Off the Bench: Stargate Miniatures

The resin printer was–say it with me now: a mistake. I had a passing thought last Tuesday and now I have a new ruleset drafted and 31 miniatures painted. 10 SG Team members and 21 Jaffa warriors.

These, of course, are Stargate teams. There’s obviously a Daniel Jackson and Colonel O’Neil there. I couldn’t resist printing and painting them. In game with my son I intend to use the other eight miniatures to represent two cooperating SG Teams.

These are the Jaffa. I’ve stuck to genericizing them with a few standouts to represent “Big bads” for culminating missions. The idea is we play a few connected missions and then do a boss battle of some form. As I have the scenarios drafted, a big bad can also appear randomly as a plot twist. Otherwise, the game just uses normal enemies with standard stat lines.

Again, it’ll be fast and simple. I’ve streamlined the design more versus what I mentioned last week. Rather than each unit have a set of dice to select, the player now has a set of dice to select. You get a D12, D10, D8, and D6 and assign them to each team member. They activate in reverse order, with enemies getting a chance to activate halfway through.

In a sense, I’m trying to mimic the nature of a dramatic plot. The characters with lower dice values are more likely to fail but act first because they’re in a hurry–their situation is more tense and dramatic. As the round goes on, you eventually come back to the characters rolling higher dice: they’re now solving the problems in front of them. You cut from Jack and Tealc rolling a D6/D8 desperately shooting down Jaffa as fast as they can, to the enemy mounting an assault, to Daniel Jackson rolling a D12 and solving the plot device to be able to let everyone escape back to the gate.

It might not be great in practice. I’ve found theory and play are two different things–but it will at least serve to get these minis some play time. Painting them was especially quick and easy: I dry brushed a triad in the major important color on each miniature, then picked out details and hit them with a simple black wash. Easy.

For the Jaffa, this meant a metallic drybrush triad. For the humans, this was a military green triad. I’m almost ashamed of how much I like them for how little work I put in. I believe, not including basing, these were about 3 hours of work overall as I watched a few episode of Stargate with the fam.