As I noted in my Off the Shelf, part of the reason I bought Halo: Flashpoint was to paint Spartans. The “Spartan Edition” does not disappoint, with sixteen of the buggers to paint. I immediately found myself facing several dilemmas. How hard do I want to try? Do I want to do classic “Red vs Blue” so I can reference a internet series I never watched while making my life simple? Do I want to be really colorful and have fun with it, knowing it will take me far longer to paint them?

I decided to have fun. This was partially inspired by the cards, which have each Spartan in unique colors. As the starter set comes with two of each of the eight models, I did eight of them in the “official” schemes and the remainder in my own schemes.

Funnily, this lead to more green Spartans than I intended. Not sure how that shook out, but I was experimenting with using thinned speed paint as washes and my greens converged. While avoiding a Red or Blue team, I accidentally made a Green team. Oh well.

The back half of my painting, which are the models added for the Spartan Edition, feature alien weaponry. I found this to be a great excuse to get more colorful and creative in the schemes.

These took me much longer but were really rewarding. I especially loved painting the more colorful weapons, like the needlers.

As a final touch, I went through all of the bases and labeled what type of Spartan they are to aid with identification down the line. I know what they all are right now, but if this game sits on a shelf for a few months I’ll be scratching my head while I ID them.

I’m not the best at painted lettering, but it’s legible and felt very “Final” as a way of calling each one done. After wrapping all of these, I went and did the obvious:

This is a 3D printed Master Chief, so not the official model. The starter set came with one if you bought on release, but now that bonus is gone. The official model isn’t too expensive or anything—I just really liked this one.

What shocks me as at the end of all this I’m still looking at other Spartan kits and wanting to paint them. Going with a full range of color was absolutely the right call, as I greatly enjoyed the process and even after seventeen total Spartans, I still want to do more.

As for the game? I’ll have a gameplay impression up soon. My son and I played a match, then another, then another, then… well, several more. It plays fast and smooth, which I’m really enjoying, while producing a series of close matches. We’re having a blast.

My starter isn’t done yet, though—I still need to paint the Sangheli (“Elites” if you’re racist) and the bits of special terrain that came in the kit to replace the objective tokens with proper terrain pieces. More on those another time. Back to rolling headshots and upsetting my child with really good dice luck.