"The Mindless Ones! They've Broken Through!"

"Brainless creatures of almost incalculable power."

These seven brutish-looking 40mm tall plastic “Wizkids” models of a Mindless One can be purchased as miniature number 05 from the Marvel “Heroclix” Giant Size X-Men range. Summoned via magic to do the bidding of others, for they have no will of their own, these extra-dimensional beings have a rocky hide and no face except for "a single glowing eye". Utilised by the likes of Doctor Doom and Dormammu”, the roughly humanoid-shaped monstrosities were created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and made their first comic book appearance within the pages of Issue One Hundred and Twenty Seven of “Strange Tales” in December 1964.

Due to these figures each requiring an incredibly simple paint-job, and having previously painted two of the behemoths before for the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge, this particular project was rather straightforward. However, it did once again give me the opportunity to try out the combination of “Vallejo” USA Olive Drab and “Citadel” Nuln Oil. The Mindless Ones' cyclopean eyes were then subsequently ‘picked out’ using a combination of “Vallejo” Heavy Red and the “Citadel” glaze, Bloodletter.

Plaguebearer WIPs - These daemons currently need all their sores and wounds painted

With the latest of my Seventh Analogue hobbies Painting Challenge miniatures completed, I have been progressing on another three Plaguebearers for my "Age Of Sigmar" Nurgle Host. Rather than simply just stick with the lesser daemons this time round, I've added a couple of cheeky-faced Nurglings to a couple of bases, so as to make the puss-covered fiends a bit more interesting to both look at and paint.

Cunningly a couple of these mini-vignettes will additionally be able to act as my ‘elite’ Plaguebearers for the “Warhammer 40,000” skirmish game “Kill Team”. Admittedly, I already own enough finished Nurgle models with which to field a 200 point force for this “standalone two-player game” by "Games Workshop". But as a small number of my squad will have special abilities bestowed upon them, such as "Relentless" and "Poisoned Weapons", I wanted to use the Nurglings to ‘mark them out' on the tabletop more easily.

Google Chat "Zombicide" - Captain America and Howard The Duck are literally swamped

Lastly, one of my biggest motivators to painting is gaming, so when Dave from "One Man And His Brushes" recently introduced me to Google Chat I was somewhat struck by the potential it had to allow me to have some tabletop fun with those who live a considerable distance away from myself. Obviously, just such an idea needed to be trialled, so having chatted through the possibility of using my "Battle Systems" scenery to create a three-dimensional "Zombicide" board, Martin of "28mm Heroes" fame, delightfully agreed to have a game...

The result was a two and a half hour mad-cap fun-fest which saw Captain America and a deranged Howard the Duck (armed with a chainsaw) fending off not only low-life criminals and thugs, but Doctor Doom and his Doombots, the Awesome Android, Stilt-Man and Nightmare, as well as Mindless Ones, Nimon, Voord and Terminator robots. Ultimately, we had to call it an honourable draw, but the 'shaky' camera action and inability on behalf of the player to see the entire tabletop certainly lead to some highly suspenseful moments as doors were smashed opened, rooms looted and corners turned...