Gorram's Great Star Wars Project

Somehow it is now February 2024 and I’ve achieved nothing concrete for this project. I did spend a fair bit of time last year going over options for planetary setting and game objectives. I didn’t make any decisions but I did think a lot about it. For some reason it came back into my head this week and I asked Alexa how many days until the 22nd of June, the date I’ve pencilled the game in for. Holy shit, what have I been doing for the last six months???

So here I sit, with only 130 or so days to do everything. Why do I do this stuff to myself?

Having never done something like this before, I need to find a way to tackle the whole project my way. That means lists, tasks and sub tasks, planning, planning and a little more planning.

Things that need decisions:

1. Game system – currently between WEG Star Wars Battles because I have a copy and Xenos Rampant because several of us have copies. Star Wars Bolt Action is also a possibility.
2. Which planet/battle the game is going to focus around. I’ve gone back and forth on this one a lot over the past six months; it’s pretty much the only work I’ve done on the project. I’ve narrowed it down to two. I think. Maybe three. Or four.

While these decisions are pending, I need a foot of the elephant to get started on. Something smaller that I can get my head around dealing with. I can get started on the armies. I know for a fact that there will be stormtroopers. Lots of them. I played with the idea of using proxies, I even picked up a sprue of Wargames Atlantic Eisenkern Stormtroopers (https://wargamesatlantic.com/collections/iron-core/products/eisenkern-stormtroopers) to see if painting them up white would suffice. Truthfully it would, especially at a distance when standing round playing and if I was just doing a small force for normal gaming, I’d go with them. This game is to be a bit special though and the distinctive look of a Star Wars stormtrooper turns out to matter more to me than I thought it would. I am my own worst enemy, it is known.

Next then is the expensive elephant in the room, Legion. A widely available, commercial option that is currently in production. Boy it’s pricey though. And unit sizes are dumb. Seven in a box? We can all agree this is not the sensible way to buy 60-80 models. However, the original core box had several units in it and has been out for ages. And being an FFG original product, it was designed that everyone should buy two core boxes as “the best way to start an army”. I’m just to going to brush past that bullshit. The benefit is that there are quite a lot on eBay.

A few months ago, someone was selling the the Imperial halves of two core boxes (1 Darth Vader, 4 units of stormtroopers and 2 units of speeder bikes plus all the token gubbins I don’t want) for £90 including postage. Was it a steal? No, but I thought it was a pretty good value considering the box new (at the time of writing) is £100+ even from third party sellers. It works out to £2.70ish a model. So I had some stormtroopers to get started with… and all that white to paint. Bugger.

Since I picked them up though a third option has come to me. I was given an old 3D printer by someone who had upgraded and, whilst it isn’t the most fancy machine out there, it has been producing minis just fine for me. I’ve had to stop printing for the winter as I was struggling to keep the temperatures consistent for the duration of a print and it was leading to failures. So the plan right now is to work on the FFG models until the weather warms a little.