The Disaster Artist
23rd November 2024
Barry
3 mins
As someone who plays tabletop games I think there’s a general inference that I’m the kind of hobbyist who can put together miniatures and paint them. And that would be a massive misunderstanding.
X-Wing was the first miniatures game I started playing, and a huge draw for that was it was ready to go out the box and that could be said for a lot of the games I play. Others aren’t painted but don’t need any real construction like Imperial Assault where painting is clearly optional. And I’ve made an honest go of painting miniatures with varying degrees of success. It’s all about incremental steps.
Enter Star Wars Legion – or more specifically – the Shadow Collective faction packs. I’d previously had a vague interest in Star Wars Legion but a Scum faction? That I could really get into. That’s my jam.
Until I opened the pack and went for the instructions. Then I was reminded of my mediocrity when it came to this facet of the hobby. And so two packs of Shadow Collective, the Rebel transport and a bunch of individual figures like Bossk and Boba Fett sit, untouched at the top of shelf where shame collects. I mean it gets easier to walk past it over time and you stop thinking about the money you have sitting there. Instead of trying to build and paint my Legion collection I moved on to repainting the sub-optimal Attack Wing miniatures, painting unique pilots for X-Wing miniatures and the never-ending battle to paint my Imperial Assault for the day I get to around to playing that campaign all the way through.
Shatterpoint released and this time I expressed a level of self-awareness to not proceed with the game. Rosco and others got into it and I could probably borrow stuff should I express any interest in playing it. Things were final until AMG announced Spectre Cell from Star Wars Rebels in an upcoming release. And I do love that show.
Ando bought both squad packs, Make the Impossible Possible and Stronger Than Fear for my birthday. Separately the Coolant Discharge guys got me the Enlightened Starter set for Dystopian Wars. I suspect the latter was more about their interests than mine but we’ll get to that another time. The impetus for getting past this hurdle for building minis was Abbie, who enthusiastically sat and made the entire set of Shatterpoint Bounty Hunters for me from the We Don’t Need Their Scum unit pack. She effortlessly breezed through it and revelled in the task – so why shouldn’t I?
Can’t someone else do it?
I got into building Kanan, Ezra and Zeb with absolutely no problems at all and it made me wonder why I hadn’t started doing this earlier. So onto the next set.
Then somehow…Hera broke me. Literally she just didn’t fit together. Attaching the legs to the torso resulted in the torso splitting at the seams. The arms refused to fit snugly and exasperated the torso split. Rage ensued.
Barry struggling with Shatterpoint circa 2024.
I had to stop. A debrief with Rosco revealed a potential mistake in switching glues between the builds. Perhaps he was just being kind. However using Revell did seem to resolve the matter even with Hera’s model technically being broken when I re-attempted construction. The model is still a bit of a mess, and my enthusiasm has diminished somewhat after this model but it’s finished.
Rosco’s commentary circa 2024.
It’s done.
- Barry