When Fantasy Flight Games released Star Wars: Imperial Assault last December I was a little sceptical. Yes, I love X-Wing, but could they really pull off two good Star Wars miniature games? I was especially dubious when I heard it was based on FFG's fantasy dungeon-crawler Descent, which I didn't really care for. Yeah, well, turns out Imperial Assault is very good. So good I decided to paint the figures that came with it. And the expansions.
The Figs are a firm plastic with decent detail, some better than others. The Imperial are molded in grey plastic and the rebels in tan. They look quite good for boardgame level miniatures, but I could not stand to have a grey Darth Vader. So I took the plunge, and so did all the miniatures.
After a nice warm soapy bath to clean off all the release agent from the figs it was priming time.
Most of them got white primer, but Vader and few other received a black coat. It has been many, many years since I painted a non-GW fig, so this was novel to paint a different kind of stormtrooper.
I still used Citadel paints, just a brighter palette that I usually do. I didn't spent a huge amount of time per figure, so they look good from two feet away.
The Stormtroopers were by far the trickiest ones to paint. I used a black wash over the white, and then went back and re-painted the parts that were supposed to be white. The AT-STs were the easiest. Grey spray paint followed by a heavy black wash and finished off with a little bit of detail.
The Rebels were fun and fast to paint. I had always though that Han Solo was wearing a white shirt and black pants. Not so. I actually used internet research for good! Luke Skywalker's sculpt is quite nice, I'm just not sure why they chose his "Escape from the Death Star" look as the campaign is set right after the Death Star is destroyed. Totally minor quibble.
The bases gave me some pause. I have seen people do some amazing textures, but the downside to that is they can only match one of the three terrain types that are on the mapboards. So I went a dark grey, and it works great to making the bases functionally invisible. I put red or blue rings around some of the units to tell different deployment groups apart and done! When the weather gets a bit warmer I will seal them.
Having painted figures on the nice printed mapboards gives the game a great finished feel and adds a lot to the immersion of the game.
Next up, I'll yammer about how this game plays.
Go Roll Some Dice
And do a little painting
