2024 Painting Log

My entry into Gangs of Rome followed an all too familiar pattern. I read about the game and it sounded interesting (it’s possible I had just rewatched the Rome TV series and was flush with enthusiasm for ancient Rome). So I bought the rule book, accessories and enough miniatures to try it out, plus a terrain kit or two from Sarissa. Assembled and painted everything, then played the game and enjoyed it quite a bit, although I did find some elements of the game to be a little fiddly, particularly the damage and equipment tokens. I especially like the amount of NPC action the game has, between the mobs that wander around the board and the individual incola who do things like throw scorpions at your fighters for no good reason. I bought more miniatures and terrain, painted those…and never played the game again. That was in 2020.

I like the game and the setting, it’s just that there aren’t enough days in the week for me to have time to play all the games I want to. However, the Kickstarter for the second edition caught my attention — it looked like they addressed most of the issues I had with the game, and the new action system involving planning out your actions and then rolling to see how many you can actually accomplish looked interesting, so I decided to give it another go.

I have quite a few miniatures from the older edition which of course are perfectly usable, but I am conditioned to paint first, then play, so I want to get the new miniatures done before I try out the new rules. This represents just under half (10 out of 23) so I’m well on my way.

These were all done primarily with speedpaints over a black-then-drybrushed primer (still not calling it Slap Chop). The speedpaint flesh tone doesn’t cover particularly well, so after one test (the puppeteer), I did the skin on the rest of the figures by painting flat skin tone with regular paint and then doing a flesh wash. But I think maybe my bottle of flesh wash might have gone off, it was pooling and drying in a really patchy way. So I had to go back over most of the skin with regular paint to clean up the mid tones and highlights.

2024 models painted so far: 48, for 3 different games