Great Escape Games – Old West Building
After tinkering around with the General Purpose Wagon, and further converting the kit, Great Escape got in touch with me and send me some sprues from their current Kickstarter campaign.
The crowdfunding campaign for Dead Man's Hand Redux is meant to finance a new starter set, covering plastic miniatures and terrain! And the later is something, that I noticed being hinted in the background of the product shots of the last few months. Please be aware, these are early test sprues, so things can change, parts can be tweaked and added, and what we see here might not be the final product.
Old West – Converting the General Purpose Wagon
You might have read the article on the General Purpose Wagon by Great Escape Games last week, and as I mentioned among the last few sentences, I got a few more of the sprues for further kitbashing and conversions.
Being highly motivated to produce progress on this setting by Red Dead Redemption 2, as mentioned in an earlier post, I started the last save game and took a few pictures of the wagons in the game. Some were broken down, others filled with goods and personal objects, and all of them provided inspiration for some modification based upon the plastic kit.
Great Escape Games – General Purpose Wagon
One of the items that I brought with me from our 2023 Nottingham tour as the new General Purpose Wagon by Great Escape Games. I picked it up at Northstar, as the complete set and another one with just the plain carriage, as an unhitched wagon.
This is a new hard plastic kit for the Dead Man's Hand range, they introduced a few weeks ago on their social media and as we had a stop planned at Northstar, I just the chance to get my hands on the two.
Old West – Moving to Colorado
I have been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 in late summer and what shall I say, it really got me hooked again with the Old West. I already own a complete collection, with a posse or two even painted up and am pretty rounded with the latest addition in 2020 with Boothill Miniatures.
I have a few rule sets for the stock as well, favouring Warhammer Historicals Legends of the Old West, but I picked up Shootout in Dingstown at Rhein-Main-Multiversum this year. And of course there is always Osprey, in this case just very horror / pulp with Dracula's America.
Great Escape Games – Dead Man’s Hand Plastic Gunfighters
Great Escape Games, the company behind Dead Man's Hand, released a plastic set of Gunfighters earlier this year. They sent over a sprue of these and we're going to cover it today.
Dead Man's Hand is not the only game they carry, beyond the Western skirmish, Great Escape Games has a broad variety of rulesets, like the world war 2 platoon sized Rules of Engagement, 1920's gang fights in The Chicago Way or Clash of Empires, a mass-combat rule sets that covers the Ancient to Medieval era. Most of these games are not only supported with rules and supplements, but miniatures as well and in the case of Dead Man's Hand they released this new set of plastic gunfighters. Two sprues per box at 15 GBP.
Boot Hill Miniatures – The last stand of Wild West miniatures
Most of my Wild West miniatures are by Artizan Design, most of them - and that might shock you - even painted.
The last time I added to that collection, were Wargames Foundry Old West models that I bought at Salute 2018. Similar to Claymore Castings, I had my eye on Boot Hill Miniatures as well for a longer time, but they don't do shows so I had no chance to pick them up at Salute nor Crisis, but Helion & Company is one of their stockist (a fact that I was made aware of _after_ I went to Salute). So now with no shows happening for the foreseeable future and a dropped pound, I decided to order directly (the roughly 7 GBP shipping cost was something that kept me from ordering).
Dead Man’s Hand: Banditos – Part 3
My third finished gang member for the Banditos is the planned leader of the gang. The dynamic pose and the aggressiveness the miniature expressed clearly called for that.
The outfit was obviously inspired by Mariachibands and so I let myself be inspired by originals as well. Unfortunately, when I was looking for pictures, I quickly realized that the clothes weren’t far as colourful as I remembered them. Nevertheless, I decided to stay true to the look and tried to give the clean black of the suit a more worn out look, as if it had been worn for a continuously long time. I followed Citadel's app suggestion for "dirty black" again and was quite satisfied with the result.
Dead Man’s Hand: Banditos – Part 2
The turn of the year and the usual duties as a father have led to a small break in our Dead Man's Hand article series. Fortunately, since I did not tackle the project on my own, we will again have a Wild Wednesday occasionally. Finn's introduced his first gang member, Hector Villa, some time ago. Now it's time to introduce Tuco. And with this Finn will take over from here on...
With Tuco I went back to the experience I gained with painting Hector’s jeans and painted the poncho in yellow. At first I wanted to apply a light base color layer and tone it down it with a wash, but by mixing in white, it looked nicely faded, so that I used a lighter one than the intended wash. Of course, the pants should look similar raggedy and so I decided to keep them beige. I wanted Tuco to give the impression of a poor helper.
Dead Man’s Hand: Outlaws – Part 7
With Frank McMiller, the trio of McMiller's sons is complete. All in all, I used the same color scheme as on Eugene or Seamus to establish a visual connection.
Dead Man’s Hand: Banditos – Part 1
Even though one of McMillers gang members still haven't been introduced, it's time to turn the attention to the antagonists. Finn will take over at this point and introduce his Banditos by himself and continue our common storyline in Dead Man' Hand.
After I had a long hobby break, Dino spured my interest again. I liked the idea to start a Skirmisher as a joint project and so I began to gather a posse in the Wild West. The models are all from Great Escape Games. So far I had painted only Space Marines and admittedly not very well. I chose to get back into painting by consuming numerous tutorials. For the color concept I wanted to keep the posse quite colorful, they should look like a mixed up bunch, which only had their Mexican roots in common. At the same time, they had a lot in common through the many typical Western leather applications.