Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The Martians Arrive


All Quiet on the Martian Front was just released by the nice folk over at Alien Dungeon. It is a 15mm scale tactical game of the Martian invasion early 20th century. The "current" game year is 1914 and the Martians control a large part of the globe. I backed it on Kickstarter just over a year ago and finally the big box arrived containing about 2/3 of the initial releases.

The main rule book is a nice 176 page full color hardcover. Good art and lots of pictures. The only minor complaints I have is that the pictures of the models are all of the prototypes and not of the much nicer plastic production run. The other complaint is lack of all the tables gathered together at the back of the book. That is less of a worry as I'm sure they will be released as PDFs.

One of the big goals of the Kickstarter campaign was to raise enough capital to make the Tripods and tanks out plastic. That was passed, and thank goodness it was. The plastic Assault and Scout Tripods are very easy to work with and go together in a flash, I've put together six of each in no time at all. The US tanks are also plastic and easy to assemble, with parts to make several different versions.

I built a few Tripods, and then settled in to assembling the US Army forces.

The infantry are single piece figures that go five to a base. It did take a small amount of effort to clean the flash off them but they went on the bases just fine as did the Heavy Machine Gun teams.

There is a fun unit called "Rough Riders" that are assault troops riding Harleys. No other model gave such frustration in assembly. They are only two parts, the Bike/rider and the handlebars. The handlebar part is very small and difficult to get into position. I managed making two units (six stands) of them without hurling them across the room, and they do look cool.

The tanks were fun to assemble, the only sticking point was what variants to make. I did a unit or two of the major ones and a have a few left unbuilt. A PDF is coming soon to fully address the different variants that are now possible with the plastic kit.
The artillery units, and the large super tanks will be arriving in the next shipment, hopefully before the end of the year.

Next up, the Martians!

Go Roll Some Dice
And Free Earth!

2 comments:

  1. Nice pics. I agree the stuff goes together easily. I have yet to do the infantry so it is nice to see them done. However I skimped on the hardback rulebook and regret tlhat now, the stater one is very brief. Thanks for putting this up.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Still sooooooo upset that I let this Kickstarter slip past. Now I have to wait for it to show up in stores...

    ReplyDelete