From Space fleet to Battlefleet gothic ? Part 1

Over the years, GW has released a vast array of games developping other aspects of their major settings (namely warhammer Battle and Warhammer 40k). For Warhammer Fantasy Battlle you could think of Warhammer Fantasy Role Play,  Mighty Empires, Man o'war, Mordheim, Heroquest, Warhammer Quest, Blood bowl, etc...

Warhammer 40k which was already strongly Roleplay oriented at the start was developped with Space Hulk, Confrontation, the Epic system, Necromunda, Inquisitor,...

One of the games I'd like to talk about today is Space Fleet :

Space Fleet was published in July 1991 by Games Workshop and designed by Jervis Johnson and Andy Jones. It was released as a board game for about 2 to 4 young players. I insist on young players because the rulebook given with the game is actually printed on just 2 A4 sheets (we'll develop on that a bit later.)  Space fleet was not the first step into space ship combat for Citadel who had previously released models for Star Cruisers.

While released in July 1991, the game was advertised in November 1989 in WD119 (that's 20 months before) so let's have a look at that :

Ars Moriendi - A life in progress post

(Some appropriate music first)

It's common knowledge that life's a funny thing. You'll hear the "life's worth nothing but nothing's worth life" motto and all kinds of ready made predigested thoughts when getting on the topic but rest assured I won't bore you with any of it...

It's just that life's funny, you get a slap from one hand and a caress from the other... but memento mori I suppose (OK I did continue).

Why all the weird (and let's face it, slightly gloomy) tone ? Well because among a massive dose of real life that hit me in a face like a trout, some good things have immerged. One of those is that Brian Roe AKA the Roebeast from the Magical house of sunshine blog, has kindly organised a giveaway to celebrate his 200th follower and I've somehow managed to be the winner of it thanks to a fluke !

I think giving away a present in which Brian put some time and effort makes it even more valuable and the excellent thing about it apart from its quality, is that it blends just nicely with my bases and their sort of purplish tone.

Rad mutants - Iron Claw pirates

At last I finished some models !

These have somehow jumped to the top of the paintqueue (well, greatly thanks to The one for sending me Captain Dunbar as a gesture of kindness) and as always with Bob Olley's sculpts, I just let the models paint themself without worrying too much.
I've already told you how I strongly believe you only truly know a model once you've painted it, well that is even more true with Bob Olley's sculpt. I called it the "Bob Olley effect" earlier, you may not like what the sculpt look like (I've been like that a lot in my earlier days), but the minute I painted one (I was kinda forced), I realised it was a tremendous pleasure to work with his models and I have come to be a huge fan of his work. I just love sculptors who work for painters. Just like Jes Goodwin (my own personnal favourite), Bob is a very painter friendly kind of sculptor and that's what makes his work so great and favoured.

But let me tell you about those particular models. They are Iron claw pirates dating from the time when Bob had his own studio producing models for Games Workshop (just like the Morrissons had the Marauder studio).

There's a full range of pirates to pick from, all particularly characterful :

I have most of this range except maybe 3 of 4  and I expect to paint the full set in due time. Looking at the picture above, I just feel frustrated to not have collected Ooglorg the cruel yet as it would have made a set of 5 aliens which would have been pretty cool but anyway... (if any of you feels like trading him, I'm your man)

As you can see, those models all bear the distinctive style of Bob with organic shaped weapons, very detailed faces (you may not be able to spot them but if you've ever handled one of these you surely know every single detail like eye lids and nose hair are sculpted), wrinkles and wrinkles over wrinkles and guns you don't know what to count as.

You may have noticed I didn't place the models in a random way. you can clearly see the one on the left is far more humanoid than his colleague on the far right. This is because I've decided to treat them as mutants. But not the chaotic sort, no, just like my Rad chimera, I want these guys to be the offspring of radiations and fallout of some nuclear holocaust. The further you get to the right, the more the mutant and his ancestors have been exposed to radiations.

That was a way to unite all those models by giving them a similar paintjob to tie them a little. I voluntarily left some remnants of "human" pink skin and coloured red the overgrown or most mutated parts (the heads in most cases).