-Woman are unable to hit the Hobgoblin.

Ice Man arrives at the Fantastic Four building and and puts out the fire with his ice powers.  Hobgoblin is too busy with our heroes to throw any more pumpkin bombs at the headquarters.

The X-Men and Deadpool are now ready for battle.  Our heroes fail to further injure any of our villains this turn, but Doctor Doom manages to shock Deadpool with a lightning strike from his gauntlets, wounding him.

Firestar and Cyclops both blast away at Sabertooth,  knocking him out of commission.  The Hulk throws a truck at Abomination, but fails to injure him. 

The villains charge into hand to hand combat, taking on Hulk, Ant Man and Cyclops.

Cyclops retreats to a better shooting position while Beast and Deadpool jump into the mix.

Iceman and Angel help out in the attack on Hobgoblin.

It breaks down into a brutal slugfest, with Abomination taking further injury.

Black Cat manages to jinx Deadpool, resulting in further injury to him.  He decides to retreat and fight elsewhere.

Hobgoblin is knocked out of the sky, and our airborne heroes come down and join the fight on the ground.  However, Firestar is wounded by Doctor Doom.

Deadpool partially heals his injuries, then he takes down Abomination with Hulk and Iron Man.

Meanwhile, Spider-Woman and Firestar tangle with Black Cat, injuring her. 

Doctor Doom is trapped in a block of ice by Iceman, while Hulk and Cyclops help swarm Juggernaut. 

Juggernaut and Black Cat are knocked out cold, and the villains are now headed for jail.  Our superhero neighborhood watch have saved the Fantastic Four headquarters from destruction, with only the loss of a few ficus plants in the fire!

More Heroes and Villains

So I'm back with some new figures for the kids' superhero games.

First up are two members of the Avengers:

Hawkeye was made from Crossover's Fletch hero.  I've gone for the more traditional comic look rather than the movie costume. Overall a nice figure that was easy to paint.

 Thor is a repainted Heroclix figure.  The original paint job wasn't too bad, just a bit flat.  The sculpting is actually rather nice. 

Next up is our S.H.I.E.L.D. scientist, Professor Kiyoshi Mamba, one of the world experts on aliens and mutants.  This figure comes from Reaper's Chronoscope line.  He will play a major role in our upcoming cross blog game.

Electro is the first of our two new villains.   This is another Heroclix repaint. Again, the original wasn't bad looking (the eyes were actually great, so I left them alone), just rather flat.

Last is Sabertooth, another Heroclix figure. The sculpting is just ok (his head is a bit big), but as you can see, the original paint job was absolute crap and had to be completely redone:

S.H.I.E.L.D. Team 6: Alien and Mutant Threats

After the events in New York city, S.H.I.E.L.D. needed to be better prepared to deal with alien and mutant threats.  Using the U.S. Navy SEALS as their model, special teams of elite agents were trained to act as the vanguards during hostile encounters. Their mission is to provide reconnaissance, recover any useful alien technologies, and coordinate initial resistance until a larger S.H.I.E.D. force can arrive. 

Team 6 is located on the west coast of the United States.

I wanted to get my kids inserted in their superhero games in preparation for the cross blog game we'll be conducting with Maj Guiscard.  My kids didn't want to create their own superheros, so I decided to make some S.H.I.E.L.D. agents instead.   We have a figure for each member of the household, with IDs on the back of the helmets.  The figures are Nova Corps Troopers from Reaper which I would highly recommend. In the movies the agents are shown in black and blue uniforms, but I think they would be a bit dark and not show the details of the figures very well. As such, I've opted for the more classic blue and white look. They ended up looking a bit more clone trooper-ish than I planned, but as my kids like Star Wars, it actually got them more excited about the figures.

I still have additional items to paint, but we should be ready for our game in July.

Heroclix Repaints

As I've stated earlier, I'm not a fan of the Heroclix figures.  A lot of the sculpting is merely mediocre, and the painting is terrible.  That being said, there are a lot of figures that my kids want that don't have something similar available in metal.  As such, I broke down and started looking on eBay for cheap Heroclix that seemed to have potential for conversion.  I ended up buying a bunch for $1-$3 from a vendor offering deep shipping discounts on multiple figures.

