As we slide into winter, it’s time for a painting challenge to take our minds off the cold weather, rain and impending Mariah Carey event. 

Games Workshop will soon be releasing Arks of Omen, which features Combat Patrols fighting on a Kill Team Into the Dark style Space Hulk map (though you could just use Zone Mortalis terrain, or the old Kill Team Arena maps, etc etc) using the new Boarding Action rules. 

For me one of the big problems with 40k has always been that it isn’t very friendly towards small-scale games, and this makes it difficult to maintain momentum in painting up a force to play regular sized games, unless you’re doing some sort of Escalation style campaign in a club or store. 

In Boarding Action games you choose a 500 point force with no models with the MONSTER or VEHICLE keywords, which basically means it’s infantry time, and 500 points of infantry is a healthy first step towards a bigger 40k army while being a reasonably substantial painting project on its own. 

So what is this painting challenge?

Between now and the end of February (which in no way officially marks the end of Winter because that’s the Spring Equinox in March, but Winter doesn’t officially start till 21st December in the crazy world we live in so it balances out and gives you like an extra month to get it done, so stop being picky) you paint up a 500 point force and/or a Boarding Action board to play with them on. 

The rules:

You paint either a 500 point force and/or a Boarding Action tables worth of terrain. Then you take a photo (or two or three) and do one of the following:

• Post it on Twitter tagging @goonhammer and adding the hashtag #ghpatrol
• Post it on Instagram tagging @goonhammertv and adding the hashtag #ghpatrol
• email it to us at contact@goonhammer.com. 

Some Questions You Might Have

Can you finish a force you already started? – Yes.

Can you take a painted Kill Team and expand it into a 500 point force? – Yes.

Can you finish off a project that you sort of abandoned earlier? – Yes.

The point of this is to get yourself either a painted combat patrol or a painted set of terrain or both so you can play some cool games. 

Is There a Prize?

No, there’s no prize for this. Though really if you think about it the true prize is the Combat Patrols we made along the way. But we will pick our favorite and feature it on the site and tell everyone that it is the best and the person who made it is incredibly rad. We’ll also share cool pictures with those hashtags via retweets and Instagram stories.

My pledge

What will I be doing? Well given last time I painted a completely different Kill Team to the one I started out with, let’s see if I can finish what I’m going to start with. 

I’m planning on doing a Rogue Trader Marine force, where I take the current Horus Heresy range, which is essentially the 1990 Space Marine range done with modern tooling, and paint up the cool army I wish I’d had when I started the hobby. This involves painting beakies, which is something that you just want to do when you get to my age.

This is models from the Horus Heresy Age of Darkness box plus a Blood Angels Assault Terminator squad (the 2013 BA Terminator sprue is pretty solid compared to the older one). 

It’s 16 models, I have four months, more than half are already built and undercoated. I can totally do this. 

And you can too. 

So remember to pop your progress pictures on twitter with the hashtag ghpatrol, and we’ll do a progress article toward the end of January and a finished project article in early March.

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.