I’m not sure about you, but for me, gaming always takes a hit over the holidays. Family plans, dinners, shopping, wrapping, and travel seem to combine into a flurry of activity that leave me unable to get games on the table. I try to compensate for this by modeling and painting as much as possible.
I’ve really been loving Star Wars Legion and fell into the Droid (Separatists) half of the Clone Wars Core Set when my friend and I got into the game. I’ve got a nice collection already, building it up over time, and since the Droids are a bit of a swarm army, I have painted a lot of droids over the years. However, there were two boxes on my pile of shame and I couldn’t escape their pleading glare. This holiday break was my time to get them built and painted.
First was the Star Wars Legion: BX-Series Droid Commandos Unit Expansion. FFG did a great job with this unit from sculpting to build-ability and I even found the box opening exciting. First off, it has these vibrant yellow/orange shield bits. It immediately got me excited to think about how I would paint these figures while retaining this really cool color. You’ll also find seven upgrade cards (I love reading the new cards…I know you get it). I was surprised a bit to find two unit cards. It is a cool feature of this unit, you can field them as a single unit or as two smaller strike teams. The seven figures you get can be built several different ways (full transparency, I ended up buying a second box so I could build all the types I wanted). They can have blasters, vibroswords, deflector shields and you can mix and match them a bit.
I chose to build the vibrosword unit as I thought that would benefit my play style more. It is a very simple build, less than an hour. It also painted up super fast. I live up north so it is too cold for rattle cans, so I airbrush primed them and laid down some base gray colors. Little plug here, Vallejo Primers on Frontline Gaming are a great indoor priming option if you have an airbrush. I then swapped to brushes and picked out some details, pretty much mirroring the box art. I actually had the whole unit done in one night. One nice thing about a droid army is that you can knock out units pretty fast.
Next up was my NR-N99 Persuader-Class Tank Droid. I got this as a birthday gift and I am ashamed to say it sat for five months before I cracked the box. Man, I messed up… this model is so cool. As usual, I spent a little time reading through the cards and tokens. The biggest new thing for me was “Transport” and I’m excited to see how this works on the battlefield. I imagine a group of troopers riding toward an objective and making my opponent make tough choices about shooting the tank or shooting the riders.
Building the NR-N99 seems intimidating but it is actually pretty easy. If you’ve ever built a tank, you’re essentially building three tank treads and attaching them with arms. You also have two droid passengers, I will paint them separately and magnetize the droids. My thought is they will represent a unit being on the tank or if it is empty. That is, of course, not necessary and I think the model looks a lot cooler with the two models riding on it.
This model is begging for an amazing paint job. There are some great details but I didn’t have to finish painting for it for this article, but I’ll have pictures up soon.. I know I can always come back if I really get inspired. My AAT Tank is still one of my favorite paint jobs, so that will inspire me to get this one up to snuff.
Well, the holiday’s are over and I made a small dent in my pile of shame. I’m still ramping back up into gaming and waiting to get my new Legion units on the table. Of course, I also received a Mandalorian Super Commandos box for Christmas, which I am excited to paint…but will I build a whole army around it?? Decisions decisions…
Article by David Farr