There were plenty of cool things on display at the GAMA Expo last week, but we were most excited about getting our hands on a mini from the forthcoming Gundam Assemble game. Was it everything we’d hoped and dreamed it would be? Spoiler alert: yes.
Gundam Assemble is a tabletop miniatures skirmish game releasing next year. It is played on a hex board, and there are Gundams – which is about all we know at this point. The miniatures for said game are going to trickle out a bit early. Limited edition starter decks for the Gundam Trading Card game will each have three Gundam Essemble miniatures included (to use as tokens), adding up to twelve total lil’ mechas.
Jas from Battle Pub Games in San Antonio hipped me to a Gundam Assemble build and paint event the next night at GAMA. Attendees would play a demo of the Gundam TCG, then clip, build, and paint a Gundam Assemble mini. By the time I got to my demo round, the booth had run out of figures, but Michael from Copper Frog Games generously gave me his mini to paint up!
Side note: The Gundam TCG was fun – the general mechanics will be familiar to veterans of other Bandai Card games. The hook: pilots link with mobile suits to power them up, and you gain resources (like mana in MTG) on a steady turn-by-turn cadence. The card art is gorgeous as expected, and the brisk demo had me wishing that we had another turn so that I could play the Wing Gundam in my hand.
While I did not clip the mini, the runners are chunky and the plastic feels pretty heavy duty. There were some hefty moldlines on the Zaku (especially on the legs), and I would highly recommend busting out the sanding sticks vs the typical moldline scraper / back of the hobby knife technique 40k modelers are used to here.
The Zaku was broken up into six pieces. While it would have been great if both arms were detachable for subassembly painting, but I made do with painting up the model all at once. The connection points were all super solid and didn’t need glue if you really wanted to skip it.
After assembly, I used an airbrush to prime the model black, and hit it all over with Army Painter Air Feral Green. The darker green details were basecoated with AP Air Militia Green, and the dark gray bits were painted with AP Air Raven Black – both with a brush. The backpack was basecoated with GW Incubi Darkness, and the metal bits were painted with AP Plate Mail Metal. I applied decals and did some sparing sponge weathering: first a bit of AP Plate Mail Metal, then Dryad Bark.
The head camera and the front of the scope were basecoated with Plate Mail Metal, then AP Air Zephyr Pink. To get a bit of glow in the exhausts, I added a bit of white in the recesses, slapped on some GW Blood Angels Red Contrast, put a drop of Two Thin Coats Demon Red in the center, and highlighted the edges with Plate Mail again. The same metal color was used to add some sharp line highlights along panel edges. The entire paint job was brought together with some liberal use of enamel panel liner. Vallejo Mecha Matt varnish brought the entire scheme togeher.
Basing was done with a variety of pastes. The name of the game was building up the impact craters with successive layers. The results were primed black and basecoated with AP Air Leather brown, washed with Aggaros Dunes Contrast, and drybrushed with Zandri Dust and Morghast Bone. The darker bits in the crater were stippled with black paint and blended in with some successive layers of Nuln Oil and Army Painter Soft tone.
The Zaku model is kneeling, so the overall height is a bit tough to suss out. Here are some bananas for scale.
Conclusion
Cleaning up, building, and painting this model was a challenging & rewarding hobby experience, and I am looking forward to working on more Gundam Assemble kits in the future. Seasoned modelers (and especially Gunpla freaks) should be right at home here. Matching a classic Gundam scheme with mini paints was fun, and this whole project was an enjoyable step outside of the way I typically paint. Especially as it seems like Gundam Assemble is only a few models per side, I am really looking forward to the full game’s release next year.
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