Can I call them the "Stink-eye" Tribe?

    28mm Old Glory Indians (well, one is a Falcon fig -- can you guess which one?) from the "Stink-eye Tribe"

I am sure that sometime during my decades of painting miniatures it took me longer to complete a batch of figures than these. However, I can't think of any recent examples. These 8 Old Glory 28mm bow-armed Indians have been partially painted and sitting on my desk (or conveniently hidden out of sight in a drawer) for months. Not years, but definitely quite a few months! Well, they're done, now. I want to call them the "Stink-eye Indians" because they have been sitting there, glaring at me, for so long, impatiently waiting to be done.

My friend Mike gave them to me when he purchased a horde of them at a flea market for a great deal. I needed more bow-armed Indians for my Beaver Wars campaign playtest, so I eagerly bumped them ahead of other projects in the queue. I wouldn't say I lost all motivation to paint shortly after I started on them, but I certainly had a lot of other things jump up and grab my attention. It didn't help that they were Old Glory figures, either. To me, Old Glory is the minimum of baseline of quality in historical miniatures. If you go much lower, it is not really worth investing your time in them. They aren't great figures, but they aren't horrible, either. They certainly do not hold a candle to my usual Conquest Miniatures. But when Mike handed me a batch of these for free (my favorite price, I admit), I chose to paint them over putting in a new order with Conquest.

    More Old Glory"Stinkeyes" ready to participate in my Beaver Wars playtest!

Since they weren't the world's most stunning miniatures, I decided to experiment a bit on them when it came to warpaint. I am normally fairly conservative when it comes to warpaint on my Indian miniatures. However, I tried out a couple whole torso warpaint schemes. Plus, I used a different technique for the red paint on the scalp. I actually liked how both experiments turned out. So, though these will never be my favorite figures in my collection, I was able to use my painting of them to improve my skills a bit.

Next up, is a batch of 7 28mm Indian women produced by (wait for it...) Old Glory. Once again, my O.G. pusher Mike purchased a batch of these online and asked if I wanted to split them with him. Since there is a decided shortage of 28mm Native American women, I agreed. After this, I think I want to take a break from Indians. Not sure what it is that I'll paint, but I can definitely use a change of pace. Hopefully, it won't take me as long to complete the Old Glory women as it did the men of the Stink-eye tribe!

Dinosaurs as the "good guys"??

    Although it was a laugh-a-minute for the players, it wasn't so much for the Nazis frantically trying to escape

We were heading to Keith's "man cave" for our usual Sunday evening of gaming. He was hosting his 11-year-old nephew, Michael, for the week, and wanted to put on a game that he might enjoy. With Keith being only mildly over-the-top about dinosaurs, it was only a natural he put a game on involving dinos. Rather than one of his usual Dino Hunts, Keith had a twist in store for us this evening. WE would be playing the dinos. And we would be hunting humans...specifically, Nazis!

    Nazis try to in vain to take refuge on a steep hill

Keith had seen a light-hearted set of rules called, "Eat Hitler" on Wargame Vault and downloaded them during their July sale. The scenario for the evening postulated that Hitler and his closest associates, with assorted guards, escape the fall of Berlin in a time machine. Russian artillery fire knocks the controls awry, though, and they ended up back in prehistory in a valley populated by hungry dinosaurs. Each of us would play a carnivorous dinosaur (or a number of smaller meat-eaters) with the herbivores and Nazis as non-players.

    My dino snacked on two Nazis before they decided to flee the hill

I don't think the rules were designed for the 7 players we had participating, so we had to make some modifications early on. What's more, after playing it through, we had some more suggestions for changes if Keith were going to run this as a fun, convention game some day. We had a good time, of course. Just about everybody got to chomp some Nazis. My Allosaurus-sized dino (whose Japaneses name I forget) managed to eat one guard and Adolf Galland. No one ended up eating Adolf Hitler, who was saved from a pack of velociraptors by his loyal dog, Blondi. The seven players chased the Nazis around the board, generally ignoring each other and the herbivores. In the end, only Hitler, Blondi, and two others were left scrambling furiously to avoid the dinosaur rampage.

    Steve's raptor pack used their cleverness to drive a pack of herbivores ahead of them to avoid Nazi firing

Keith's nephew Michael played the T-Rex, and seemed to have a good time. I took lots of pictures of the mayhem, and decided to go ahead and post some here. Enjoy!

    Michael's T-Rex showed up and crashed the raptors' dinner party

    A spinosaurus got in on the feast and chased down the last remaining group of Nazis