Kryomek

Long ago, I bought a bunch of figures for Kryomek. By "long ago" here, I mean, when the rules were in print and Fantasy Forge were actually selling it. Recently we've actually got round to playing it. The 26 years between me buying figures and them showing up on the gaming table are a personal record. It's been so long that the rules are now free to download and the minis range is on about its third owner!

I didn't really want to paint the Kryomek in either the glossy black of "Aliens" or the bright colours of the FF catalogue shots (the colours are supposed to denote different classes of armour/combat skills).

So I started out with a grey-blue tone for the plates and pinkish flesh between (as prototyped by the "giant worm" in my Ratman army) but eventually stopped doing the blue part because it was almost invisible anyway and went with just shaded grey tones. The pink flesh was base-coated white and then washed with a dilute red ink shading.

The weapons are bone-colours, shaded with washes. I added dribbles and stringy globs of green to the acid-fuelled ranged weapons. There's a brilliant Tamiya translucent green that works really well for this sort of thing -- the equivalent in red is great for blood effects.

This is a bunch of warriors advancing through our second game. After the first I decided that the counters provided with the game don't cover nearly enough circumstances, so I designed some new sheets with more tokens.

A little later on, the warriors round the refinery by the ruined building (splash, splash, splash through the polluted water -- doesn't bother us, we've got acid for blood to start with!!) and the NTFA marine forces are ahead. Several of the squads are taking fire which affects their ability to shoot back.

Meanwhile on the other flank, the Warmaster is leading hordes of Helions (bitey aliens without ranged weapons).

They've got a hill to climb over before reaching marines pouring out of the space colony.

Sadly, none of the photos of the human forces were in focus. Well, they were a long way away.

The marines are in VJ WW2 military colours; selections of greens for the fatigues, leather pouches and metal weapons. The buildings/terrain are from the collection of Cambridge City Games Club.

The conclusions we came to about Kryomek are;

• It's quite fast to play once you get the hang of it.
• Kryomek need some transport (I've ordered a bunch of bio-tanks from ScotiaGrendel)
• It needs some better look up tables -- to include the impact modifiers for a start which we kept forgetting to add.

Not bad for a game that's taken two decades of waiting to try out!