Continuing with my Adepticon Arena Rex purchase, Vargr.
Once again, the pose is wild. He’s about to shift directions and mess you up. This was probably the most straightforward of the set – just a bunch of skin tones. As usual, I’m not happy with the blending up close, but it looks nice on the tabletop.
Arena Rex was one of the darlings of Adepticon 2016. The booth was always busy, with a bunch of people waiting in line. The game has an interest damage tree mechanic, but the models are what really attracted me. Romanesque gladiators is a great period, brought to life with a highly detailed, characterful, and extremely dynamic sculpts. I had to have some.
I settled on the Zephyri, a cross between Vikings and Native Americans.
The models are cast in a white resin. It’s not my favorite material – I have a really hard time cleaning up mold lines. At least there weren’t many air bubbles.
You can activate one model per turn. To keep from activating the same model each turn, the model gets a fatigue token that must be cleared before it can be activated again. You can get extra actions by flipping the token over to the theta side, which are even harder to clear. I decided to paint them as coins, and tried out an oil wash to try to bring out the symbol.
Bjarrhvit is the centerpiece of the Zephyri starter. Just look at all that flowing fur.
Frigge’s shield and feathers were separate pieces. The shield is a pretty nice piece by itself, with a slot for the hand to slip into. The feathers were a challenge to position.
I love Sven’s footwork. It’s so easy to imagine him delicately flitting around a bigger opponent, waiting for his opening. The model showed the weakness of the resin, however. The thin spear was so soft and droopy, no matter how many times I reshaped it with heat and ice water. I gave up and used a bit of brass rod, although I failed to salvage the resin speartip.
It seemed like Bishop would make a good addition to both Pandora and Tara crews. I’ve gotten one game in with Tara, and Bishop put out a stupid amount of damage, including a couple counterpunches with his Cage Fighter defensive trigger.
Much like Lilitu, the blade and chain catches on things, and the blade is already starting to break off. Maybe he’ll end up with a double chain fist.
The flames on Iggy’s hands gave opportunity to do more object source lighting, which I’ve done to some nice effect a few times. It ended up looking bad, though, so I painted back over it. I think the blue shirt is the wrong color choice to put reds and yellows on.
