We Got Big Trouble…

Apparently I’m not happy unless I’m working on at least five projects at a time, so I’ve started painting the minitures from the Big Trouble in Little China board game. It’s an older game (published in 2018 and now out of print), but I just bought it last month so I don’t think it qualifies for the spring clean challenge.

The miniatures are…not particularly good. If memory serves, I looked at the crowdfunder/pre-order for this game when it originally launched, and decided to pass on it for that very reason. But I got a chance to play it at a convention a few months ago and really enjoyed it, so I got an only slightly overpriced copy on eBay and here we are.

With board games I always want to try to match the game’s artwork as much as possible, and luckily I found the online portfolio of Ilya Golitsyn, the game’s primary artist, which was incredibly helpful.

I adopted a “whatever gets it done” approach to painting these. Jack, Gracie and Margo were primed grey, drybrushed white, and painted primarily with speedpaints. Jack’s t-shirt design is actually sculpted on, but it’s raised rather than indented so it wasn’t actually that helpful — if it had been indented it would have been easy to do with a wash, but as it is, it would have been a lot easier to just freehand the design on a blank shirt.

Wang, Eddie and Egg Shen were primed black and then drybrushed in their primary color (dark green, purple, and blue respectively). Then I triad-painted the skin tones and details, and drybrushed some source lighting (most obviously on Egg Shen).

I’m satisfied with the results, they’re definitely good enough for a board game and actually look a lot better than I was expecting. Now it’s on to the villains!

As you might expect, the villains were a little more fun to paint.

I looked at a lot of images of the Three Storms from the film, and it was interesting to note that their colors (especially Rain) are a lot more muted in the movie than in the game’s artwork. I decided to lean closer to the artwork, as it would make them easier to identify on the game board, although they’re pretty distinct models so there’s not much chance of mixing them up.

The game’s stat board for Lo Pan himself is double sided — he begins the game as a ghost, and later transforms into flesh and blood. Originally I was going to paint the miniature to match the artwork on the “ghost” side, since that’s how he spends the majority of the game. But in the end I decided that would make him look too much like Lightning (see above), so I went with a “full color” scheme.

No need to reinvent the wheel for the Wild Man. Needless to say, that one went very quickly — the hardest part was not having a base to hold, but since it was 90% drybrushing it was only an issue when priming and varnishing.

I probably should have saved the fun ones for last, because now I’ve got 29 henchmen to get through. Hopefully they’ll be more fun than they look…

Well, 6, in multiples of 3. These were…interesting to do. The quality of the models in this game is really all over the place. The eyeball creatures and the armored guards look great, but the hatchetmen and gunslingers are a little rough. Of course, that could be down to painter error…

I still have 5 security guards and 8 street thugs left, then I need to figure out storage.

The molded plastic storage tray that comes with the game fits the miniatures very tightly, so much so that the paint will likely rub off when popping the figures in and out. So I need a new storage solution.

There’s really no need to be precious with plastic miniatures — my Monolith Conan and Mythic Battles: Pantheon figures have been rattling around loose in tackle boxes for years with no appreciable damage to the paint jobs. But rather than try to find a tackle box that will fit the Big Trouble box, I decided to cobble something together out of foamcore.

I won’t bore you with a step by step description of the process, but here’s what I came up with:

As an added bonus, this uses the space in the box more efficiently — I’ve got room in the bottom for the dice and a small tackle box containing all the tokens. I may decide to add something to the bottom of each of the smaller compartments to fit the bases so the figures don’t move around, but I usually store and carry my board games like they were cake boxes, so honestly I think this will be fine as-is.

Wow, another but-but-ding — that’s two in one month! I am doubly honored. Thanks Gerry, Justin and John for the kind words and encouragement.

Here we have the last of the multiple henchmen for Big Trouble in Little China. The security guards were pretty standard and not very interesting — I started with a drybrushed base and went all Kev Dallimore triad for the highlights.

Most of the game’s henchmen came in multiples of 3 or 5, but for the Lords of Death street thugs there are 8. We see three different Lords of Death in the film, so even though these are all the same sculpt I tried to mix it up a little, although I did give them all the same funky glasses.

That’s all the figures done. I’m hoping to get the game to the table this weekend, so I should be able to wrap this project up with some shots of the models in action, and an overview of how the game plays.

We got the game to the table this weekend. We had played it twice before: once with friend’s copy not too long after the game came out (2017 maybe?), and again at a convention back in March. Our first play didn’t leave much of an impression, but we had a lot of fun at that convention game, which is what prompted me to buy my own copy.

There were two of us playing this time. We chose Jack Burton and Egg Shen as our characters. The game offers a fun way to balance for fewer players: each player gets a companion, which is one of the other characters in the form of a card that adds an extra die to your rolls and gives you a special ability specific to that character. For our game, Egg Shen got Gracie Law as his companion, and Jack Burton got Margo Litzenberger — they seem like some unlikely pairings, but we’ll go with it.

The game plays out in two parts: in the first half, players wander around the board (representing Chinatown), gathering strength and experience by fulfilling quests and fighting low-level bad guys. Quests are generally in the form of “go to this location and roll a test, then go to the next location and roll another test or fight a villain). There were three major quests in our two-player game: one for each character and one centered on one of the major villains — in our case it was Lightning, one of the three storms.

In addition to the major quests, there are always three minor quests in play, which are simple “go to a location, do a thing, get a reward” tasks.

Dice tests and combat are handled the same way. Each player has a small board for their character, and a number of action dice with three different symbols: mind, body and spirit. At the start of your turn you roll the dice, and then to perform actions you slot your dice into the row that corresponds with the symbol rolled. Any die can be used for any action, but each character has certain “epic” slots on their board that make the actions more effective when a die is placed there. Dice have to be placed in slots from left to right, so, for example, Jack Burton has epic slots for his first two dice placed in his body row, so he’s better off when he rolls a lot of body results on the dice. Mind, not so much…

Players can attack enemies on their turn, and at the end of each round every enemy on the board moves towards the nearest hero and attacks if they manage to get to the same space (or within line of sight if the enemy has a ranged weapon). The board is divided into zones representing different buildings, and one big zone representing the streets — enemies won’t ever move out of the zone they spawned in, so most of them just roam the streets, and the heroes are safe from them unless one or more happen to spawn inside a building (usually as a result of a quest card).

All the while, the Trouble track is counting down, and when it gets to the end, the first part of the game is over and we go to the showdown. The board is flipped over, with the new board representing the three levels of Lo Pan’s hidden fortress. Whether or not the players completed their major quests determines where the heroes start during the showdown, and also what enemies are present and where they spawn. In our game, we defeated Lightning during a quest so he wasn’t on the board for the showdown, but we had plenty of other problems to contend with…

The showdown part of the game is much shorter. Players have to complete one or more tasks (depending on the number of players) in order to unlock the elevators and get to the middle level where Lo Pan is lurking. Then he has to be defeated, at which point the players win!

At the convention we played with a full table of 6 players, which was fun but a little chaotic. We enjoyed the game just as much with just the two of us — it scales up and down well and really hits that sweet spot for cooperative games: enough of a challenge that we felt like we accomplished something, but not so difficult that you get frustrated by losing over and over.

All in all we had a great time with the game — the game mechanisms are interesting and well thought out, and it really puts you in the film. We’ll definitely be playing again!