Awful Green (and Purple) Things from Outer Space!

 Craig has been having fun with the venerable game, The Awful Green Things from Outer Space!  This game was originally a free insert in the long-defunct Dragon Magazine in 1979.  The game was created by legendary gamer Tom Wham and is currently available from Steve Jackson Games.

Craig has 3-D printed game components, and is currently working on expanding the game to be a four-player game with two crew factions and two different strains of 'things'.  

But I'm getting ahead of myself!  For those not familiar with this game, a bit of background is going to be helpful.  The crew of the spaceship Zuntar has been exploring the galaxy, and picked up some strange rocks from an otherwise nondescript planet.  This rock inexplicably grew into a strange creature that started to eat crewmembers.  Here is the gameboard, which is the floorplan of the Znutar.  

And here are the 3D printed components.

As an example of the crew, these are the Snudlian crewmembers.  The underside of each crewmember has information on that piece including movement rate, attack dice and constitution.

Other crewmembers include the Redundans, Smabalites, Snudalians and the ship's mascot.

Craig has added Awful Purple Things from Outer Space as a second faction to compete with the Awful Green Things.  Both types of Awful Things come in multiple 'stages':  eggs, young, adults and fragments.  Fragments are a potential side effect of being attacked by the crew.  If a weapon doesn't kill an AT, it might break it into multiple fragments which can each grow into a new AT!

The crew are not prepared to battle the ATs.  They must experiment, typically by trial and error, to find out which tools will be useful in stopping the ATs.  Craig has printed out chits with weapon effects - each time a tool is used, a chit is randomly chosen.  The effects range from no effect at all, to small to large amounts of damage, to potentially exploding the ATs into fragments or even making them grow larger!  These trays hold the chits as they are drawn.

Here's an early shot from the game.  APTs (awful purple things) are starting to spread through the ship, laying eggs and searching for crewmembers to lunch on.  Crewmembers in turn prepare to respond to the invasion.

The Znutar has a few small craft, seen here including the saucer, cockboat and scoutship.

The white boxes are spacesuits, which make the crew harder to kill.

Over time, the crew end up concentrated in a few small areas as the ATs run rampant through the rest of the ship.

Finally, the ATs overwhelm the crew.  Surprisingly, the ship's generally useless mascot survived by hiding out in the computer room.

The game is great fun as long as you don't take it too seriously.  Last night's game was a playtest, and Craig is planning adjustments before presenting it at Trumpeter Salute in April. 

Danuta

Last year (2025), Annie from Bad Squiddo Games ran a kickstarter for 'Women of the Resistance' for her new line of figures based on real women who battled against the Nazis and other fascists during WWII.  Now that it's 2026, I've finally started painting them up!

The first model is not actually part of the kickstarter, but one based on Danuta Danielsson, the 'woman with the handbag' who was photographed taking a swipe at a neo-Nazi skinhead in 1985.  See the link for more info on the real Danuta. Here's my take on her.

I've attached masking tape labels to the models to help remind me who is who!

I don't have any models of 1980s neo-Nazi skinheads so instead, here is an action shot of Danuta taking a swing at a man in a blue suit.

Small ship actions in WWII

Arthur surprised me this week.  It turns out that when he was locked away in his room, he was busy designing a new game!  Inspired by Peter Dennis' Paperboys, specifically the ships, Arthur built a collection of small WWII ships.  He melded this with the profiles from the Wings of War/Wings of Glory WWI air game to come up with a game.  Here are the 2-d ship models he built for Soviet Bronekrater patrol boats.

A German E-boot.

And a German armed trawler, a Kriegsfischkutter.

We managed to fit in three fast scenarios.  

The games were fast and fun.  Lots of crazy results including collisions between ships:

Ships crashed into islands as well.  There are some fun critical hits, as ships can catch fire and take damage over multiple turns, or take mechanical damage which prevent guns from firing or prevent the ship from turning either to the left or right for a number of turns.

Ships were restricted to firing forward - not necessarily historically accurate but gave the players an interesting challenge .

Arthur has plans to refine the game further, but the game he presented this evening was fast and fun.

Tlingit Warriors

 Brand new from Eureka Miniatures - so new that they haven't even been released yet - are these 28mm Tlingit warriors.  As an aside, Eureka has had 15mm Tlingit for quite a while now.  

