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Menards One Police Plaza is modeled after the NYPD’s real One Police Plaza, but it only has four stories (five if you count the control room on the roof) compared to the real one’s fourteen stories. The Menard’s model is 13 1/8” tall, which works out to be approximately 72’ in scale. So it’s more like a local precinct house than the city’s central headquarters... But it’s still a big, beefy building considering your only playing on a 36” x 36” map and it’s basically a 12” cube of solid plastic. (It’s also got working lights and spinning rotors on the ‘chopper!) The World Headquarters building from Menards stands a mighty 23.5” tall which is 94’ at scale... So not exactly a “skyscraper,” but it’s certainly big enough that it’ll look impressive when Spider-Man is duking it out with Green Goblin on the roof. It’s a full 1.5” taller than Forge World’s Warlord Titan and wide enough to hide one too. Plus, it’s got a Starbucks in the lobby... Bot also retail for under $100.00

An object that's 3' tall in the real world would be 144' tall at 1:48 scale; which wouldn't match the giant skyscraper seen in the MCU which is well over 600' tall, but would still look dang impressive on the gaming table.

That's because they're filled with love of the God-Emperor!

Overall height of the figures is close; the typical Primaris Marine is about 4.0 cm, the typical Tactical Marine is about 3.3 cm, the typical Imperial Guardsman is about 3.0 cm... But they all have massively deformed hands and swollen heads heroic proportions. The tallest character, so far, in Marvel Crisis Protocol is the Hulk, who stands 7.0 cm tall and the shortest character, so far, Black Widow, is 3.5 cm tall. (Rocket Raccoon is due out soon and will be shorter). The key difference is that the Marvel characters (with obvious exceptions like the Hulk and M.O.D.O.K.) all have realistic proportions... They should look okay when paired with terrain designed for WH40k, Infinity, or The Walking Dead but it will depend a bit on the individual terrain pieces in question. But I'm going to be building and buying some proper O Scale buildings to work with them, since it's things like doors, windows, tables and chairs that are the real "scale markers" to the human eye. Atomic Mass Games has a helpful Battlefield Setup blog post with suggestions for the amount of terrain for a standard 36" x 36" table. The Marvel Crisis Protocol Core Set comes with two light poles, two traffic lights, and a trash bin (Size 1); two compact cars and two dumpsters (Size 2); and one newstand (Size 3)... Currently, I'm working on building some road tiles from Fat Dragon Games that have 4.5" wide roads. At 1:48 scale, that works out to 18' from curb to curb... which is too small for a two lane road which is typically closer to 18' (U.S. Interstate Highway System use a 12-foot standard lane width, but roads are frequently narrower). I think it should work out okay, but if I'm unhappy with them they shouldn't be too hard to reprint at 130% to get 6" wide roads. I'm also going to build one small building (Size 4) and one large building (Size 5) from the Fat Dragon Games set, to tide me over until I can get my hands on some of these beauties from Menards. I also have started daydreaming about buying some plexiglass, a circular saw, and a metric ton of LED lighting and building a 3' tall replica of Avenger's Tower...

Those are members of a Praetorian Guard regiment, the Mordian Iron Guard wear a peaked cap.

That’s just terrifying.

Obviously, just like jockeys in real-life, your forest gobbos have chosen the lightest members of the tribe to ride into battle mounted on spiders.

Because nothing says “ultimate masters of tactics able to adapt to battlefield conditions on a moments notice to exploit any weakness in the enemy’s battle plan” like having fixed tactics that you use in the same order during every fight.

You could apply the same reasoning and say that the tiki-masked gobbos are the some chosen youths of the tribe, sent to war to play the drums to signal and inspire the warriors. Not unlike the fifers and drummers* seen in 18th and 19th Century armies. Bonus points if you make a gobbo version of the Spirit of ‘76 trio. * (Who were actually most commonly adult men, but children in the role were common enough that they came to be commonly depicted in stories, songs, and artwork as a romantic, heroic, tragic, or sentimental figure as needed by the storyteller.)

You misspelt “Third War of Armageddon.” 😉

GW’s decision to set the game during the Heresy might have been a mistake in this regard, since it basically means all participants will be “Imperial” models... The Traitor Legions will differ from the Loyalists only in their paint job. Unlike “classic” Epic 40,000 there won’t be any Eldar Titans, no Ork Gargants, no Tyranid Bio-Titans, and no mutated, warp-forged Chaos Daemon Engines.

Plus... Equals... Oh, yeah.

Do players have to cut a promo before the match begins? Because that was always the best part of pro wrestling, in my opinion. Yes, the stunts were cool, the fight choreography was fun (especially with wrestlers that really knew their wrestling psychology), and all the rest... But watching someone like Ted DiBiase, Macho Man, or the Rock cut loose on the mic was what really kept me watching. I’ve always wanted to try the World Wide Wrestling RPG, which had some really neat mechanics that sort of rotated game-mastering duties between the players as “Creative,” and players can actually sometimes succeed better by loosing a match than by winning it!