As expected, they looked terrible, but underneath the horrible painting, there were actually some pretty good sculpts for most of them.  The plastics they were made of seemed to vary between figures, with some being hard, and others soft.  Depending on the figure, they were cast with no bases, small bases around each foot, or a large crescent shaped based. Figure sized seemed to vary, but overall the majority weren't too different in size to my metal miniatures. All could be be popped off the Heroclix dial without too much effort using a blade . This I did, placing the figures on 30mm rimmed bases (unless the figure was too large) and added resin texture gel.  Based on what I'd read on LAF and other forums, I decided to forgo priming the figures and just start right on top of the existing paint job.

Currently, I have three figures completed:

Repainted Batman

The original Heroclix

The particular Batman figure runs large: He is 33cm foot to eye, putting him about half a head above the other standard size figures.  There are several other sculpts available, so perhaps one of them would be closer to the other figures.   That being said, this particular sculpt isn't too bad.  I opted to keep him in the more modern dark colors than the classic blue.

Repainted Darkseid

The original Heroclix

The original paint job on Darkseid actually wasn't too bad, just really flat looking. I think the 3-tone upgrade makes him pop much more. Darkseid is a large figure, running 42mm foot to eye.  Floating in the air, he would have been difficult to store in my current box, so I'll brought him back down to earth and put him on a 40mm base.

Repainted Abomination

The original Heroclix

Abomination is the last figure for this round of painting. The sculpting is good, but he was just a hunk of green plastic with two white dots for eyes and a smeared mouth.  Rather than keeping him bright green, I decided to give him more of an olive color, using Russian green as the base. I think this will make him stand out a bit more against the Hulk.

Overall, I have to say they are coming out better than I expected.

New Heroes and Villains

The kids wanted to get a little painting in, and we managed to knock out a few new figures.

First up from the boys are Black Cat and American Dream:

Black Cat is from Reaper, and American Dream is an Old Glory figure. The boys did the bulk of the  painting, and then asked me to come in and do some clean up and detailing.

For myself, I finished up the half painted Beast and then painted a figure that we'll be using for Juggernaut.  These figures are also from Old Glory and Reaper.

 

The Bad Seed: Superhero AAR

Another afternoon of superhero gaming with the boys.  This time they wanted to run more figures (two superhero teams of four), so we we went for something bigger.

Green Goblin Girl, with the help of HYDRA, has secretly been breeding alien plants in the city's botanical garden. The spores from these plants have the ability to turn people into her goblin slaves!  Can our heroes destroy the plants and prevent her from taking control of the city?

Green Goblin Girl and the HYDRA goons lurk in the park, cultivating the plants.

The Fantastic Four and the X-Men arrive to stop her.

 The teams spot the mercenary Deadpool lurking down a side road and know he must be up to no good. They decide to surround him, while the Human Torch takes to the air and opens fire on him. Deadpool manages to squeeze up against the wall and avoids the flames.

Deadpool hops the wall and scores a shot on the Thing, while the HYDRA troops are drawn towards the street by all the noise. Luckily, Iceman and Firestar arrive. Deadpool avoids Firestar's flames, but Iceman manages to encase him in a block of ice, putting him out of action.

Green Goblin Girl throws a pumpkin bomb at Cyclops and Beast, but misses her targets. Our heroes begin moving into the garden to engage the enemy and destroy the plants.

Fierce fighting breaks out, and the Human Torch manages set one of the alien plants ablaze before it could release its spores. However, Green Goblin Girl manages to slip through the melee and make it to her truck, which is carrying barrels of harvested spores!  Can our heroes stop her before she can get away and release them into the city, causing its citizens to turn into evil automatons?

Thankfully Firestar spots her before she gets far, and the truck is engulfed in flames, destroying the spores!

As the battle continues in the garden, Deadpool manages to break free of the ice, cutting Firestar with his sword before Iceman can refreeze him.

Our heroes quickly defeat the remaining HYDRA troops and set about destroying the rest of the plants.

However, the Thing is too slow in destroying his plant, and gets  a face full of spores. As he begins to turn against his comrades, Firestar and Human Torch are forced to attack him until he is finally knocked out.

 The city was finally safe from Green Goblin Girl's spores.  Reed Richards took the Thing back to Fantastic Four headquarters, where he developed a serum to turn the Thing back into his normal heroic self.