Introducing the Perishables!

Well, it's been three months since I last was organised enough to post anything here, but now I have something to push me to do it - a new cast for 7TV, to coincide with the arrival of 7TV Pulp!

To pull this together, I raided my lead pile to find anything vaguely appropriate. I had the idea of creating a band of mercenaries in the mould of The Expendables, but set in the 1930's - so a variety of uniformed and non-uniformed cast members, but all with a military theme. 

I also got slightly excited at Partizan, and bought a pulp miniatures film crew for reasons that don't necessarily make sense.

Once I had that, and a billboard kindly donated by Kieron, I was pretty much duty bound to make a scenic base to keep it all on. And thus, the Perishables were formed...

 All of this was kicked off by the announcement of the Wargames Illustrated 7TV day for this year, which was held last weekend at Wargames Foundry.

To be honest, pulp isn't a genre that I've ever been particularly excited by. So it really was the strength of the 7TV Apocalypse day last year that drove me to pick up the Pulp version of the game and pull a cast together for it.

This year's was, if anything, even better, so I'm very glad that I did! We were each assigned to either Hydra or the Strategic Scientific Reserve to give an overarching theme to events. As a group of hopeless goody-goodies, the Perishables were on the SSR side.

On the day I played three games. The first, against Adrian's cultists, saw us scrapping over the components of a potential super weapon. Particular highlights for be were a scuffle between two spies on a cliff top, that was eventually resolved by my man shooting his opponent in a the back, and my completely forgetting to collect one of the objectives that I'd carefully deployed in front of until the end of the game.

Largely though, this was an object lesson why it's better to bring a gun to a knife fight if possible, as my rifles gave me something of an edge against cultists holding scary blades. I was thus able to snatch 4 objectives to my opponent's 3. All of which would have been more impressive if I'd actually won, but thanks to my failure to seize the McGuffin, I didn't.

Second, I was up against Matt's mobsters, attempting to capture a secret super weapon production facility, deep in the jungle. It's fair to say this went somewhat better, as a timely cliffhanger card combined with the gangster's positions to allow my rugged veteran to mow down half of the opposing cast in a single turn. I reduced Matt's mob to just the crime boss  (and I probably could have finished him off too if I'd remembered to steal the scene) and grabbed the lab too, but I can't claim this was due to tactics so much as pure blind luck at the right time.

The third and final game was where things got serious. The super weapon had been assembled, and the Perishables needed to destroy it before it could rain terror onto an unsuspecting populace. I was up against Simon's very nice gangster cast this time, and Simon made good use of cover to form two firing lines that covered every possible approach to the weapon. This made things very difficult, but I was able to combine stealing the scene and heaping almost all my plot points on one action to stagger through with the rugged veteran and plant the bomb. The mob boss made a stab at defusing it, but couldn't pull it off and so the Perishables saved the day!

The terrifying super weapon is just visible through the trees...

So, my results were a loss that I thought I'd won, and two wins that I'm not at all convinced I deserved. That's the wonder of 7TV, and part of the reason I enjoy these days so much. The game doesn't lend itself to competitive tournament-style play, so mostly people just revel in the glorious daftness of it all. It's a lot of fun.

Also, there were a few freebies and I managed to win some prizes by coming something like 4th in the overall rankings (there were a lot of prizes). After a bit of horse trading with Kieron, who also had some prizes, I ended up with 66 new models, so that's not going to have helped my painting totals enormously.

Incidentally, we'd been asked to provide a super weapon, and I struggled a bit for ideas. This is how I ended up with the terrifying spectacle of the board with nails in it...

Fearsome!

I wanted to get started early so I actually painted several more models than you see here. The rest are awaiting bases, but I've cunningly left a few spaces on the scenic base that I can slot them into. So that will be my next bit of work here, which you can expect to see here in another three months or so. 

Right then, painting scores. It's been months, so you'd expect a fair amount of movement in the figures, and indeed that's what we find.

Acquired: 126
Painted: 29

Right. Something of a mountain to climb there. The remaining pulp figures should help a bit, but it looks like I need some more quick to paint but numerous stuff to try to bring this under control. I'll see what I can do!