With great miniatures must come lousy photographs... Spidey is actually the easiest to assemble mini in the set, his sculpt has the fewest pieces out of all of them. Two halves to his torso, four single piece limbs, a head, and the two part pile of debris he’s standing on. The average Tactical Marine has more bitz! I’m really looking forward to the challenge of painting him.

Crossbones has a brutally simple pose that matches his characterization in the comics and his abilities in game perfectly: charging forward and punching $#¡+€ in the face. It’s simple, but surprisingly effective. Hard to really capture properly giving my limited photography skills, it’s a really dynamic pose that works best when seen in the flesh (or plastic in this case).

I’ll never get used to calling her Captain Marvel. That’s always going to be Billy Bateson to me, I’ve always been more of a DC guy than a Marvel guy... Plus, she only became Captain Marvel in 2012. She was Ms. Marvel first, she was Binary for the vast majority of her career (include the decades I first started reading comics), and then Warbird for quite a while after that... Oh well. Captain Marvel is probably my least favorite sculpt out of the characters in the Core Set. Her sash doesn’t match the positioning of her body (she flying up, but it’s blowing sideways) and her downcast gaze doesn’t match the “powerful” posture (she should be looking up, up, and away)... It’d also have been nice to have her “Kree Helmet” mask as an alternate head. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a great miniature overall. It’s just my least favorite out of ten... Somebody’s gotta be in last place.

“Allow me to introduce myself, Herr Kapitän. My name is der Rote Schädel...” The Red Skull has one of the simplest poses of the ten figures in the Core Set. He’s just standing there, in a almost “parade rest” posture, admiring the glow of the Cosmic Cube and sneering with malevolent evil... and honestly, it’s the perfect pose for him. Although it’s a fantastic mini, I have one or two quibbles. I’d have like to see an alternate sculpt that replaced the Cosmic Cube in his right hand with a P38... Maybe even an entire alternative right arm posed in the Hitlergruß salute. But that would probably make it illegal to sell in Germany. No doubt that’s why he has HYDRA patches on both sleeves and not a swastika arm band. (The MCU filmmakers left the swastika off his costume for the same reason.) On the other hand, if I was truly motivated, I could convert him and/or greenstuff sculpt replacements...

All I know is that should I ever be the victim of a shark attack...

Pure theoryhammer, having not gotten to play Age of Magic yet, I think the Static War Machine is just fine... But it requires the investment of a second unit of infantry to babysit it and your opponent having enough targets at range to make it worthwhile. Good for large pitched battles, not so great for smaller skirmishes.

I’m hoping to bring Marvel: Crisis Protocol, if anyone is interested in checking it out.

Clan Kuge Heroine from Zenit Miniatures; rather lightly armored, but she’s still distinctly feminine without wearing “sexy” armor with nonsense like an exposed midriff or giant metal bewbs. Onna-Bugeisha from Test of Honor. Much more heavily armored than above, plus armed with the naginata so commonly associated with women of the samurai caste... The perfectly coiffed hairdo is a little fantastical, but, hey, it’s a fantasy game. Yuko from Titan Forge. A bit more on the “sexy ninja superhero” side, but still a nice mini. Mika, Female Samurai from Reaper. This one is just really silly... But, for sake of completeness, here it is.

To be fair to GW, the models for Adeptus Titanicus are a hell of a lot more detailed than the ones that Iron Wind Metals is putting out... and Iron Wind Metals doesn’t actually make any new designs for BattleTech, they’re still using the designs, molds, and equipment they acquired from Ral Partha in 2001. Many of those designs go all the way back to 1984. Not only are the designs far less complex, any and all “start up costs” for getting the designs made have loooong since been recouped. Catalyst Game Labs has announced some plastic minis are due out in the near future... But they’re still vaporware at this point.

Well, if Tony Stark can build a suit of Iron Man armor... in a cave! With a BOX OF SCRAPS! Then I should be able to handle it too. I’ll have more photos later, hopefully with better lighting, but I was eager to share with the rest of you nerds. These models are very detailed, with a lot of undercuts, hidden joins, and all those other wonderful things that modern computer-aided sculpting allows... On the other hand, it makes them rather fiddly to build. Tony Stark starts out as sixteen (16!) separate pieces... and he’s one of the easier ones. Models are 1:48 scale and true to scale. Iron Man stands a hair’s breadth shy of 40 mm boot to head, which works out to 1.92 m... His canonical height in the comics is 1.98 m. Black Widow is 35 mm tall, which works out to be 1.68 m... She’s 1.7 m tall in the comics (and Scarlet Johansen is 1.64 m tall). Proportions aren’t GW “Heroic” either, I mean, there’s no mistaking Captain America for anything less than a superior physical specimen and Crossbones is an absolute beast... But they look like the sculptors are actually familiar with human anatomy. (Although guys like the Hulk, Venom, and M.O.D.O.K. all revel in their silly comic book glory... I don’t have them yet. But I will.)