Tyranid Week: om nom nom nom

This big beasty is a fine representative of what I’ve always liked about the Tyranids (even though I only played them for one, short summer), and that would be teeth and claws and spikes and more giant spikes and all those other pleasantries. Like many of you, I was absolutely stunned by the film “Aliens” the first time I saw it. Space Hulk, therefore, was a glorious revelation to my young mind both because it introduced me to the concept of Terminators, of which you can quite easily see my continued fondness (see: Onorevoli, Book Wardens, etc), and because it clearly nods to (and perhaps winks at) “Aliens” in the fundamental substance of that game itself.

When the Carnifex first came out, I remember being completely stunned. I bought one impulsively –without having painted a single Genestealer since Space Hulk first came out a veritable lifetime ago- and I remember being almost light-headed with anticipation, cloudy with visions of a new, ravenous horde springing from the depths, from unguarded air vents, from underneath the very floor boards.

And then I got home and put him on the shelf for what seemed like several years (but I’m not exactly sure. Does anyone remember when the plastic Carnifex first came out?). Regardless, he collected dust until Ref and I needed something like an NPC army for a campaign we created in 2006. The idea, originally, was that the Tyranid force could be played by either of us our armies spread into the undiscovered territories across a four-page map that I stitched together (as you may have already intuited, we didn’t have much by way of experience with campaigns at that point, still don’t really). In the end, Pitmann handed it to me with his Iron Warriors, and he never even had to bother fielding the Tyranids once. Not once! That was a tightener. On the upside, I got to play my hastily invigorated Tyranids quite a few times that summer, but they were soon relegated back to the margins where they've been ever since.

Nevertheless, the Tyranids reemerged after a several-year hiatus for the re-release of Space Hulk this summer. I still love that game, and I am equally enamored with the new models therein. Just wonderful stuff. Certainly, it helped rescue teach of the models in this week’s posts from obscurity. Although perhaps less impressive, I’ve felt a bit married to the “purple” theme in the army. I’d no intention of starting from scratch, and the purple is genuinely quite distinct from all of my other armies, but I still felt that my hands were somewhat tied when it came time to put paint to brush.

I’ve tried to ensure that all my SH stuff can play double-duty, and these Genestealers are no exception. The basing for these models comes from Dragon Forge’s Tech Deck range. As ever, I recommend. In fact, I’ve just placed another, unrelated but rather large order with them, which will be the substance of future posts, no doubt.


(p.s. if you’ve ever wanted to find all the horrible little problems with your painting –say, for example, a thumb print smeared across the base of your Carnifex- take a photo of it. These details will just pop right out for you. ugh).

Did I mention that I love Space Hulk?