Painting Thunderstone Quest Barricades

The Barricades expansion to Thunderstone Quest was released in 2019, and I got my copy from backing the "Back to the Dungeon" Kickstarter campaign. I still remember my surprise at opening the box and finding two miniatures in it. I actually felt a tinge of disappointment: I didn't really want any more minis for this game. They just serve as tokens, but because they are so stylized, it introduces a bit of ludonarrative dissonance that there is no connection between this token and the game. Anyway, I primed these two figures, and then they sat on my painting table for over a year, soaking up positive vibes whenever I looked at them. 

I was going to say that I started them after finishing the Shadowed Paths expansion back in December, but now that I think about it, I think I actually started them before receiving that set. Anyway, the point is that these guys needed to be done, so did finally finish painting them... around December. And then, they sat on my table until today, when I varnished and flocked them. I look forward to putting them into my massive Thunderstone Quest box. (I wrote in my previous painting post about why there's been a big delay in posting any painted minis.)

Enough story—on with the figures!

This is the first one of the two that I painted. Looking over it (you know, for months), I decided it would be fun to try to accent the long robe by doing a warm gradient, and I am happy with how it turned out. The flesh and the pants are similar in tone, and I chose a neutral light grey for the wrappings and scarf so that attention would be drawn to the warm colors. The gold trim and accents I think also help tie it all together. 

Although my other Thunderstone Quest figures are more creatively based, I wasn't very creative with this nor the other one. I just used some basing paste, the mix of flock I used on my Journeys in Middle Earth characters, and some static grass. In retrospect, she would have looked a lot better on something like a desert base: the natural brown and green is an unintended contrast against the rest of the figure.

Here is the other figure, preparing for a heroic downward strike in a manner that I can't help but think this armor could not possibly support. Oh well. I do think the blue, silver, and steel work well together, coupled with the natural brown leather accessories. The color of the satchels pick up his hair and boot colors in a nice way.

A lot of my miniature-painting involves matching colors from game illustrations, but I had to choose my own palettes for these two. I am happy with how both turned out. They were both a bit too small for me to put in the eyes, though, so I decided to leave them with just the shadow of a face rather than dotting in miniscule pupils. 

We played Barricades Mode of Thunderstone Quest just a few times, but we have never desired to go back to it. We always end up either playing a scenario out of the books until the books are done, and then we switch back to Epic mode.

Also, over the past few weeks I have made some improvements and additions to my Thunderstone Quest Randomizer app. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. There's a thread about it over on BoardGameGeek, and it's free and open source, so you can check out the repository as well if you're interested.