Arthur and I have been interested in Tlingit and other First Nations of the Pacific Coast for a while now.  We've been following James Morris' Mogsymakes website articles, as well as related material in Wargames Illustrated and on Youtube, on the conflicts between the Russian American Company and the Tlingit in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.  We enjoyed our visit to a modern Tlingit community at Carcross, Yukon this summer.  I've also been looking at other materials, such as Graeme Menzies' Trading Fate, which examines the history of how relationships between First Nations and the British, Spanish, Americans and other explorers and traders led to the modern international borders.

So here are the first eight warriors.  I am not confident that I have gotten everything accurate but I'm doing the best that I can!

First up are three archers.  The warrior on the left has a coat of armour made from Chinese coins sewn onto leather.  These would likely have been a bit weathered and not as shiny as I made them, but it's more fun for them to be bright.  

These two warriors have wooden helmets carved to present a ferocious and terrifying image to their enemies.  Again, I've made the colours brighter than you'll find on surviving museum pieces with the theory that when new, the colours would be more vibrant.

The final three (for today) are warriors with iconic elements of Pacific coast FN, including the large daggers, wooden slat body armour, and a war club studded with orca teeth.

I'm going to take some time before I finish up the next group of these warriors.  I want to do some more research, and I'm not satisfied with the quality of my painting.  I really want to do these warriors justice!

02 Hundred Hours - Sabotage

 I'm enjoying 02 Hundred Hours from Grey for Now Games.  On Tuesday, Oliver and Tyler came over and we tried the Butcher and Bolt scenario.  Things went pear-shaped for the attackers in turn 2 when Tyler's SAS trooper decided to shoot one of the sentries, but only wounded him, moving the alarm track from 'calm' to 'alarm raised' in one step!  No photos from that game, unfortunately, but things went poorly for the attackers.

Last night, Lisa came by and we tried Scenario 3:  Sabotage.  In this scenario, an SAS team infiltrate an enemy base to sabotage stores.  Rather than using Germans as the defenders, I decided that this time, the raid would be on Italians.  

Here is the table.  The SAS want to blow up the ammo and fuel storage in the centre, in the compound surrounded by barbed wire.

Italian sentry on patrol.

Italian officer checks up on the sentry patrolling with guard dog.

Another Italian sentry on patrol.

He spots the SAS sergeant!

Meanwhile, the other SAS team members move in from behind the garage.

The sentry shoots at the SAS sergeant, but misses.

The SAS and the Italian officer see each other! 

The guard-dog handler moves toward the SAS sergeant.

SAS troopers advance and silently kill the Italian officer in close combat.

The SAS team enters the supply compound and places demolition charges.

Meanwhile, Italian reserves move up and engage the SAS raiders with rifle fire.

The charge detonates, and the ammo dump is destroyed!  Unfortunately, the SAS officer got caught in the explosion, although his colleague avoided being hurt.

With the demo complete, escape and evasion is the next task for the SAS raiders.  The Italians move to stop them.  After an intense pursuit, two of the SAS raiders escape but the Italians subdue the others.

All in all, a fun action as the raiders achieved their primary objective of destroying the ammo dump but at the cost of more than half of the raiding force.

We made a few errors which will be corrected next time.  I was confused as to how the reserves could move on the table - I thought they were not allowed the 'Advance' action as they had no enemy in 15", but once they come on the board they are allowed to 'Advance' to the table centre.  I also missed that reserves were supposed to pass a 'Smarts' test before coming on the table.  I'm uncertain about the demo rules - once the demo charge is placed, the countdown will go pretty quickly, so it will be very difficult for the demo expert to get clear of the detonation.  I figure I'm missing something.  Any insights appreciated!

Scatter Terrain and Corpses

 Here's a variety of new bits to scatter around the table.

First up, Doug gave me these dead Nazis.  Quite timely, as I am just getting into 02 Hundred Hours, and during the initial, sneaky portion of the game, bodies of dead guards need to be tracked as a sentry stumbling across a dead body can lead to the raising of the alarm.  The body in the greatcoat is probably meant to be French, but I cheated a bit to paint him to match the Pulp Figures Impassive German Guards.

I picked up these Green Stuff World tree stumps from Magic Stronghold.  Great little pieces to fill out a table, providing cover and character to the tabletop.

And finally some graveyard bits, again gifts from Doug.  Here are some items that can be scatter terrain or markers as needed.  Maybe the shovel is a tool that a character can use if needed to dig up a grave...

And some markers for exhumed graves!  Two of these contain bodies, but one is for an empty grave, and another for some hidden treasure.  Plus a macabre pile of bones.

All in all, a handy pile of scatter to fill in different tabletops.