It Is A Silly Place

You know you're near the bottom of your painting barrel when you turn to rubber miniatures.

This is Sir Galahad, the game's Yellow Knight. If the shield wasn't premoulded with a design, I'd have done a chicken.

These lovelies are from Days of Wonder's excellent Shadows Over Camelot game, which I'd recommend highly if you don't know it already. But they were never high on my painting list.

The jolly pure Sire Perceval (white), here depicted in full epic windswept-and-interesting mode. He's presenting his profile because there's a rotten great mould join down the middle of his face, which rather spoils the moody posing.

The game isn't a wargame, so having perfectly good models with coloured bases is really all you need. You aren't customising character models to centrepiece an army, you aren't going to convert them, the squashy plastic feel of the models is faintly disturbing to hold as you paint them. Acrylics never feel dry on them, somehow, they retain a tackiness that makes you suspect fingerprints. 

Sir Gawain the Green. Came out well, this one, my favourite of the lot. Which, incidentally, is the name of his dad. 

All the same - when you're low on unpainted stock as I am (and I'm not counting the Bag of Limitless Minions, anything in there is as painted as it's ever going to get), they aren't a bad little challenge. And they don't require any Tau Light Ochre, which is a huge plus as far as I'm concerned. A nice colourful selection, following the portraits on the game's rules cards, and I'm pretty happy with the results. 

Purple Sir Tristram clearly enjoys a pint of guiness on his days off. It restores your health, as his shield clearly labels. 

Not all of them, mind you.They just aren't entirely designed with paint in mind, I think. Not that they're bad models, exactly, there's a lot of crisp bits on them. But it's patchy, and for every nice detail there's a smeary face or blobby shoulder. Not to mention the horror of bendy rubber weaponry, which is impossible to drybrush in my usual emphatic manner. I nearly disarmed Sir Kay twice. Shame I couldn't take his face off and scratch build. 

In terms of replicating the picture, this is the stand-out miss of the set. My rather splodgy paint doesn't help, but that head! It's like Mr Whippy attacked a pumpkin. 

It's a corking old game. Cooperatively, you and your fellow players must unite to save the kingdom from various evils for a group win. Namely dragons, black knights, various pagan invaders, Morgana Le Fey and each other. For one of you might be (and there's no guarantee) a traitor, secretly trying to stop everyone else winning and steal the game for yourself. 

Token Black Knight Sir Palamedes. Who is also a ninja, for some reason. 

My favourite memory is still a game when we all accused each other of being evil traitors, which lost us the game because in fact there wasn't one, we were all just inept. That gleeful sense of potential skullduggery really brings an otherwise slightly slow cardlaying exercise to life for me.

Bad guys! I've only done one each of Picts and Saxons, I couldn't face doing four of each clone. Yet. This one's a Pict. He's armed with what seems to be part of a breadknife. 

I rather like the Saxon, who from his shield clearly moonlights as a chaos marauder. To further prove this hypothesis, his head is about as lopsided as they come - look at the insets. Perfectly normal from either side, hideously deformed from the front. As though Sloth grew a beard. 

King Arthur himself, with Red Pendragon shield.

Supreme Executive Power, A Beacon and Sir Come-Back-Here-And-I'll-Bite-Your-Legs-Off.

Only a couple of months left until my Dawn of the Reapers, now. If I can just keep my itchy fingers away from copies of Stormclaw (I like both the Space Wolf and Ork models, although the former would get converted to slightly chaos-infused Inquisitor bodyguards) or any more Kickstarter projects (Mantic's Dwarf King's Hold, I'm looking angrily at you right now, please stop taunting me with good-looking zombie troll sculpts), I'll be golden. All I need is something to fill the time between now and then. 

Bring me the Tau Light Ochre!

Group shot. Shortly afterwards, Sir Lancelot turned up and ruined everything.