After the massive job of putting together 3 armies for Beyond the Gates of Antares, it was about time to test out some paint schemes. Nothing very original, but as always, they had to match my main objective of… can I paint them quickly.
First I had to let my fingers recover. 1600 points (roughly) of Ghar, Algoryn and Concord left my fingertips a little bereft of feeling as they were suffering from green stuff and superglue melded into my fingerprints. The plastics are well made and didn’t require as much mold line removal as GW plastic, or indeed Mantic Restic. Although I’m going to have a break from building now and get some painting done.
What got me wanting to play Antares initially was the cool looking scheme done on the great Algoryn models, along with the similarity to Bolt Action rules. So, I had to use a scheme similar to Warlord’s for the Algoryn. My wife who’s decided to adopt the Concord as her army, liked the bone/green standard so I stuck with that. As I wanted all 3 armies to look different, I didn’t want to have the Ghar in a grey/white that was similar to the Concord bone, so I tried out the Crystal Blue colour I’d used on my Deadzone Forgefathers. Although it looked ok, they were too similar to the Forgefathers. So in the end, I decided, to go with a really easy to paint metal scheme. All 3 different enough to see clearly on the table.
Sorry for the poor lighting on these photos…
Trial Algoryn Paint jobs
Trial Concord Paint jobs
Trial Ghar Paint jobs
Although I say “trial”. I’ve actually got a full unit of 3 of these painted now.
Game On
As the armies were all built, we decided to try a small game out. Just 500 points of Ghar vs Concord. This was mainly to try out the rules, and for me, to hope my wife found it as easy to play as Bolt Action.
Ghar Empire (497 points)
- 2 Army Options: Block, Extra Shot
- 5 Ghar Battle Squad (1 Leader, 4 troops)
- 3 Ghar Battle Squad (1 Leader, 2 troops)
Concord (498 points)
- 1 Army Options: Block
- C3 Strike Command Squad (1 Leader, 4 Troops) with Spotter Drone
- C3 Strike Squad (1 Leader, 3 Troops, 1 Troop with Plasma Lance) with Spotter Drone
- C3 Strike Squad (1 Leader, 3 Troops, 1 Troop with Plasma Lance) with Spotter Drone
- C3D1 Light Support Drone with Batter Drone
A great game with some real learning highlights. At one point the Concord managed to get a lucky shot on the large battle squad with 2 other hits. My wife put the lucky shot on my leader, not knowing he’d get a re-roll. He rolled a 10, and a 10 on the re-roll. Plasma explosion! One of the other Ghar died to the shot he took, and 2 others also died to plasma explosions. I feel my dice were rigged to get 10’s. All fun though and quite devastating to see a unit of 5 Ghar Battle troops drop to 1 in a single round of shots from the Concord. Hopefully, the gribbly little Ghar won’t see bad luck like that when we start the Battle for Xilos campaign games.
Poor lighting again, but we played mainly at the nearside of this setup. Next table will have to be a jungle table for the Battle of Xilos.
One thing I decided to do after the game was to knock up some cards to use for the Army Options. That way, we could have the cards on the table and discard them when they were used. All the info is on the cards, so no looking anything up.
I made 3 sets, which you get the idea of their looks from the pictures below.
Below should be a link to a pdf with each of the files of 7 cards for the 3 factions shown. They are all sized to fit in standard card sleeves. I’ve printed mine on card and put them in Ultra-Pro card sleeves so they’re pretty solid things now.
Till next update… Enjoy.
Gimgamgoo.com 