Spy-Fi Figures

One of my initial early thoughts for this years Historicon was to use the 7TV rules in a James Bond setting. I have a ton of Artizan, Hasselfree, and of course Crooked Dice figures that all fit into this genre.

What's nice about the Agent Carter boards is that they can easily double for a Bond setting - and depending on how things go at Historicon, I may run another game or two but use these figures instead to change the feel a bit.

These are all the easily recognizable Bond figures.

Goldfinger and From Russia With Love figures.

Blofelds and evil masterminds.

More Bond-like agents.

Really like the chap on the end with the eye patch! Number 2 perhaps?!

And the tie of year award goes to Dr. Everythingwillbealright above :)

My favorite figure of the group, and not anything close to spy-fi! This is Mr. Hyde from West Wind's Empire of the Dead line. The whole line has some absolutely fantastic figures, but when I saw this one I had to immediately buy it. He's just a monster (no pun intended lol!) next to the other figures. Who knows what I'll use him for, but it doesn't matter, he can just stand around on the table and look brilliant!

All the above figures were painted by Arthur Hannan at http://www.ezpainter.co.uk/ over in the UK. I stumbled upon an ad Arthur had put up in the Bolt Action International Facebook page and thought I'd get in contact about helping out with my ever growing mountain of unpainted lead - as mentioned in the post for goals for the year way back in January, I'm making commission work on figures a focus and this was the first step in making that mountain smaller!

We sorted things out really quickly through a few emails and I had 100 figures in the mail and on their way across the pond. What was great was that almost immediately in that first email I could tell Arthur and I were exactly on the same page as to what I was looking for color and style wise. He kept in almost daily contact as he worked through the figures, sending me photos of the progress - I think he completed all 100 in less than two weeks.

I have about 60 more to base up (I told Arthur I would take care of all the basing since I'm only going to use clear bases going forward on these types of skirmish figures), so that'll be for another post. But super happy to have had Arthur help me with this first group, they all look fantastic! I was so impressed with Arthur's communication and all the progress photos he sent, that I sent him another 90 figures before these had even gotten back to me where I could actually see them with my own eyes. Amongst those 90 figures are all the SAS agents, several Peggy Carter figures, as well as Hydra soldiers, two Dr. Zola's, and about 40 German zombies that will be the bulk of what is used for Historicon. Can't wait to see what he comes back with for that batch of figures!

Until next time, thanks for looking!

Ivor

Agent Carter, The Manor - WIP

Amazing how different things are now that the wife and all the horses are back from South Carolina! Farm is on full go 24/7 now. Anyway, despite no posts through April I have gotten up to the studio to do some work.

I added two new driveways into the courtyard to begin with - the first was being weighed down by my Agent Carter season one book :)

I put down the initial undercoat of earth color around the manor.

 And here you can see both of the driveways as mentioned above.

I'm really thinking about changing up the entrance on this end of the manor - the area I didn't paint brown. I was thinking about making a stone patio/deck type of structure off those double doors. I think it needs something different, as the layout how it is now, it just seems odd to have another driveway going around to this side.

I've also began to experiment with putting magnets into the foam board to lock up the seems a bit better. Unfortunately these magnets that I had in a drawer just aren't strong enough, so I ordered some of the good neodymium 1/2 by 1/8 disc magnets from Ebay. Hopefully they'll do the trick

One thing I really wanted to do with this board was to not make it football field - meaning completely flat across. I wanted some variations in height around the manor so I added left over foam board from Jakob's last architecture project around the outside of the courtyard. In hindsight, I really should have done a better job rounding the pieces so I didn't have so many straight edges.

My thought was that when I put the plaster cloth over the "mounds" I could shape it some and it would soften those edges.

Well, it didn't quite work out like I'd hoped; it was ok, just not what I had pictured in my head. I did some re-adjusting and ultimately it did work out and once I put the flock on it looked the business - thank goodness!

I threw down some trees just for fun to get a better idea of a final product. Tufts and flowers will be added as well.

I'm going to put magnets on the trees, like I did with the Chicago Way board from last years Historicon event. This makes both travel and actual gameplay easier when the trees can be removed.

I also got the last of my Secret Weapon power generators and put an initial coat of paint on them. Still lots to do detail and weathering wise. I put a copper color on one to see if I liked that color better than the standard metal/silver, but I'm not sure which looks better honestly. I'll probably need to see it in relation to all the other bits and bobs I'll have around the facility.

I got Red Skull onto a clear base too :)

I did see verification in the Historicon PEL that Agent Carter will be running on Thursday morning at 11am and then Saturday night at 7pm. If I don't make a complete meal out of the game (high probability at the moment though LOL!) maybe I'll run it one or two more times, Thursday night or Friday sometime. But that's always the challenge of Historicon - do you want to run your game as much as you can or do you want to get out there and roll some dice yourself?! I know I want to try to get into Miles Reidy's weird war game, as I've yet to miss one of his games since I've been going to H-con, as well as David and Kalissa Skibicki's Bolt Action game. Plus you gotta get into the vendor hall as quickly as you can to snap up those bargains!

Until next time, and as always, thanks for looking!

Ivor