Space Marines | Dragons of Lancasm

Here’s my three squads of Space Marines from the Space Crusade board game finally completed. Blood Angels (red), Imperial Fist (yellow) and Ultramarines (blue). I started painting figures from the game about two years ago, getting onto the space marines in October last year.

Each squad has three marines with bolters, one marine with a heavy weapon and a commander. The heavy weapons (assault cannon, missile launcher or plasma gun) and commanders weapons (heavy bolter, bolt pistol & power axe, or power glove & power sword) are interchangeable and I’ve had to do some careful filing to make sure they are less likely to get stuck together and break. (The ones that aren’t already broken that is.) For the images, I’ve made sure that I picked something different for each squad.

The plasma gun is meant to have a bright coppery-gold muzzle, but it looks quite yellow in the image, so I’ll go over it again tomorrow with bright bronze.

The special weapons were very fiddly to paint, and I wasn’t as concerned with spending as much time on them as I did with the marines themselves. As board game pieces, they will all go back into the game box soon. Everything in the box except for the orcs and gretchen have now been painted, and I have no intention of painting them. I started this because some of the pieces I could use in my Gamma World game (and have) and the marines deserve to be done if my friends and I ever decide to play again.

Last, but not least, here’s an orc who should have been painted back in Sept 2018 when I did orcs and goblins. He’s a bit paler than his brethren because he’s apparently been hiding with my skaven for at least a decade. The marines and the orc all qualify for Ann’s March painting challenge – Neglected but not forgotten!

Here’s a group shot of all the Space Crusade pieces that I’ve now painted.

With lock-down rules relaxing here, my wife and I were able to visit a friend’s home for an evening of catching up in person yesterday. We also managed a fairly long five-player game of Ticket to Ride. While I’ve heard a lot about the game, we had never played it before. We had a lot of fun learning strategy, building train lines and upsetting other players plans. It was nice being out and while I didn’t win, I had a lot of fun. My wife came second and received a certificate and a bracelet as a price from the 8 year old who came last. (Who might have done better if she’d paid more attention to the game, instead of than talking to everyone, making prizes and looking at her iPad. She’d wanted to play Alhahambra, but her father thought that we’d learn TtR faster.)

Painting has been mostly Space marines over the last two weeks. I have two squads almost done, with the main exception being their special weapons. I have now added the last 6 figures from ‘My Little Scythe’ to the tray, so that’s something more interesting to do interspersed between working on the Ultramarines.

The Space marines haven’t been as much fun to paint as the Chaos Marines were. Overall, I feel these are slightly simpler sculpts. The detail is “softer” – armor plates not so individually defined, detail like the chest eagle mostly hidden behind the bolters, etc. My freehand isn’t up to painting chapter symbols on shoulder pads either, which is a pity. These figures will go without. (It could happen if I turned up some decals on the ‘net at a really low price.) In any case they do stand out a lot more compared to the single colour plastic that they started as.

I hope you are all coping well with life and Covid-19 where you are. Best wishes!